Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan

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Five Lessons On the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan SUNY Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture Nasio, Juan-David. State University of New York Press 0791438325 9780791438329 9780585093161 English Lacan, Jacques,--1901- , Psychoanalysis, Subconsciousness, Pleasure. 1998 BF109.L28N3713 1998eb 150.19/5/092 Lacan, Jacques,--1901- , Psychoanalysis, Subconsciousness, Pleasure. cover

Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan cover-0 Page ii SUNY SERIES IN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CULTURE

 

HENRY SUSSMAN, EDITOR cover-1

Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan Juan-David Nasio Translated by David Pettigrew and François Raffoul  

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS cover-2 Page iv

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State University of New York Press, Albany Cinq leçons sur la théorie de Jacques Lacan, Juan-David Nasio, © Editions Rivages, 1992. The English translation of "Appendix: The Concept of the Subject of the Unconscious" by Juan-David Nasio (translated by Boris Belay) originally appeared in Disseminating Lacan edited by David Pettigrew and François Raffoul, State University of New York Press, 1996. © 1998 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, State University Plaza, Albany, N.Y. 12246 Production by M. R. Mulholland Marketing by Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nasio, Juan-David. [Cinq leçons sur la théorie de Jacques Lacan. English] Five lessons on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan / Juan-David Nasio: translated by David Pettigrew and François Raffoul. p. cm.(SUNY series in psychoanalysis and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-3831-7 (alk. paper).ISBN 0-7914-3832-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Jacan, Jacques, 1901-. 2. Psychoanalysis. 3. Subconsciousness. 4. Pleasure. I. Title. II. Series. BF109.L28N3713 1998 150.19'5'092dc21 97-35886 CIP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1  

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Contents Translators' Introduction

1

Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan Prefatory Remarks

13

First Lesson: The Unconscious and Jouissance

15 16

First Principle: "The unconscious is structured like a language" 25 Second Principle: "There is no sexual relation" Second Lesson: The Existence of the Unconscious

45 45

When can the unconscious be said to exist? 49 The unconscious manifests itself in "lalangue" 51 The unconscious is a structure that actualizes itself 61 The unconscious is the displacement of the signifier between the patient and the analyst 69 The subject of the unconscious Third Lesson: The Concept of Object a

73 73

The therapeutic goal of psychoanalysis 76 Object a 78 The problem of the other 79 The formal status of object a 82 The "corporal" status of object a 83 The breast as object a 93 Summary on object a: the need-demand-desire triad Fourth Lesson: Fantasy

97 97

That which is proper to psychoanalysis

99 Clinical observations on fantasy 106 The body as a core of jouissance  

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Fifth Lesson: The Body

115 117

Sexual, symbolic, and imaginary body 120 Partial body and jouissance 123 A clinical vignette 129 Formations of object a Appendix: The Concept of the Subject of the Unconscious

133

Translated by Boris Belay 133 The relation of the subject to unconscious knowledge 139 The relation of the subject to logic 140 The relation of the subject to castration 143 The layered subject of the unconscious 144 The concept of unconscious knowledge Notes

151

Index

157

 

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Translators' Introduction Now, what in fact does theory mean to us? The place of theory in analysis, if we state it in one word, is that of truth. This does not mean that theory states the truth, but rather that it functions in service of truth. It determines, in us, consciously or unconsciously, a particular mode of analytic action. Juan-David Nasio Dr. Nasio has been a practicing psychoanalyst for some thirty years and has emerged as one of the leading Lacanian psychoanalysts in Paris today. He has produced, moreover, an impressive series of books on Lacan's work. 1 Nasio's texts are distinguished by their exceptionally lucid quality and a pedagogical style that draws upon his extensive clinical practice. Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan2 has the particular value of bringing into the fore the relevance and the contribution of Lacanian theory to the psycho-analytical cure. Nasio claims, in fact, that theory as such affects the cure: "Theory will cause me, unconsciously, when I do not expect it, to adopt a special listening" (FL, 116). Even though Lacan's writings are often perceived as overly intellectualized and of little practical value for therapy, Nasio eloquently demonstrates the clinical and practical import of Lacan's theory, even in its most difficult or obscure moments. Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan combines sophisticated theoretical elaborations with a practical perspective: while the text represents a genuine conceptual advance in Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, it also brings out the effects of psychoanalytic theory on the analyst's listening and practice. Nasio clarifies and elaborates, for example, upon key concepts in Lacan's work, including the unconscious, jouissance, fantasy, and object a, insofar as each operates in the analytical cure. He also provides the foundations for a psychoanalytical theory of the body based on Lacan's categories (the Real-Symbolic-Imaginary triad). Nasio insists, further, on the crucial importance of the body for the psychoanalytical cure: "Any psychoanalyst's intervention that reveals a meaning," he claims, "remains an   page_1 Page 2 intervention permeated by the body. The body is present, in knowledge, in the reading of a text, in the understanding of what is written, and in the simple fact of stating "I understand." That's where the body is" (FL, 50). The treatment of the body presents us with one of Nasio's most trenchant contributions. Indeed, he does not simply clarify Lacan's complex and difficult work, but also elaborates upon it with originality. As he himself admits, a number of his claims, although a result of his reading of Lacan's work, "have never been stated by Lacan himself" (FL, 45). Nasio differs from Lacan's stated theses, such as in the case of the definition of jouissance, or when he forms the notion of formations of object a. In this brief introduction, we will limit ourselves to highlighting what, in our view, are some of the most important contributions of Nasio in this book, and focus on his elaboration of the concepts of the unconscious, jouissance, and the body. Nasio begins by advancing the provocative statement that the unconscious exists and "can only exist within the field of psychoanalysis, and more precisely, within the field of the cure" (FL, 45, emphasis ours). Three fundamental propositions support such a surprising claim: first, founding his reflection upon Lacan's famous saying, "the unconscious is structured like a language," Nasio insists that the unconscious is not some substantial entity lying hidden at the core of the psyche, some deep level inaccessible to consciousness, but is to be understood in terms of the effects of language on the speaking subject. The unconscious emerges in an unexpected act, i.e. when a saying exceeds the intention of the subject who speaks, an act by which the subject "says more than he wants" (FL, 46). Indeed, Lacan does not simply posit that we human subjects are "speaking beings.'' This trivial statement is not what is at stake in the expression, ''the unconscious is structured like a language." More radically, it is a matter of stating, as Nasio specifies, the following: "we are not only speaking beings, we are beings inhabited by language. We could have taken moreover a supplementary step and said: we are not only beings inhabited by language but above all beings that are exceeded by language, carriers of a speech that comes towards us, knocks us down and affects us" (FL, 35, emphasis ours). It is indeed distinctive to the analytic scene that the patient is astonished by his or her own words, to such an extent that one can say that the unconscious is indissociable from that element of surprise. There is not an unconscious "before" the act of saying, and   page_2

Page 3 there is not an unconscious after that occurrence. The unconscious exists" only in that surprise (in the very precise sense of ex-sistence that Nasio develops on the basis of Heidegger's thought of ek-stasis, exteriority, standing outside). It is in this respect that the unconscious is said to exist only in the cure: it only manifests itself in an act of speech that occurs in the transference. This is why, secondly, Nasio stresses that the unconscious cannot exist without its being recognized by the listening of another subject, namely, the psychoanalyst. The unconscious is now to be seen as an agency that is produced when the analyst's interpretation, considered as an act of his or her unconscious, recognizes the act of the unconscious of the analysand (FL, 47). According to Nasio, the unconscious needs to be recognized in order to be. This already implies that the unconscious is not merely confined to an individual psyche, but appears in a relation between two subjects. This leads Nasio to a third proposition, having to do with the non-individual status of the unconscious. For thus produced, the unconscious is a unique structure, shared by the analytic partners. Nasio is quite dear on this point: there is not an unconscious that belongs to the analysand, on the one hand, and another that belongs to the analyst, on the other. There is only one unconscious, the one that is produced in the transference. The analytic relation will progressively cease to be a relation between two persons as it becomes a unique psychical place that includes conjointly the analyst and the analysand; or rather, the place of the in-between which envelops and absorbs the analytic partners. Analysis is in fact a singular place that contains the psychical life of the analyst and the analysand. (FL, 98) This ek-static unconscious implies the de-individuation of each of the analytic partners. This does not imply, however, that the unconscious would be a collective entity. The unconscious, writes Nasio, is "neither individual nor collective, but is produced in the space of the in-between" (FL, 25). This "in-between" partakes of the structural status of the unconscious, i.e., the fact that a signifier only refers to another signifier and therefore neither begins nor ends with a subject. In analysis, the signifier bounces back and forth, as it were, forming a circle between the analysand and the analyst. The signifier repeats itself, circling within the transference, thereby causing "the successive appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of the same signifying element, in times and places in different subjects" (FL, 24). This procession, this structure, Nasio asserts, "belongs to no one. There is no individual   page_3 Page 4 structure and there is no individual unconscious" (FL, 23). Such is what Nasio calls the "logical" sense of the unconscious. Dr. Nasio's treatment of the unconscious leads to the second pillar of Lacan's conceptual edifice: jouissance, with its accompanying formula: "There is no sexual relation." Indeed, jouissance and the unconscious are inextricably bound. Nasio writes: "jouissance means that the human being, by committing a blunder, activates the unconscious. These say the same thing from two different angles: the work of the unconscious involves jouissance, and jouissance is the energy unleashed when the unconscious works" (FL, 32). Ultimately, Nasio defines jouissance as "the energy of the unconscious" (FL, 117). These problematic assertions call for further reflection. For the American reader, jouissance is perhaps one of the most enigmatic terms to occur in Lacan's text. 3 Nasio provides a particularly illuminating account of that term. First, he carefully distinguishes jouissance from the usual sense of orgasmic pleasure, and severs any connections to the notion of pleasure as such. Whenever we hear the expression jouissance, or "to undergo jouissance" (jouir), Nasio warns us, we must disregard any reference to pleasure. Pleasure is the conscious or preconscious feeling of psychic energy, while jouissance is the unconsciousand never immediately feltform of it. While pleasure lies in a diminishing tension for the ego, jouissance represents an increasing tension; while pleasure is the immediate feeling of an energy, jouissance is never felt immediately but manifests itself indirectly in the experience of an "intolerable tension": Jouissance occurs in "limit-situations" (FL, 38), when a rupture occurs. Indeed, "Jouissance is the maximal state in which the body is brought to its limits'' (FL, 39). While pleasure is a transitory phenomenon, jouissance, claims Nasio, is a "permanent'' state, practically "atemporal," cosubstantial with life itself (FL, 40).

Referring to Freud's conceptualization of the three fates of psychic energy (partial release of energy, nonrelease of energy due to repression, and total release), Dr. Nasio delineates three states of jouissance: phallic jouissance, surplusof-jouissance (plus-de-jouir), and jouissance of the Other. While recognizing that the analogy between jouissance and energy is not present strictly speaking in Lacan's work, Nasio proposes the following elaboration: Phallic jouissance reformulates Freud's notion of a partial release of psychic energy. In this   page_4 Page 5 case, the phallus represents the gatekeeper of that release, and serves as the agency of repression; hence: "phallic" jouissance. In fact, for Nasio, "the main function of the phallus is to open and close the access of jouissance to the outside" (FL, 27). The phallus, then, either allows the partial release of psychical tension (e.g., in a symptom), or prevents that very release, thereby creating a dynamic reserve of psychical tension. That dynamic reserve is what Lacan calls surplus-of-jouissance, a jouissance whose exit is prevented by the phallus. "The term 'surplus','' Nasio writes, "indicates that part of the energy that is not discharged, the residual jouissance, a surplus that constantly increases the intensity of the internal tension" (FL, 28). Nasio asserts that this residual surplus plays a key role in analysis, indeed, that it is the driving force of the analytic cure, the center governing the analytic process" (FL, 33). Indeed, "once granted that the bond between the analyst and the analysand is organized as an immense and unique psychical apparatus, the place of the analyst corresponds to the place reserved for the object of the drive'' (FL, 98), that is, object a. As soon as the analyst occupies that place, he or she assumes a listening posture, a way of being silent at crucial moments in the cure. In other words, for Nasio, the psychoanalyst in the cure is in the place of the category of surplus-of-jouissance, that is, "the energy that makes the unconscious work," that "causes and reactivates the unconscious" (FL, 99). Finally, the jouissance of the Other designates a hypothetical state in which psychical tension would be absolutely expended, a state that is impossible. Hence the second fundamental proposition of Lacanian discourse: there is no sexual relation. Jouissance becomes here the very locus of the impossible. In fact, all these categoriesphallic jouissance, surplus-of-jouissance, jouissance of the Otherare only approximations that cannot fully define the nature of jouissance, the "very essence of psychical energy" (FL, 30). Any symbolic elaboration is in the end powerless to penetrate the "density of jouissance" (FL, 131). Not only is jouissance unable to be represented (as it lacks a signifier), but it is also without subject. On the first point, the absence of any signifier to represent jouissance is what accounts for Lacan's statement, there is no sexual relation." Nasio is quite dear on this: "Lacan's formula that 'There is no sexual relation,' is precisely an attempt to delineate the real, to trace or delimit the lack of the signifier of sex in the unconscious. 'There is no sexual relation,' is a statement which means that in our unconscious there are no sexual signifiers that are linked together" (FL, 113). In a parallel fashion, Nasio insists that there is no subject of jouissance: "When there is jouissance, who undergoes it? I would answer that no   page_5 Page 6 one undergoes jouissance; that we do not undergo jouissance with something, but that something undergoes jouissance within us, without us (FL, 40). Nasio contrasts this phenomenon with the status of the unconscious (as structured like a language): There is no subject of jouissance in the same way that there is a subject of the unconscious. The difference is essential. The subject of the unconscious is always represented by a signifier, its presence is necessarily marked in by a representation that indicates and signifies it. In the case of jouissance, I have already emphasized the absence of a representative signifier. In Lacanian theory, the subject is always accompanied by a signifier; for Lacan there is no signifier without a subject and reciprocally there is no subject without a signifier. Consequently, we will say: there is no subject of jouissance because there are no signifiers able to represent it. (FL, 40) This "subject-less-ness" of jouissance, its lacking a signifier that could represent it, indicates that jouissance lies beyond conceptualization, marking the very limits of analysis and of theory. Psychoanalysis, Nasio claims, can only know "the signifying borders which delimit the regions of the body which are the source of jouissance." In other words, even though jouissance cannot be represented, "the signifier can nevertheless approach, delineate, and circumscribe the local zones where the body undergoes jouissance" (FL, 30). Jouissance takes

place in and through the body, to such an extent that ''when psychoanalysis locates jouissance it is always a local jouissance that is in question" (FL, 30). Surplus-of-jouissance, for example, is located primarily in the erogenous zones and orifices of the body. The surplus-of-jouissance constantly stimulates these zones and keeps them in a permanently erogenous state. For Nasio the flux of jouissance circles the edges of "the hole" as a surplus-of-jouissance, an excess of tension without expenditure; a jouissance that when engaged marks the activation of the unconscious. When the unconscious is active, there is jouissance, and when there is jouissance, there is body. Nasio accounts for this in the following way: "To say that the body undergoes jouissance means that apart from any sensation of pain or pleasure that is consciously felt by the subject, a twofold energetic phenomenon takes place at the moment of the manifestation of the unconscious: on the one hand, the energy is discharged (phallic jouissance), and on the other hand, and simultaneously, the internal psychical tension is reactivated (surplus-of-jouissance)'' (FL, 36).   page_6 Page 7 The articulation of what Nasio calls a "partial jouissance," or a jouissance of a part of the body (and for Nasio there is never a total body), gives rise to a most provocative clinical and theoretical advance of his book, namely his elaboration of the status of the body in psychoanalysis. For how is the body to be approached and conceptualized in psychoanalysis? For Nasio, the question of the body arises from the relation between the subject and language, more precisely, when the subject is exceeded by the language it speaks (is spoken by). For when "language, or better yet, when a signifier takes the form of a "saying" which is said beyond me, without my knowing, a supplementary element is added: the body is affected" (FL, 36). Which body, asks Nasio? The body as jouissance. I could reconsider our formula and declare that for us, the beings who undergo jouissance, our bodies are symbolically marked, or I could declare quite simply: our bodies are subjected to language. You will understand now when we affirm that "the body is affected by a speech that exceeds us," it means that the body undergoes jouissance. (FL, 36) Indeed, if jouissance, as we have seen, is to be approached in terms of the body (as local jouissance), the body in turn is to be considered in relation to jouissance. As Nasio explains, psychoanalysis does not ask, "What is the body?" but rather, "How does one experience jouissance? or, more directly, "Where is jouissance?" (FL, 106). The analytical position itself is defined according to the way in which the body is questioned as a place or locus of jouissance, as it undergoes the maximum test of a great pain or loss, an expenditure or exhaustion. Jouissance is in fact the body in a state of expenditure. As Nasio states: "That the body undergoes ''jouissance" is to say that the body 'loses''' (FL, 107). According to Lacan, then, the body in psychoanalysis is "the locus of jouissance" (FL, 106), "the space in which a multiplicity of instances of jouissance circulates" (FL, 106). Besides being that which undergoes jouissance (sexual body), the body is also for Nasio a "collection of signifying elements" (FL, 118). Nasio adds a third element, the body as image, that is, the image of my body when it "comes back to me from the outside." The body is then approached in three ways. From the perspective of the Real, it is jouissance; when jouissance prevails, words disappear and action dominates. Words and   page_7 Page 8 thoughts fail, the subject disappears, and only the body that undergoes jouissance remains, and, in Nasio's terms, "takes on everything." From the perspective of the Symbolic, it is a collection of signifying elements; from the perspective of the Imaginary, it is an external image. Nasio develops those perspectives, which together constitute the Lacanian psychoanalytical frame to think the body. Nasio firmly defines the contours of the body in psychoanalysis: "For the psychoanalyst, the body is not the same as it is for the anatomist, physiologist, biologist or even the philosopher" (FL, 106). The body in psychoanalysis must respond to the two fundamental elements which circumscribe the psychoanalytic field: Speech, and sex. "Anything that is not covered by the domains of speech and sex lies outside of our purview,'' specifies Nasio (FL, 117). The body is therefore not the organism that the surgeon treats, for instance, but is that which is affected by speech and sex.

Further, the clinical transference collapses the bodies of the analyst and the analysand into a bond that is analogous to that of its effects on the unconscious. In a sense, this phenomenon could be described as the "body in-between," a "body" that also only exists within the field of the psychoanalytic session. Nasio goes so far as claiming the following: "I am convinced that, as is the case with the individual unconscious, the place of jouissance in the cure is also that of the inbetween. When we say that the body is a part and that this part undergoes jouissance, it must be understood that the place of the body in analysis is that of the interval between the armchair and the couch, and that this place is precisely that of the analyst" (FL, 126). Nasio asserts that as the patient explains his or her suffering, an essential phenomenon takes place: the analyst becomes, "progressively and unnoticeably, the recipient of the symptom" (FL, 17). Indeed, through transference the psychoanalyst becomes a part of the symptom. This ''sharing" of the symptom in fact defines the analytic transference. In this case, the Lacanian expression of the "subject-supposed-to-know" means that the analyst takes the place of the recipient of the symptom, and even that of the cause. "When I suffer or am faced with an event that surprises me, I recall my analyst to such an extent that I cannot avoid wondering if he or she were one of the causes" (FL, 18). The resulting activation of what might be called the "body-unconscious" blurs the distinction between the corporal entities of the analysand and the analyst in the analytic session. The jouissance of the body stands as no less than the activation of the body that is unique to the analytic session, a body that "overturns the flesh and bone of the subject" (FL, 122).   page_8 Page 9 What is distinctive, in the end, about Nasio's treatment of Lacan's theory is the extent to which his fundamental conceptsthe unconscious, jouissance, the bodybecome the locus of the overturning or exceeding of the discrete boundaries of the individual. The theory of the symptom, as Nasio presents it, illustrates this patently: the sharing of the symptom that takes place in the analytic session involves a signifier that leaps, or circulates, as it were, from analyst to analysand. As Nasio asserts, "the symptom appears first in me, and later it can be repeated not only in me but elsewhere as well, in the speech of another subject with whom I have a transferential bond" (FL, 23). The symptom-signifier leaps from one subject to another, in such a way that the repetitive sequence forms a circle of elements already repeated or to be repeated. This circulation of the shared symptom, or leap of the signifier, works as a "language" that connects the analytic partners. In this peculiar language, the signifier is repeated without the knowledge, conscious intentionality, or will, of the analytic partners. For Nasio, this procession or structure "belongs to no one." The signifier that is repeated is without meaning except for the jouissance of its repetition. The unconscious, then, is a structure of repetitive signifiers that are actualized by either one of the analytic partners. In this case neither the unconscious nor the body-jouissance can be assigned exclusively to either of the partners in the analytic session. The jouissance of the body-unconscious is formed out of the transferential bond and "shares out'' the actors in analysis. The in-between of the unconscious in analysis, the role of transference in the surplus-of-jouissance, and the inter-corporeality of the ''body,'' of analysis, all point towards a radically nonindividualistic sense of the psychoanalytical subject. This defines new challenges for psychoanalytical theory. Nasio presents them as follows:

 

Thanks to this logical conception of an unconscious that is extended between two subjects, we have broken with three intuitive prejudices: chronological time, Euclidean space, and individual unity. If we work with the notion of the unconscious, if we think and rethink it constantly, we clarify our practice, we see our prejudices with respect to chronological time, Euclidean space, and individual unity, fade. We will no longer speak in terms of a person, nor in terms of past future or present time, nor page_9 Page 10 any longer in terms of a container in order to designate the place of the unconscious. We must practice thinking in other terms. To the extent that we improve as practitioners and refine our listening, we are confronted by the task of thinking the unconscious outside of time, space, and the individual. (FL, 65-66, emphasis ours)

It is the measure of Juan-David Nasio's achievement in Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan to

have identified such challenges, and to have begun to address them.  

DAVID PETTIGREW AND FANÇOIS RAFFOUL page_10 Page 13

Prefatory Remarks The following pages in no way aim to be exhaustive nor to speak the truth about the truth [dire le vrai sur le vrai] with respect to Lacan's work. These lessons present what, in my view, constitute the two major pillars of Lacan's theory, the unconscious and jouissance, as well as concepts which derive from them, including the signifier, the subject of the unconscious, and object a. I must choose not to consider numerous aspects of Lacan's work in order to concentrate on these concepts which, for me, best reveal the logic that is implicit in Lacan's thought. It is thus "my" Lacan, as it were, that I present in these pages. The image of Lacan that is reflected is not that of the man, of his writings, or of his style, but rather that of a logic, an essential schema of his thought that guides me in my work with my patients. The best teaching that I received from Lacan is this liberty of engaging an author to the point of recreating him.   page_13 Page 14 THE SYMPTOM SIGN AND SIGNIFIER THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION WHAT IS JOUISSANCE? PHALLIC JOUISSANCE, SURPLUS-OF- JOUISSANCE, AND THE JOUISSANCE OF THE OTHER PLEASURE  

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First Lesson The Unconscious and Jouissance I have chosen to present two fundamental principles of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory to you, one related to the unconscious, and the other to jouissance. The first principle states: "The unconscious is structured like a language"; and the second, "There is no sexual relation." I would say that these two principles are the pillars which support the theoretical edifice of psychoanalysis, the premises from which everything flows and to which everything returns, and which found an ethics for the psychoanalyst. Indeed, if analysts recognize these propositions and test them in their practice, their listening will be uniquely transformed. To orient myself I will use a concept, that of the symptom, a concept that will lead us first to a principle relative to the unconscious and then to one relative to jouissance. Let us accept for the moment, the triad: symptom, unconscious, and jouissance, and immediately pose the question: What is a symptom for us? The symptom, properly speaking, is an event in analysis; one of the forms in which the experience occurs. All analytic

experiences are not symptoms, but any symptom manifested in the course of the cure constitutes an analytic experience. The experience is a punctual phenomenon, a uniquely privileged moment that marks and defines the path of an analysis. The experience is a series of moments anticipated by the psychoanalyst, fleeting moments, and quite ideal, as ideal as geometric points. And nevertheless the experience is not only an abstract geometric point. It has an empirical aspect as well, I would even say a sensible aspect, an aspect that is perceptible by the senses which is presented as that moment when the patient speaks and does not know what he or she says. It is the moment of a stutter, when the patient stammers, the moment when he or she hesitates and speech fails. It is said that Lacanian analysts are interested in language, and they are mistakenly classified as linguists. This is a mistake, because psychoanalysts are not linguists. Psychoanalysts are certainly interested in   page_15 Page 16 language, but they are only interested in the limit where language fails. We are attentive to the moments at which language slips and speech goes astray. Let us consider a dream for example. We accord more importance to the way that the dream is recounted than to the dream itself; and not only to the way it is recounted but above all to the precise point of the narrative when the patient is not sure and says, "I don't know . . . I cannot remember any more . . . perhaps . . . maybe . . ." This is the point that we refer to as experience, the perceptible side of experience: a stutter, an uncertainty, a comment which escapes us. This describes the empirical aspect of the experience. Now we come to the abstract aspect of analytic experience to complete our definition. I have said that the experience constitutes the limits of speech, the moment when speech fails. Now I would add that when speech fails, jouissance appears. We have changed, we are now operating in a radically different context. We leave the empirical order of sensibility to enter that of a theoretical elaboration. Analytic theory postulates that at the moment when the patient is exceeded by his or her speech, jouissance surges forth. Why? What is jouissance? Let us set this question aside for the moment in order to return to it when we address the second principle concerning the nonexistence of a sexual relation. We can consider for the moment the concept of the symptom and concern ourselves with the first principle which, as we will see, claims that the unconscious is a knowledge structured like a language. We can pose the question once again: What is a symptom? We know, generally, that the symptom is a disorder that causes suffering and manifests a pathological state of which it is the expression. But in psychoanalysis, the symptom appears to us differently than as a disorder that causes suffering, it is above all a malaise that is imposed on us, beyond us, and which challenges us. We describe this malaise with peculiar words and unexpected metaphors. But whether it is a suffering, or an odd word to describe the suffering, the symptom is above all an involuntary act produced apart from any intentionality and any conscious knowledge. It is an act which does not refer to a pathological state so much as to a process called the unconscious. The symptom is for us a manifestation of the unconscious. A symptom has three characteristics ( figure 1). First, it is the way in which the patient speaks of his or her suffering, the unexpected   page_16 Page 17 details of the narrative, and in particular, the impromptu speech. I recall an analysand who, for example, shared her anxiety of crossing bridges with me, saying "It is very difficult for me to go there, I do not make it unless someone is with me. Sometimes I have been able to cross alone, when I could see the silhouette of a police officer or a uniformed guard on the other side of the bridge." Well, in this case, it is the detail of the man in uniform which interests me more than the phobic anxiety itself. The second characteristic of the symptom is the theory that the analysand formulates in order to understand his or her malaise, for there is no suffering in analysis unless one wonders why one suffers. Freud noted the presence in children of an infantile sexual theory; likewise we note that the patient as well constructs his or her personal theory, they "throw in

their two cents" to try to explain their suffering. The symptom is a painful event that is always accompanied by the patient's interpretation of the causes of their malaise. Now this is a crucial point. It is so crucial that if in an analysis, during the preliminary interview, for example, the subject is not awakened by his or her own questions, if he or she has no idea of the reason for their suffering, it is the psychoanalyst who will then have to encourage the emergence of a "theory" by leading the patient to question him or herself. But when in an analysis the patient interprets and explains his or her suffering, an essential phenomenon takes place: the analyst becomes, progressively and unnoticeably, the recipient of the symptom. The more I explain the cause of my suffering, the more the one who listens to me becomes the Other of my symptom. This is the third characteristic of the symptom: the symptom calls for and involves the presence of the psychoanalyst. We can change the terms and put it another way. The principal characteristic of the symptom in analysis is that the analyst becomes included in it. In a cure already well underway, the symptom is so linked to the presence of the practitioner that when you think of one you think of the otherwhen I suffer I think of my analyst, and when I think of him or her it is the memory of my suffering that comes back to me. The psychoanalyst becomes, then, a part of the symptom. It is this third characteristic of the symptom that opens the door to what we call the analytic transference and differentiates psychoanalysis from psychotherapy. Precisely, if you ask me about the transference in psychoanalysis, one possible response would be to define it as the particular moment of the analytic relation when the analyst becomes a part of the patient's symptom. This is what Lacan calls the subject  page_17 Page 18 supposed-to-know. The expression "subject-supposed-to-know" does not simply mean that the analysand supposes that his or her analyst possesses knowledge about them. It is not just that the patient supposes that the analyst knows, but rather that the analyst is at the source of the patient's suffering or of any unexpected event. When I suffer or am faced with an event that surprises me, I recall my analyst to such an extent that I cannot avoid wondering if he or she were one of the causes. In an analysis that is in progress, for example, the patient declares, "Since I came here, I have the impression that everything that happens to me is related to the work that I am doing with you." The pregnant woman will say, "I am pregnant, but I am sure that my pregnancy is directly linked to my analysis." But what does ''directly linked to my analysis" mean? That means that from a certain point of view the analyst is the spiritual father of the child, the cause of the event. To say that the analyst is a part of the symptom means that he or she is in the place of the cause of the symptom. Thus the Lacanian expression "subject-supposed-to-know'' means that the analyst takes the place of the recipient of the symptom, and then in addition to that, means that they are the cause of it. For the practitioner who must direct the cure, it is important to understand how, imperceptibly, through the sessions, this phenomenon of the supposition ends by including them in the symptom of the analysand. I am thinking particularly of an analyst undergoing supervision who reported his difficulties with a patient to me whom he had worked with for two years and who seemed trapped in an obsessional neurosis. I responded to him in the following way: "If after two years of analysis you think that your patient has an obsessional neurosis, you should tell yourself that when you listen to him or her that the symptoms of his or her neurosis involve you. Yes, try to listen to your analysand, while saying to yourself that you are a part of the obsession from which he or she suffers." We can note that it is in this engaged kind of listening that the great difference between the psychiatric diagnosis and the psychoanalytic understanding of a neurosis can be found. When the analyst diagnoses the patient's neurosis, he or she knows that they are a part of the symptom that they diagnose. In sum, the phenomenon of the supposition accompanies every event in an analysis. Thus there is no painful event which is not "interpreted" by the patient whose words, suffering, and beliefs gradually envelop the practitioner.  

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Figure 1 The triad: symptom, knowledge and jouissance In truth, the characteristics of the symptom can be considered from another conceptual angle, by distinguishing two aspects of the symptom: on the one hand as a sign, and on the other hand as a signifier. The sign is directly linked to the phenomenon of the supposition which we just mentioned. This aspect of the symptom as a sign entails the following: a painful and surprising event occurs, the patient explains it, and immediately places the analyst in the role of being both the Other of the symptom, and the cause of the symptom. This is the definition of the sign proposed by Lacan: a sign is that which represents something for someone. In fact it is the definition established by the American logician Charles Sanders Peirce. 1 Any symptom represents something for the one who suffers and at times for the one who listens. Pregnancy, for example, for that young woman, represents the fruit of her work in analysis and for the practitioner, one of the therapeutic effects of treatment. This then is the aspect of the symptom that is a sign. It is the factor that encourages the establishment and development of the transference. Now we will discuss the symptom as signifier. Of the two, this is the most important for us, because it makes us understand that in which the structure of the unconscious consists. As signifier, the   page_19 Page 20 symptom tells us: this suffering that is imposed upon me against my will is One event among other events that are rigorously linked to it, an event which, unlike the sign, has no meaning. But what is a signifying event, and more generally, what is a signifier? The signifier is a formal rather than a descriptive category. What it designates hardly matters: for example, we have chosen the example of the symptom, but a signifier could just as well be a slip of the tongue, a dream, the narrative of a dream, a detail in this narrative, even a gesture, a sound, a silence, or the analyst's interpretation. All these manifestations can be legitimately called signifying events on the condition that three criteria are taken into accountthree criteria that are nonlinguistic in nature, in spite of the fact that the term signifier is of linguistic origin. First, the signifier is always the involuntary expression of a speaking being. Any gesture will be a signifier only if it is a clumsy and unexpected gesture, accomplished apart from any intentionality or conscious knowledge. Second, a signifier is devoid of meaning, it signifies nothing and is neither explicable nor inexplicable. As a signifying event, a symptom calls for neither a supposition of the analysand, nor a construction of the psychoanalyst. In a word, the signifier is, and nothing more. Third, the signifier is, yes, if it remains attached to a totality of other signifiers. It is One among others with which it is articulated. Although the One signifier can be perceived by the analysand or the analyst, the others to which it is connected are not. Those are virtual signifiers, formerly actualized or, as of yet, not actualized. The articulation between One and the others is so essential that when one thinks of the signifier, one can never imagine it by itself. A Lacanian aphorism summarizes this relation quite well: a signifier is only a signifier for other signifiers. 2 This formal articulation has practical implications: a signifier is a signifier neither for the psychoanalyst, nor for the analysand, nor for anyone,

but only for other signifiers. What can this mean if not that as soon as the signifier occurs, it recalls other signifiers that are already past and announces the inevitable arrival of the next signifier. I can, for instance, be surprised by a symptom that exceeds my intention as a "saying" that I say without knowing it, I can as well bear it as a painful event, I can even interpret it, think it, give it meaning, and nevertheless all my suppositions will not change the fact   page_20 Page 21 that in three days, or one year, it can reappear again or in the guise of another sudden and uncontrollable event. This is when I ask, "But how is it possible? What is there within me that causes the symptom to reappear as insurmountable, repeating itself so mercilessly?" We are faced here with the problem of repetition to which we will return often, particularly in the second lesson. For the moment we will bear in mind the essential idea: one thing is the concrete and individual reality of a symptoma phobia of bridges, for exampleanother is the signifying status of the same symptom, the same phobia but considered from the perspective of the three criteria that define the signifier. From the point of view of their individual reality, all symptoms are distinct and never repeat themselves identically. Yet, from the point of view of their formal signifying value, all symptoms are identical because they all appear one by one in the place of the One. Here, then, is the essential idea at the heart of the Lacanian concept of repetition: all the events which occupy the place of the One repeat themselves identically in a formal sense, irrespective of their different material realities. We will return to this. As we can see, the signifying side of the symptom is an involuntary event, devoid of meaning and ready to be repeated. In short, the symptom is a signifier if we take it as a event of which I am the master of neither the cause, the meaning, nor the repetition. Lacan represented the signifying event with the notation S1. The number 1 marks that this is a unique eventa symptom is always of the order of the Oneand the letter S notes the word signifier. To consider then that the symptom has a signifying aspect indicates that it is One, that this One surprises and imposes itself on the patient without their knowledge, and repeats itself. This means that there will be another One, and then another One, etc. But to claim that the symptom is a signifier underlines not only that it is One that is imposed on us, escapes us, and is ready to repeat itself, but above all, that it occurs at the right moment to question us. As a signifier, the symptom is not a suffering to which we submit passively. No, it is a suffering that questions, and that question is always pertinent. It is pertinent as a message that teaches us facts of our history that have been ignored, and tells us what we had not, until then, been aware of. Another example of the signifier is a witticism: the witticism considered as a spontaneous reply that one says without knowing it, but with such an appropriateness and accuracy that everyone laughs. Now the symptom can have the same virtue. It can   page_21 Page 22 manifest itself in the life of the subject in a way that is so opportune that, in spite of its distressing character, it appears as a missing piece of a puzzle which once put in its place, puts our life in a new light, without however, completing the puzzle. The signifying scope of the symptom resides precisely in its ability to appear at just the right moment, as an indispensable piece that produces, in the patient and often in the analyst, a new questiona question that provides access to the unconscious considered as knowledge: "But how is it possible that the symptom reappears so opportunely such that irrespective of the fact that I suffer, it casts my life in a new light? What is this combinatory thing, which, beyond my will, organizes the repetition of my symptoms and assures that one of them emerges at the right time for me to learn that my misfortune is only due to my desire?" This question is very different from the one that raised the problem of the cause of the symptom and instituted the subject-supposed-to-know. In this case, the subject no longer interrogates the symptom as a sign, for it is not the "why" with which it is concerned, but the "how." How is the sequence of events ordered? What is the order of the repetition? These questions are appropriate because they lead to the hypothesis that the unconscious is structured. In order to be clear about this, I would like to return to the distinction between the sign and the signifier. Let us be clear now. To approach the suffering of the symptom in terms of a cause, is to treat it as a sign; whereas to find

myself subjected to the same misfortune at a propitious moment, as if it was imposed by a knowledge that I do not possess, is to recognize it as a signifier. Let us reconsider the question of the astonished analysand, a question that opens onto the unconscious: "Who knew? Who knew that the word that makes me laugh or the symptom that enlightens, had to occur at such a precise moment in order that I finally understand it?" The response of analytic theory is as follows: "The one who knew how to place the symptom or the witticism so wisely so as to surprise and make us understand is not a subject but rather an unconscious knowledge." Yes, indeed, the unconscious is the order of a knowledge that subject carries with it, but of which it is unaware. But the unconscious is not only a knowledge that leads the subject to say the right word at the right moment, without however knowing what it saysit is also the knowledge which orders the repetition of that same word later and elsewhere. In sum, the unconscious is a knowledge not only because it knows how to place the right word in the right moment but because it   page_22 Page 23 also guarantees what is proper to repetition. We can state it in the following sentence: The unconscious is the knowledge of repetition. But what is repetition? Let us recall the principal point. The fact that the signifier is repeated identically means that there is always an event that occupies the formal locus of the One, while other absent and virtual events are ready to occupy it. We are, I insist, dealing with two agencies: the first is the agency of the One which corresponds to the event that has actually occurred, and the second is the agency of all the other past or future events that have or will occupy the locus of the One. To suggest that the unconscious is knowledge of repetition means that it is not only a knowledge that can use the right word at the right moment, but also that it causes the carousel of past or future elements that have or will occupy the locus of the One to turn, that is to say, the place of the manifest signifier. The unconscious is the movement which permits the repetition, or rather that permits the recurrent occupation of the place of the One. In short, what do we wish to clarify with this formalist vision of the dynamic of unconscious knowledge? We wish to say that the unconscious is a constantly active process that exteriorizes itself incessantly through acts, events, or speech that meet the conditions that define a signifier, namely, to be an involuntary expression, opportune, devoid of meaning, and identifiable as an event in connection with other absent or virtual events. But I must introduce an important clarification in order to clearly delineate the place of the unconscious in the cure. Let us imagine that I am now manifesting a symptom, for instance, a slip-of-the-tongue. No doubt this symptom appears first in me, and later it can be repeated not only in me but elsewhere as well, in the speech of another subject with whom I have a transferential bond. Thus the signifier is repeated by occupying the locus of the One, a place that can be found in one person or the other, indifferently. The signifier bounces from one subject to another, in such a way that the repetitive sequence, the chain of signifiers, I mean to say, the circle formed by elements already repeated or to be repeated, that is, this procession, this structure, belongs to no one. There is no individual structure and there is no individual unconscious. Let us take the example of the psychoanalyst's interpretation. No doubt a privileged moment in the process of the cure occurs when the analyst gives an interpretation. But what is an interpretation in the strict sense of the word if not an expression of the   page_23 Page 24 unconscious of the analyst and not his or her knowledge? I want to emphasize here that if we apply the thesis of the repetition of the signifierricocheting from one subject to the otherin order to understand how the interpretation comes to the practitioner, then we must change our formulation. Instead of stating, "The interpretation expresses the unconscious of the psychoanalyst," we must correct this and suggest, "The interpretation repeats today, in the words of the analyst, a symptom that was manifested yesterday in the words of the analysand." Or perhaps, "The interpretation manifested by the analyst actualizes the unconscious of the analysand." Or, still better, ''The interpretation puts the unconscious of the analysis into play." This was, we recall, the successive appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of the same signifying element, in tunes and places in different subjects, a process that only operates if a transferential relation is well

established. The argument that founds this first principle defining the unconscious as a knowledge having the structure of a language, and the corollary which ensues, can be summarized as follows: The unconscious is the web woven by the work of signifying repetition, more exactly, the unconscious is a virtual chain of events or of "sayings" that knows how to actualize in an opportune "statement," what the subject says without knowing what it is saying. This word that the subject "says" without its knowledge and which actualizes the unconscious chain of sayings, can emerge in either of the analytic partners. When the "word" erupts in the analysand, we call it, among other things, a symptom, a lapse, or a witticism, and when it erupts in the psychoanalyst, we call it an interpretation. As you can see, the unconscious connects and binds human beings. In my view, this is one of Lacan's fundamental ideas. The unconscious is a language that connects the analytic partners: language links whereas the body separates, the unconscious binds whereas jouissance separates. We will return to the problem of the body and of jouissance, but the thesis of the structured unconscious already permits us to deduce a crucial corollary for our work with our patients. If the unconscious is a structure of repetitive signifiers that are actualized in a "word" enunciated by either one of the analytic partners, it follows that the unconscious cannot be individually attached to each of them and that consequently we can no longer assign an unconscious that is proper to   page_24 Page 25 the analyst or to the analysand. The unconscious is neither individual nor collective but is produced in the place of the inbetween, a unique entity that crosses and surrounds each of the actors in the analysis. We have thus been able to account for the first fundamental principal: "The unconscious is structured like a language." In light of our reflections we can reconsider Lacan's saying and now propose: "the unconscious is a knowledge structured like a language," or even more simply, "a structured knowledge.'' When Lacan proposed this formula for the first time he conceived of the unconscious chain of sayings according to the linguistic categories of metaphor and metonymy. Then, to establish the laws that rule the linguistic structure of the unconscious more rigorously, Lacan used the conceptual apparatus of formal logic. We will have the occasion no doubt, during these lessons, to return to the functioning of the structure of the unconscious. For the moment we will move on and satisfy ourselves with the initial statement of the first principal: the unconscious chain of sayings is structured like a language, or perhaps, "The unconscious is a knowledge that is structured as a language." The second fundamental principle concerns jouissance and asserts: "There is no sexual relation" [II n'y a pas de rapport sexuel]. Now in order to understand the Lacanian concept of jouissance and to establish this second principle we must locate our guiding thread again, that of the symptom, and come back to the trails blazed by Freud. In order to justify the first principle with respect to the unconscious, we had characterized the symptom by its empirical aspect as a discordance in the narrative, by its status as a sign that induces suppositions from the patient and even the analyst, and finally by its status as a signifier that surprises, imposes itself, and repeats itself, apart from any intentionality. Nevertheless, we have not brought out the most obvious aspect of the symptom, the one that is most tangible for the one who suffers from it, namely, the very fact of suffering, the painful feelings provoked by psychical disorder. 3 Symptoms are indeed painful manifestations, apparently useless acts, that one performs with a deep aversion.  

page_25 Page 26 But if for the ego, the symptom essentially signifies suffering from the signifier, for the unconscious, on the other hand, it signifies the achievement of a satisfaction. Yes, an achievement of a satisfaction, because the symptom is both suffering and relief, suffering for the ego and relief for the unconscious. But why relief?. How can one claim that a symptom soothes and frees? From what oppression does it free us? Now, it is precisely the soothing and liberating effect of the symptom that we take to be one of the major aspects of jouissance. However, let us pause for a moment and ask ourselves a more general question: What is jouissance and what different forms does it take? The theory of jouissance proposed by Lacan is a complex construction delineating three modes of jouissance. We will often have the chance in these lessons to treat of the problem of jouissance, but for the moment, I would like to cover the most important aspects. First, permit me a terminological clarification. No doubt, the word jouissance spontaneously evokes the idea of a sensual or sexual pleasure. But as is frequently the case, a word in analytic vocabulary remains so determined by its ordinary sense that the theoretician's work of elaboration is often reduced to differentiating the psychoanalytic meaning from the common meaning. This is exactly the work that we must undertake here with respect to the word "jouissance," by separating it carefully from the idea of orgasm. I would ask you then, each time you hear me say the word "jouissance," to forget any reference to orgasmic pleasure. This having been said, we now approach the concept of jouissance itself. In order to take account of the Lacanian theory of jouissance, I must first recall the Freudian thesis of psychical energy, such as I have understood it. At the outset, we will set forth a premise. According to Freud, human beings are inhabited by an aspirationalways constant and never realizedto attain an impossible goal, that of absolute happiness, a happiness that takes different forms, including a hypothetical absolute sexual pleasure experienced in incest. This aspiration known as desire, that élan born in the erogenous zones of the body, generates a painful state of psychical tension, a tension that is increasingly exacerbated as the élan of desire is stopped by the dam of repression. The more repression is intransigent, the more the tension is augmented. Faced with the wall of repression, the thrust of desire finds itself constrained to take, simultaneously, two opposing paths: the path   page_26 Page 27 of a discharge through which the energy is freed and dissipated, and the path of retention in which the energy is conserved and accumulated as a residual energy. One part overcomes repression and is discharged outside as an energetic expenditure that accompanies each of the manifestations of the unconscious (a dream, a slip of the tongue, or a symptom). It is precisely that incomplete discharge that gives the relief we spoke of with respect to the symptom. The other part that does not succeed in crossing the barrier of repression and remains confined within the psychical system is an excess of energy which, in turn, over-stimulates the erogenous zones and constantly overactivates the level of internal tension. To say that this excess of energy always maintains an elevated level of tension, means that the erogenous zone, a source of desire, is constantly stimulated. One could imagine a third fate of psychic energy, a third possibility that is absolutely hypothetical and ideal since it is never realized by desire, namely, a total discharge of energya discharge that is accomplished without the interference of repression or any other limit. This last fate remains as hypothetical as the absolute sexual pleasure of which Freud spoke, a state that is never attained. Very well, I propose to you the following connection that we will refine later: psychical energy, with its three fates, would correspond, in my view, to what Lacan designates by the term jouissance, the three states of jouissance: phallic jouissance, surplus-of-jouissance, and jouissance of the Other. Phallic jouissance corresponds to the dissipated energy at the time of the partial discharge and has the effect of a relative relief, an incomplete relief of unconscious tension. This category of jouissance is called phallic because the limit that opens and closes access to the discharge is the phallus (Freud would have said: repression). Basically, the phallus functions as a barrier which regulates the part of jouissance that leaves (discharges) and that which remains in the unconscious system (residual excess). I cannot elaborate here upon what led Lacan to conceive of the phallus as a barrier to jouissance. I will speak of it a few pages further on, and would only ask that you remember that the main function of the phallus is to open and dose the access of jouissance to the outside. What outside? That of unexpected events, speech, fantasies, and the totality of external productions of the

unconscious, one of which is the symptom. The other category, surplus-of-jouissance, corresponds to the jouissance that on the contrary remains confined within the psychical system and whose exit is prevented by the phallus. The term "surplus" [plus] indicates that part of the energy that is not discharged, the   page_27 Page 28 residual jouissance, a surplus that constantly increases the intensity of the internal tension. We note as well that the residual jouissance of which we speak remains profoundly anchored in the erogenous zones and orifices of the bodythe mouth, the anus, the vagina, the penile opening, etc. The pressure of desire emerges in these zones and in turn the surplus-of-jouissance constantly stimulates these zones and keeps them in a permanently erogenous state. We will return often to this category of the surplus-of-jouissance, when we study the Lacanian concept of object a, and consider its position in the relation between the analyst and the patient. Finally, we arrive at the third category, the jouissance of the Other, a fundamentally hypothetical state which corresponds to the ideal case in which the tension would have been totally discharged without the impediment of any limit. This is the jouissance that subject supposes of the Other, the Other that is also for it a supposed-being. This ideal state, this point on the horizon of an absolute and impossible happiness, takes different forms according to the perspective from which one sees it. For an obsessional neurotic, for example, the unattainable yet always-present horizon is death, while for a hysterical neurotic, the same horizon is an oceanic madness. If we then consider the same horizon in terms of the desire of a child in an oedipal phase, it takes on, we know, the mythical figure of incest, incest considered as desire's most fulfilled realization of desire, the supreme jouissance. But whether ideally desire is accomplished by a total cessation of tension, as in the case of death, or on the contrary, by a maximal intensification of the same tension, as in the case of the perfect jouissance of the incestuous act, it nevertheless remains that all these excessive and absolute forms are fictions, bewitching and deceptive mirages that fan the flames of desire. Now, psychoanalysis privileges only one of these mirages and elevates it to the rank of the unknowable, of the unknown real in the face of which all theory fails. There, where the human being is subjugated by the mirage, psychoanalysis recognizes the limit of its knowledge. But which mirage is it? It is the lure that fascinates and deceives the eyes of the oedipal child by leading it to believe that absolute jouissance exists and that it could be experienced in an incestuous sexual relation, which is entirely possible. It is indeed for this reason that whatever its form may be, jouissance is always a sexual   page_28 Page 29 jouissance. It is sexual not in the genital sense, but insofar as it is marked by its mythical destiny of needing to be consumed in the incestuous act, to be the jouissance experience by the Other in the form of an absolute sexual pleasure. The Other can be any mythical character, whether God, the mother, or the subject itself in a fantasy of all-powerfulness. We can specify that the incest of which we speak is a mythical figure with no relation to the concrete and morbid reality of the pitiful violation of the daughter by her father or the impure fondling of a son by his mother. As a doctrine that attempts to delineate the limits of its knowledge as best it can, psychoanalysis has understood that this very place where the sexual relation would be possible for the oedipal child, is where it proves to be impossible. At the very place where the mythical child supposes the jouissance of the Otherthe ideal voluptuous pleasure of the incestuous sexual relationpsychoanalysis knows that the Other does not exist and that this relation is impossible to realize by the subject or impossible to formalize in a theory. It knows this because it has learned from clinical experience that human beings necessarily encounter all sorts of obstacles such as language, signifiers, and in particular, the phallus: all limits that shatter the ideal trajectory toward the full realization of desire, that is to say, toward jouissance. Now, that place we call ''jouissance of the Other" in reference to the child who lusts after it or is afraid of it is not only

the place of impossible incest, it is also for psychoanalysts the place of impossible knowledge. Not only is the subject's realization of the sexual relation impossible, but also it is impossible to formally conceptualize it in theory, and impossible to write it with signs or letters that would speak of the nature of jouissance if that relation could be consummated. In a word, jouissance is in the unconscious, and in theory, a place that is empty of signifiers. It is in this sense that Lacan proposed a sentence that was scandal: "There is no sexual relation." At first, one understands this as the absence of a genital union between a man and a woman, but this is an error of interpretation. The sentence means that there is no symbolic relation between a supposed signifier of masculine jouissance and a supposed signifier of feminine jouissance. Why? Precisely because in the unconscious there are no signifiers that signify the jouissance of either one if that jouissance is imagined to be absolute. This is also because the analytic experience teaches us that jouissance, in its infinite form, is a place without signifiers and without any   page_29 Page 30 individuating features. From this the second principle is derived: "There is no sexual relation." To better understand Lacan's sentence we can complete it by writing, "There is no sexual relation . . . that is absolute"; that is to say, we do not know absolute jouissance, there are no signifiers that signify it, and consequently there can be no relation between two absent signifiers. Certainly, we admit that there is no absolute sexual relation because there is no signifier that signifies absolute jouissance, but can one claim that there would be a relative sexual relation? Strictly speaking, we must answer that there is no relative sexual relation either because neither is there a signifier which can signify the nature of a relative and limited jouissance. If the word relation means a relation between two signifiers which would signify jouissance, there would be no relation whatsoever, whether absolute or relative, whether limited or unlimited jouissance. There is, then, no sexual relation, even if relative. Nonetheless, a question remains. How can we conceive of the ordinary sexual encounter between a man and a woman? We will say for the moment that in terms of jouissance, this encounter does not concern two persons, but rather partial places of the body. It is the encounter between my body and a part of the body of my partner, between different thresholds of local jouissance. I insist that we do not know what absolute jouissance is, but neither do we know what jouissance really is in its local expression. Of course, there are no signifiers that represent unlimited jouissancebut one can just as well say that neither are there any signifiers that represent partial jouissance attached to the erogenous places of the body (phallic jouissance and surplus-of-jouissance). That being said, the signifier can nevertheless approach, delineate, and circumscribe the local zones where the body undergoes jouissance. When we say that jouissance is delineated by the signifiers we mean that as the thrust of desire it is delineated by the edges of the erogenous orifices. The signifier is to be understood in terms of the corporal edge. In sum, psychoanalysis does not know the nature of jouissance, the very essence of psychical energy, whether global"of the Other"or local"phallic" or "residual"; psychoanalysis only knows the signifying borders which delimit the regions of the body which are the source of jouissance. When psychoanalysis locates jouissance it is always a local jouissance that is in question.   page_30 Page 31 Now we must take account of the concept of the phallus, a concept that is closely related to that of jouissance. In Lacanian theory, the word phallus does not designate the male genital organ. It is the name of a quite specific signifier that is different from all other signifiers. It has the function of signifying everything that pertains intimately or indifferently to the sexual dimension. The phallus is not the signifier of jouissance because, as we have already said, jouissance resists any representation. No, the phallus does not signify the very nature of jouissance, but it marks the trajectory of jouissanceif we think of the flux of the energy that circulatesor it marks the trajectory of desireif we think of that same flux oriented toward a goal. In other words, the phallus is the signifier that marks and signifies each of the stages of that trajectory. It marks the origin of jouissance materialized by the erogenous orifices; it marks the obstacle

encountered by jouissance (repression); it marks the externalizations of jouissance as symptom, fantasy, or action; and finally the phallus is the threshold beyond which the mythical world of the jouissance of the other opens. But by what privilege do we call this signifier the phallus? Why choose a reference to the masculine sex? Why "phallus"? The answer to this question lies in the primacy that psychoanalysis accords to the trial of castration in the development of human sexuality, a trial in which the phallus is pivotal. 4 Before concluding this part devoted to jouissance, I must establish an important point. We had mentioned a readjustment of the connection established between energy and jouissance. Concerning this comparison, Lacan was quite clear. He did not take jouissance to be an energetic entity, because it does not correspond to the physical definition of energy as a numerical constant. "Energy is not a substance," recalled Lacan, "it is a numerical constant that the physicist has to find in his or her calculations." And later: "Any physicist knows full well . . . that energy is nothing but the numerical value of a constant." Precisely in this sense jouissance "is not energy and cannot be inscribed as such."5 One sees that for Lacan jouissance cannot be rendered mathematically by a combinatory calculus, and therefore cannot be energy. Nevertheless, in spite of the extreme rigor of the   page_31 Page 32 Lacanian position, I have chosen to discuss and define jouissance by making use of the energetic metaphorthe one that was employed so often by Freudbecause it seems the most appropriate one to account for the dynamic and clinical aspect of jouissance. This summarizes the arguments that invalidate or justify the connection between energy and jouissance. Jouissance is certainly not an energy if, following Lacan, we contrast it with the sense view that is provided by physics. From the point of view of physics, then, jouissance cannot be considered as energy. But, jouissance would be an "energy" if, following the Freudian metaphor, we would consider it as a thrust that, emerging in the erogenous zone of the body, tends toward a goal encounters obstacles, manages to open paths and accumulate. But there is still another argument that confers the status of energy upon jouissance, namely its quality as the permanent force of the work of the unconscious. Jouissance is unconscious energy when the unconscious works, that is to say, when the unconscious is activeand it is in this state constantlyinsuring repetition and externalizing itself constantly in psychical productions (S1) such as the symptom or any other signifying event. In this sense I would like to paraphrase Lacan from Encore: "the unconscious, means that the human being, by speaking, undergoes jouissance." 6 Similarly I will define jouissance in the following way: jouissance means that the human being, by committing a blunder, activates the unconscious. These say the same thing from two different angles: the work of the unconscious involves jouissance, and jouissance is the energy unleashed when the unconscious works. These then are the two principles on the basis of which I wanted to conclude and that seem to me today to be fundamental. One concerns the unconscious: "The unconscious is a knowledge structured like a language." The other concerns jouissance: "There is no sexual relation." These two principles seem fundamental to me because they define an entire way of conceiving of psychoanalysis. To the extent that I accept the idea of the structured unconscious, I would then conceive of, for example, interpretation as being a manifestation,   page_32 Page 33 in the psychoanalyst, of the unconscious of his or her analysand. And to the extent that I accept the idea that there is no sexual relation, I will conceive, for example, that residual jouissance, that of the surplus-of-jouissance, is the driving force of the analytic cure, the center governing the analytic process. And finally I will recognize that at the horizon of the cure and of the punctual moments of experience which mark it, the dimension of the real spreads as an obscure place of unthinkable jouissance.

Question: How can one connect the two fundamental principles that you just presented, the unconscious and jouissance? If you allow that the unconscious is a chain of signifiers in action, I would then ask you to accept that in this chain there is an element missing. Specifically, the one that should have to represent jouissance. In the unconscious, jouissance does not have a specific signifying representation, but it has a place, that of the hole; a hole within the signifying system, always covered by the veil of fantasies and symptoms. In the same way that analytic theory recognizes its incapacity to precisely signify the nature of jouissance, so one can say that the unconscious lacks the signifier that represents jouissance. In its place, there are only a hole and its veil. In order to complete my response, I must add that the place of jouissance in the unconscious is different according to whether we consider one or the other of its major forms: local (surplus-of-jouissance and phallic) or global (of the Other). If we consider the two examples of local jouissance, their place in the unconscious is that of a hole bordered by a limit, an image that corresponds exactly to the hole of the erogenous orifices of the body. If on the contrary, we consider the immeasurable jouissance of the Other, we must imagine it as an open point on the horizon with neither border nor limit, and as diffuse, without attachment to any particular system. I mean that the jouissance of the Other is not localized in a specific part of a system, but rather that it is located in a confused way by the subjectremember what we had said about the neuroticas something like a mirage. Freud always reminds us that the individual seeks happiness. Then the individual creates obstacles so as not to be able to reach it. What does he define in the end? . . .   page_33 Page 34 . . . A limited happiness. In fact, psychoanalysis discovers that we, speaking beings, are content in the end with very little. You know, genuine happiness, I mean happiness that is actually found, is in fact an extremely limited satisfaction that one obtains without much effort. Any other satisfaction beyond that limit is what Lacanian psychoanalysis calls the jouissance of the Other. From an ethical point of view, the psychoanalytic position is subversive because, in contrast to certain philosophical schools that recognize in man the search for happiness as a search for the supreme good, psychoanalysis states: we agree that human beings aspire to the supreme good, if we accept that as soon as one begins to pursue the ideal they transform it into a concrete reality of a satisfaction that is drastically scaled-down. "But"you will reply"if we recognize that the mirage of absolute happiness quickly dissipates in order to give way to a relative happiness, it remains no less true that the fiction of an absolute remains a goal that is always sought after!" Psychoanalysis would respond "No. The speaking being does not want jouissance without measure, it refuses jouissance and it neither wants nor is able to undergo jouissance." We find the best illustration of this in the clinical domain, for if you ask me what a neurotic is, I would not hesitate to define him or her as one who does everything necessary in order not to undergo absolute jouissance; and clearly, a way of not undergoing absolute jouissance, yet of course, one way of undergoing jouissance is to settle for a limited jouissance, that is to say of only partially realizing one's desire. There are two ways thanks to which the neurotic undergoes partial jouissance in order to avoid undergoing a maximal jouissance (jouissance of the Other): the symptom (phallic jouissance) and the fantasy (surplus-of-jouissance). The symptom and the fantasy are in effect used by the neurotic in order to oppose immeasurable jouissance and to resist it. The best example of this is hysteria. Hysterics are those who create a reality from scratch, their own reality; that is to say, they stage a fantasy in which the most desired jouissance constantly evades them. This is why Lacan has characterized hysterical desire, and for that matter, any desire, as fundamentally unsatisfied, since it is never fully realized, but is realized through fantasies and symptoms. It seems important to emphasize this aspect of desire that is never satisfied, for one could believe that desire is a Good that one must cherish as an ideal. This is precisely what was understood at one time as a result of the erroneous interpretation of the well-known Lacanian maxim: "do not give up on your desire" [ne pas céder sur son désir]; as if it was a slogan to encourage desire and reach jouissance. Now this is an error in interpretation because this maxim is   page_34 Page 35

not a courageous proclamation that aims at singing the praises of desire on the way to supreme jouissance, but rather a prudent reminder not to abandon desire, which is the only defense against jouissance. For certainly one must never stop desiring if one wishes to resist jouissance. By being satisfied in this partial and limited way with symptoms and fantasies, we insure that we will never encounter the full power of maximal jouissance. In short, in order not to attain the jouissance of the Other, however we may desire it, the best thing is to constantly desire and to content oneself with substitutes and illusions, symptoms and fantasies. I expect that you would want to ask at this point: ''But why would one want to avoid jouissance of the Other when elsewhere you refer to it as impossible to attain. If it is beyond attainment why should one need to work so unrelentingly to avoid it since no matter what happens there is no risk of its attainment." The answer to such a question lies in the neurotic and quite complicated way in which the neurotic addresses his or her ideals. Thus, the jouissance of the Other is a paradiselike dream which presents itself to the neurotic in contradictory and various ways: first, it is a dream that is dear to them and to which they aspire, second, it is a dream that they know they cannot realize, chimerical and beyond reach; and finally, they know that it is also, and above all, a dream that if by "misfortune" or "good luck" were someday realized, would endanger their being. They fear the extreme risk of seeing their being disappear. You see the flagrant contradiction that clinical experience confirms everyday: they want the jouissance of the Other, they know they cannot attain it, and simultaneously, they do not want that jouissance. They love it, and it is impossible for them, but they are afraid of it just the same. Of course, all of these levels blend and are conflated when we hear our analysands grapple with their dreams and their fears. How is the formula: "there, where speech fails, jouissance appears," to be understood? I could have begun my lecture with a general statement and propose: the body is subjected to language; or perhaps, I could just as well have reconsidered another general formula: we are speaking beings. This is a proposition which would have been easily accepted since everyone accepts that we speak and that in analysis speech matters. We could add: we are not only speaking beings, we are beings inhabited by language. We could have taken moreover a supplementary step and said: we are not only beings inhabited by language but above all beings that are exceeded by language, carriers of a speech that comes towards us, knocks us down and affects us.   page_35 Page 36 We would be dealing then with a matter of degrees. The first degree is that we are speaking beings; it is an empirical degree that does not correspond to analytic thinking. Analysis goes further and asserts that beyond that we are inhabited by language and remain vulnerable to its actions. The second degree, then, situates us as being vulnerable to language, and even penetrated by it. This is where the third degree comes in. When language, or better yet, when a signifier takes the form of a "saying" which is said beyond me, without my knowing, a supplementary element is added: the body is affected. The psychoanalytic conception of the subject's relation to language finds its value and force, if we think not only that the subject speaks without knowing what it says, but above all that when the subject is taken over by speech, the body is affected as well. But what body? The body as jouissance; the body defined not as an organism but as pure jouissance, pure psychical energy, of which the organic body is only the resonance chamber. This is what matters. I could reconsider our formula and declare that for us, the beings who undergo jouissance, our bodies are symbolically marked, or I could declare quite simply: our bodies are subjected to language. You will understand now when we affirm that "the body is affected by a speech that exceeds us," means that the body undergoes jouissance. To say that the body undergoes jouissance means that apart from any sensation of pain or pleasure that is consciously felt by the subject, a twofold energetic phenomenon takes place at the moment of the manifestation of the unconscious: on the one hand, the energy is discharged (phallic jouissance), and on the other hand, and simultaneously, the internal psychical tension is reactivated (surplus-of-jouissance). But why say that desire is never satisfied, as if psychoanalysis had a pessimistic vision with respect to human aspirations? I can appreciate your reservations. I will answer you by saying that in that place where desire does not attain its goal I mean where it fails, a positive creation emerges, a creative act takes place. If that is the case, you would wonder, why must desire necessarily fail? Desire will never be satisfied for the simple reason that we speak. Inasmuch as we speak, inasmuch as we are immersed in the symbolic world, inasmuch as we belong to that universe where everything has a thousand-and-one meanings, we will never achieve a complete satisfaction of desire, for from here to the full satisfaction of desire, an infinite field constituted by a thousand-and-one labyrinths, spreads out. Since I speak, it

 

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is sufficient that on the path of my desire I advance a saying or posit an act, including the most authentic, to immediately encounter a host of equivocations at the source of every possible misunderstanding. Acts can then be creative, but the purest act or the most accurate word could never avoid the appearance of another act or another word that will divert me from the shortest path to the satisfaction of desire. Once the word is uttered and the act is posited the path toward the satisfaction opens once again. One approaches the goal, one posits an act in life, and yet another path opens. This line of desire exactly reproduces the trajectory of an analysis. It is a path which is not traced in advance but is opened with each experience. The analytic experience takes place, it is inscribed as a point, and it opens from this point to a new section. We pass through it to another point, beginning a new passage. Considered as the trajectory of a cure, analysis is an expanding path, because once the limit is reached, it moves up one notch. The exact formulation would be: analysis is a limited but infinite path. Limited because it always faces a limit that stops it. And infinite because once reached the limit advances infinitely always further. This is precisely the same logic of displacement that we are able to use to understand both the trajectory of desire and the trajectory of an analysis. According to the set theory proposed by Cantor, this expanding movement is ruled by a principle called the principle of passing to the limit 7 For Cantor, the passage to the limit signifies that arriving at the limit generates an infinite set. And if we return to our terminology, we say that one reaches the threshold, and right away, an additional sequence opens up onto infinity. You have spoken of jouissance but not of pleasure. Are pleasure and jouissance equivalent notions or do they refer to two different worlds? In a quite general way, I will answer you by treating jouissance and pleasure as two distinct forms of the expression of psychic energy. But again, how do we define energy? As we know it is not easy. If you ask physicists to define energy, they would have the same difficulty as psychoanalysts would in giving an account of the nature of jouissance or pleasure. Scientists would be constrained to define energy by first situating it in a context. They would describe solar energy, mechanical energy, thermal energy, with any mode of energy defined according to the milieu in which it is expended. Additionally, physicists will produce, as we have seen, an algebraic formula, a numerical constant in order to be able to work on the basis of an exact calculus of energy.   page_37 Page 38 We do not have an algebraic formula for our work to calculate pleasure or jouissance. Neither pleasure nor jouissance is strictly definable in itself. One can only situate them in their context: with respect to pleasure, we will consider consciousness, feelings, and the lowering of tension; with respect to jouissance, we will consider the fact that it is unconscious, that it coincides with the augmentation of tension and that it does not necessarily involve feelings. Pleasure is the conscious or preconscious figure of energy, which is always felt, while jouissanceI am thinking here above all in terms of local jouissanceis the unconscious figure of energy and is never immediately felt. But the conscious/unconscious distinction is only one very general criterion to distinguish between pleasure and jouissance. From the economical point of view, I mean the point of view of the variation of the intensity of the energy; pleasure is above all the agreeable sensation that is felt by the ego when tension is reduced. In pleasure, as Freud showed, there is a diminution of psychical tension in the sense of rest and relaxation. Jouissance, on the other hand, involves maintaining or dramatically increasing the tension. It is not immediately felt, but is manifested indirectly during the maximal experiences that the body and the psychethe whole subjectmust go through. Jouissance is a word that designates the experience of feeling an intolerable tension, a mixture of intoxication and uncanniness. Jouissance is the energetic state that we experience, in limit-situations, in situations of rupture, at the moment when one is about to cross a threshold, assume a challenge, or face an exceptional, often painful crisis. Let us take the example of the child's game: there is jouissance in that child who, surrounded by friends, climbs on a steep roof, and is intoxicated by the risk of falling. This qualifies as a challenge. He undergoes jouissance not only from challenging his friends, but from the fact of testing his own limits. Pleasure is quite different. Suppose the same child, now relaxed, is soothed by the comforting movement of a swing. He is completely relaxed and at rest. But if by

swinging, he is taken suddenly by the urge to know the limit he could reach before taking the risk of falling, it is then that jouissance surges again. Similarly, in the experience of analysis, one can feel the pleasure of coming to a session, and of being comforted by talking, but one can also experience moments of extreme tension and even pain, in which jouissance prevails. Schematically, I would tell you therefore that pleasure amounts to the reduction of tension, while jouissance amounts to the increase of   page_38 Page 39 tension to its highest point. Jouissance is the maximal state in which the body is brought to its limits. Perhaps the best example in which the body is brought to its limits is the unconscious pain that is often manifested in impulsive actions. I would even say that pain is one of the main figures of the surplus-of-jouissance, or as I had the occasion of showing in my seminar, the paradigm of object a. 8 Now, if jouissance is not directly felt, you will ask me: how can one speak of jouissance, or of pain, if I do not suffer from it? How can we juxtapose two terms as antinomial as ''pain" and "unconscious"? In the same vein, you could even ask: if jouissance is a tension that is not felt, from what is it to be inferred? Should we not rather say that on the contrary one does feel jouissance. but one only feels it after the fact [après coup]? Indeed, you are correct. It would be better to say that jouissance is never felt immediately at its peak but only after the fact. Let us take the example of the man who, in a suicidal impulse, driving his car, takes the highway and drives in a daze, almost causing an accident. The difficult moment passed, he stops and gathers himself while reflecting on his acting out. . . . We can deduce from that moment, when the subject oscillated between life and death, that there was jouissance. The man had lived in the grip of a murderous tension, in a passing impulse of self-destruction. This is an indirect expression of the impact of jouissance. He did not experience any defined or precise sensation, except the vague feeling of a force that drove him to the action. From that momentary paroxysm, one can deduce that this man had lived under the grip, not of alcohol, but a drug that is a thousand times more powerful and that operates in every human being, I mean, the power of a silent and dominating jouissance. It is as if in jouissance the body takes on everything. You say "the body takes on everything," and I translate this by "action." Jouissance causes words and thoughts to fail, and is only expressed in action. Indeed, one of the most typical manifestations of jouissance as we define itas high psychical tension that is not actually feltis acting out, and in general all actions whether dangerous or not, that exceed us. When jouissance prevails, words disappear and action dominates. The sister of jouissance is action while that of pleasure is the image. Pleasure is always dependent on the coming and going of   page_39 Page 40 images that appear to me. Pleasure is a sensation perceived and experienced by the ego. On the contrary, jouissance is expression through blind action, whether productive actions as when a painter creates outside of himself, his canvas, or destructive actions as in the case of a driver who had a brush with death. But in any case, these are actions in which the subject is only body, or as you say, in which the body takes on everything. The subject neither speaks nor thinks. Lacan, inspired by the cogito of Descartes, located the position of the subject in the state of jouissance by stating, "I am there where I do not think." Can we say then that would be a subject of jouissance, a subject that undergoes jouissance? No. There is no subject of jouissance in the same way that there is a subject of the unconscious. The difference is essential. The subject of the unconscious is always represented by a signifier, its presence is necessarily marked in by a representation that indicates and signifies it. In the case of jouissance, I have already emphasized the absence of a representative signifier. In Lacanian theory, the subject is always accompanied by a signifier; for Lacan there is no signifier without a subject and reciprocally there is no subject without a signifier Consequently, we will say: there is no

subject of jouissance because there are no signifiers able to represent it. Then your question is indeed relevant. When there is jouissance, who undergoes it? I would answer that no one undergoes jouissance; that we do not undergo jouissance with something, but that something undergoes jouissance within us, without us. There is another aspect of the pleasure/jouissance distinction that is related to time. With respect to temporality, what relation holds between pleasure and jouissance? I would answer by saying that pleasure is quite transitory while jouissance is so radically permanent that it becomes atemporal. Pleasure passes and disappears while jouissance is a tension that belongs to life itself. As long as there is jouissance there is life, because jouissance is none other than the force that insures repetition, the ineluctable succession of vital events. If I had to establish a connection between the Lacanian concept of jouissance and the Freudian concept of repetition, I would conclude by identifying jouissance with what Freud called "repetition compulsion." If there is a Freudian concept that is similar to jouissanceconceived of as a force that insures repetitionit is certainly   page_40 Page 41 that of repetition compulsion, understood as the irreducible human tendency to live no doubt toward the future, but to do so by trying to complete the acts begun in the past. The entire force of life lies in this movement. From the psychopathological point of view, what is the relation of perversion to jouissance? I will be very brief, because we will return to the jouissance of the pervert. We can say that of the three clinical typesneurosis, psychosis, and perversionthe one that is closest to jouissance, but in a false sense, is perversion. For if the neurotic avoids and opposes the jouissance of the Other, as we have shown, the pervert not only seeks it but mimics it and feigns it. The pervert is the one who imitates the gesture of jouissance. What is the place of jouissance in the analytic cure? This is a question that will be present throughout these lessons because it is essential for understanding what animates an analysis. For the moment I will limit myself to two remarks that best summarize all the comments that I could make on the place of jouissance in the cure. First and above all, jouissance, and in particular its modality of the surplus-ofjouissance, that is of the surplus that constantly maintains the high level of internal tension. This is the motor force of the cure, the core around which the analytic experience gravitates. That which is dominant in analysis is not what one would mistakenly expect, that is to say, speech, but rather the dominating and attracting pole of jouissance. Still in the context of this first remark, I would clarify again, and we will return to this frequently, that the pole of jouissance is not purely abstract but takes diverse corporal forms in the cure, such as the breast, feces, the gaze, etc. All figurative representations of jouissance take their place in the different fantasies that are consciously or unconsciously constructed by the analysand within the transferential relation. The other remark concerns the function of the psychoanalyst because of all the positions that he or she is led to occupy, the one in which the analyst identifies with jouissance (surplus-of-jouissance) is the most favorable for appropriate action 9 You have defined jouissance with the Freudian metaphor of psychical energy and you just distinguished it from pleasure by again referring to energy. How is it that the concept of energy is privileged in this way?   page_41 Page 42 The connection between Freud's and Lacan's terms that I have suggested to youand for which I assume complete responsibilityshows that the Lacanian concept of jouissance can be considered as a creative renewal of Freudian metapsychology. It is as if Lacan, while respecting Freud's dynamics and threefold division of psychical energy (discharged energy, conserved energy, and its impossible ideal goal), extricated himself with the word jouissance from a mechanistic and economical account of the psychical operation. While Lacanas we have seen in this lessonhad opposed energy and jouissance, it has struck me that the jouissance-energy connection remains the best way that I have found to take account of the Lacanian theory of different kinds of jouissance. Once this clarification is made, I can now make use of the Freudian notion of energywhile fully realizing its limitsin order to show the Lacanian concept of jouissance.

But what is gained by substituting the word jouissance for the word energy? What exactly accounts for the richness of Lacan's revision of Freudian metapsychology? With the word jouissance, Lacan introduced two fundamental concepts: that of the "phallus" and that of the "impossible sexual relation." The first functions as the limit that allows or blocks access to the discharge of energy. The second functions as the ideal goal that is never attained. But whether it is the phallus as limit or the impossible sexual relation as a mirage of the absolute, with the word jouissance Lacan resolved a major problem of psychoanalytic theory. This is a problem for which the concept of energy was not a solution, namely, the problem of the nature of the subject which experiences the pain of unconscious tension when the energy is blocked by repression, and when the subject experiences a relative and conscious peace when that same energy is discharged. In fact, it is difficult to grasp the logic of Lacanian thought, for Lacan undertakes a contradictory move in the articulation of the subject with jouissance. In my view, he first introduces the word jouissance in part in order to subjectivize psychic energy, as if to show the phenomenon that Freud intuited in 1938 when he spoke of the "self-perceptions of the id." 10 According to Freud, the variations of energetic tension in the Id are perceived by the Id itself. Instead of saying, as Freud did, that the Id (the reservoir of the drive) selfperceives its own variations of energy, Lacan suggests that the unconscious works, and by working, that is to say by insuring repetition, the unconscious undergoes jouissance. To state that the unconscious undergoes jouissance is first to subjectivize the unconscious, to   page_42 Page 43 anthropomorphize it, to suppose it to be a subject, to institute one of the figures of the subject-supposed-to-know. But immediately Lacan retracts any reference to subjectivity and on the contrary advances that if the unconscious undergoes jouissance, this does not mean that there is a subject that undergoes jouissance. In short, with the word jouissance, Lacan introduces the subject only to withdraw it. In our next lesson, we will address the principle that the unconscious is structured like a language in more detail.   page_43 Page 44 THE UNCONSCIOUS ONLY EXISTS WITHIN THE FIELD OF ANALYSIS THERE IS NO UNCONSCIOUS THAT IS PROPER TO EACH ONE OF US LALANGUE WHAT IS A STRUCTURE? THE FEAR OF BLUSHING THE SIGNIFIER LEAPS FROM SUBJECT TO SUBJECT NO SIGNIFIER WITHOUT SUBJECT THE BIRTH OF THE SUBJECT  

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Second Lesson The Existence of the Unconscious With respect to the unconscious, I would first of all like to know your reaction to a remark of a friend of mine who does not believe in psychoanalysis and who said recently, ''I do not have an unconscious." What do you think of such a

statement? Is it possible that one would not have an unconscious? If you would allow me to be so boldI believe that your friend is correct: he does not have an unconscious. How can he be correct? He is correct because, in my view, if the unconscious exists, it can only exist within the field of psychoanalysis, and more precisely, within the field of the cure. Now your friend seems to situate himself outside of the field and consequently outside of the unconscious. I realize that my position may strike you as overly restrictive and that there are many grounds to oppose it. I imagine for example that you could remind me of Freud's various texts, such as the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in which he demonstrates the existence of the unconscious in a field that is as far from the cure as is everyday life. However, if we reconsider the Lacanian principle of the unconscious that is structured like a language, as well as our discussion developed in the first lesson, then we conclude that in fact the unconscious only exists within the analytic cure. I did not expect to begin this lesson in this way. Your intervention leads me to pose now a series of propositions that justify my thesis that there would only be an unconscious in analysis. I want to specify that these propositions are a result of my reading of Lacan's work but have never been stated by Lacan himself. I will advance these propositions as if they were responses to the question, "When can it be said that the unconscious exists?"  

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First, the unconscious is revealed in an act which surprises and exceeds the intention of the analysand who speaks. The subject says more than he wants and by saying, reveals its truth. Rather than revealing a hidden unconscious that is already there, this act produces the unconscious and causes it to exist. Now, for this act to actually make the unconscious exist, it is indispensable that another subject, namely, the psychoanalyst, listen and recognize the effect of the unconscious. Lacan stated "does the unconscious imply that one listens to it? In my view, yes" (T, 14, translation modified).This means that, for the unconscious to be, it is necessary that it be recognized. But that recognition is not a conceptual one, it an ontological one, that is to say, the psychoanalyst recognizes the unconscious of the other on the basis of his or her being and of his or her own unconscious. To recognize that the act of the analysand is an activation of the unconscious, there must be another act, that of the analyst. Certainly, many differences distinguish the act of the analysand from the act of the analyst, a slip of the tongue of the analysand is different from the analyst's interpretation, but from our point of view, that is, from the perspective that considers the unconscious as a structure, these two acts are formally identical, or if your prefer, significant. If the analyst is in a position to recognize the existence of the unconscious of his or her analysand, it is because he or she had already undergone analysis as a patient.

It is the conjunction of these two acts that in the field of the cure activates the unconscious, and permits us to advance three hypotheses:   page_46 Page 47 First, the unconscious is not a hidden agency that is already there, waiting to be revealed by an interpretation, but is an agency produced when the analyst's interpretation, considered as an act of his or her unconscious, recognizes the act of the unconscious of the analysand. Second, thus produced, the unconscious is a unique structure, shared by the analytic partners. Consequently, we must rectify the preceding hypothesis and conclude that there is not an unconscious that belongs to the analysand on the one hand, and another unconscious that belongs to the analyst on the other hand. There is only one unconscious, the one that is produced in the transference. The third hypothesis, finally, concerns the proposition according to which the unconscious exists exclusively in the cure. We recall that Lacan also worked on the same problem without finally solving it. In response to an interlocutor who asserted, "I say that psychoanalysis is only valid in the field of its observations, namely, the analytic situation," Lacan replied, "This is exactly what I say. We have no way of knowing if the unconscious exists outside of psychoanalysis." 11 When the unconscious has been interpreted, does that suppose that one had it in one's grasp? The unconscious is a knowledge that we cannot grasp directly. The statement that the unconscious is a knowledge is more than a hypothesis, it is nearer to a thesis, or better yet, to a principle or even an axiom. That is to say that we do not know the unconscious, we are not able to grasp it, it is not tangible, for it is as intangible as the imaginary number i. It is ungraspable but we give it a name. What did Freud do? He named it. Freud founded and named. Freud gave a name to an unexpected event, to the dream that surprised the subject, and said, "There is, here, another knowledge that we will call unconscious." This is the mad aspect of the father. A father is mad when he is not afraid to found. When the father founds he identifies with the name, he is the name, he alienates his being in a name, he makes himself the signifier of the Name-of-the-father. There is a madness in Freud when he advanced with a crazy certainty, "This is the unconscious," not in the sense that he took over the term already in use by numerous philosophers, but in the sense in which he gave it a meaning that was at that time quite novel. For he was not content to declare simply, ''This is the unconscious." He added, "Here is the unconscious and we suppose it to be a chain of signifiers.'' And as well, "We have two conceptions of   page_47 Page 48 the unconscious, or even three, a dynamic conception, a topological conception, and an economic conception." He began by naming, and the thing existed. But clearly, a name alone is unable to establish existence. It must as well be the case that the name is repeated and inscribed in a structure. To name is not simply to attach a name, naming is an act which not only instantiates an element, but gives it consistency and engenders a structure. Freud names, the thing exists, and the consistency unfolds. Now, quite often, in the context of the cure, the psychoanalyst's interpretation is limited to this act, the act of naming. A correct interpretation consists precisely in giving the right name to an event that emerges. In this way, it causes the structure of the unconscious to exist. But the problem is that one must interpret without giving it too much thought. An interpretation is not a reflective or calculated intervention. An interpretation is a name that one gives without much knowing, and in the giving of the name there is a leap. An interpretation is the leap of a name; it is a passage, a crossing, a risk taken. You see, as an act of naming, interpretation involves the risk of exposing oneself.

In your view, on the basis of what objective data has Lacan deduced his principle of an unconscious that is structured like a language? Your remark leads me first of all to recall the very important distinction between language [langage] and speech [langue]. To be sure, the unconscious has the structure of a language, but its effects are felt on the terrain of speech; that is, on the terrain of spoken language. Now the concrete and objective data that allow the linguistic structure of the unconscious to be inferred are the external acts of the unconscious. We have already noted that each of the manifestations of the unconscious must be seen, in a formal sense, as a signifier, or more exactly, as one signifier. We have also said that these external acts belong to diverse realities: a bodily gesture, an unexpected speech, or any other event. But among these realities in which the unconscious expresses itself, that of speech provides the best opening for us to come into contact with the structural order of the unconscious. In the same way that Freud took the dream to be the royal road to the unconscious, I would say that for Lacan, the royal road is that of speech.   page_48 Page 49 Lacan recognized, then, the difference that Saussure established between speech and language: speech is the spoken language. There is first a spoken language which, for example, would be the dialect of Cali, and I expect it is quite distinct from that of the capital Bogota, even if in both regions they speak the same language. Then, most importantly, there is that particular language that is the maternal language, the language spoken by the mother. It is this language in which the unconscious manifests itself. In fact, the best definition would be, "The unconscious is structured like a language and manifests itself in the language as spoken by the mother." But then, if we speak Spanish, is our unconscious structured in Spanish? No, Spanish is first a language in which the unconscious manifests itself, and not a language in which the unconscious is structured. Note that at a certain time I asked myself a similar question, as to whether the unconscious is structured in Latin because. . . Because it is difficult to understand! . . . No, because when I was working on medieval logic, I thought of the unconscious of logicians like Shyreswood or Ockham, and said to myself, "Since these men wrote in Latin and worked in logic in Latin, it must follow that the structure of their unconscious is influenced by Latin, even if the language of their mother was medieval English, and even though there were no psychoanalysts at that time. That said, it is the case that the unconscious is structured like a language and manifests its effects in the different languages spoken by the subject, most particularly the maternal language. Now, the difference between language and speech helps us to consider the relation that the child has with its mother. For one could say that the maternal language, that language spoken by the mother, is the language of the flesh, and of all that is related to the body, in a word, to jouissance. Lacan wrote "lalangue" to emphasize how the unconscious manifests itself in a language; and on the basis of these manifestations, analytic theory supposes an unconscious that is structured like a language. But why did he create this neologism, "lalangue"? In order to clarify that it is not the speech of Call or the dialect of   page_49 Page 50 whatever region that matters, it is, most importantly; lalangue in which the unconscious manifests its effects. This Lacanian neologism that joins the article and the noun serves to distinguish the language of the unconscious, from language in it linguistic sense. It is lalangue with which my patients speak to me. Each patient speaks in the final analysis with a different language. Why? Because it is not only French that is in question but the patient's own, familiar, maternal French of his or her personal history. And if the patient is bilingual and speaks French poorly this poor French will be his or her "lalangue." We must go further into the phenomenon of bilingualism and observe how the effects of the unconscious emerge more easily when one speaks two languages rather than one; that is, if one has nursed on two

languages rather than one. Lalangue is something that one sucks, it is the maternal part of language that undergoes jouissance. Lalangue remains intimately linked to the body, and is thus eminently charged with meaning. Lalangue is the language of meaning, full of meaning. If "lalangue is sucked" we must rectify the popular Spanish saying, and instead of saying, "One who does not cry does not nurse," we should say, "One who does not nurse does not speak." Your thought is quite interesting and leads me to ask: if it is necessary to nurse in order to speak, then what must one do in order to write? It is not by nursing, however, that one writes. There is something of the order of a rupture when one writes, there is a tearing that occurs. Writing has more of an affinity with language as structured than with the maternal language. Lalangue in which the unconscious produces its effects is a language linked to the body. Now what does "linked to the body" mean, if not charged with meaning? When one gives a meaning to things, the body is the medium. We give meaning through our body. Any psychoanalyst's intervention that reveals a meaning remains an intervention permeated by the body. The body is present, in knowledge, in the reading of a text, in the understanding of what is written, and in the simple fact of stating, "I understand." That's where the body is. Knowledge is linked to the image of the body. Hegel was the first to have established the corporal and imaginary foundations of knowledge. Following a Hegelian intuition Lacan invented the concept of paranoid knowledge. For Lacan any knowledge is a paranoid knowledge, that is, in any knowledge one captures and one freezes the objects of the world by assigning them a meaning. And I would add that this takes place through the image of the body. Yes, knowledge is the   page_50 Page 51 production of a meaning through the image of the body. Paul Valéry said: "We only enter into knowledge through the threshold of the body." We would like to adopt this formula for ourselves. The unconscious manifests itself in lalangue,but why does Lacan refer more generally to language in order to conceive of the unconscious system? Why did he choose language? Let us remember that the Lacanian aphorism was born at a time that was marked by the influence of structural linguistics, which was presented as a model of a young science having to construct its own object of study, namely, language. Now language corresponded so well to the criteria governing a structure, that it became the archetype of all structures. It is precisely from this eminently formal perspective of linguistics that Lacan elevated the concept of the unconscious to the rank of a language, that is, to a structure, the unit of which is the signifying element. The unconscious satisfies the requirements that define any structure. What are these requirements? First, a structure is a chain of elements that are distinct in their material reality, but similar in that they belong to the same whole. These elements are called signifiers. Second, the signifiers, as interconnected, obey a double movement of connection (metonymy), and of substitution (metaphor). Metonymy is the connection that keeps linked, as links in a chain, one signifier to the other. It insures that any given moment, the chain is able to assign a signifier to the peripheral place of the One. Metaphor designates the mechanism of substitution by which this assignment takes place, that is, the mechanism by which the unconscious externalizes itself in the form of a signifier (a metaphorical signifier). Third, and finally, the double movement of the connection and of the substitution of signifiers leads the structure to actualize itself constantly, that is to say, to place one of its elements permanently at the periphery. The hole left vacant by the signifier which has been marginalizeda signifier that has become the border and the limit of the structureis a lack inscribed in the chain. It is a lack that causes the movement of the whole.   page_51 Page 52

This is the structural functioning of the unconscious, which is that of any language. If we now reconsider our points from the first lesson, clarifying them with these structural criteria, we can say in one formula that the unconscious is a knowledge which, moved by the force of jouissance, works like a metonymical chain in order to produce a fruit: the metaphorical signifier; and an effect, the subject of the unconscious. You can see how the word "language," in truth, conceals the intelligence of a signifying order which manifests itself constantly. We are only presenting here the most mundane clinical fact, namely, that the unconscious is a process that is constantly active, in the guise of a continually renewed emission of a signifying statement. Does this renewal correspond to the concept of repetition in Lacan's work? Indeed. The renewal of the metaphorical signifier corresponds to the process of repetition as it can be conceived following Lacan with the title "repetition compulsion." Clearly, these terms of renewal and repetition are contradictory since a renewal is a replacement of a former thing by another new thing, while a repetition is the reappearance of an identical element. Renewal is replacement while repetition is the return of the same. Now in psychoanalysis this contradiction is only apparent if one accepts that the sameness of repetition is a place, that of the signifier One, a place occupied successively by events of which the reality is different each time. By occupying this place, the event is identified with the One and by the fact of having occupied it, it is invested with the function of the signifier, and takes its place immediately in the metonymical chain of all other signifiers. Consequently, when we speak of repetition we must realize that what is repeated is the occupation of the place of the One. The element in the role of the One loses its singularity and becomes identical to the element that preceded it and the one succeeding it. I would like to insist on this because the logic of the repetition compulsion always requires a particular effort for thought. In repetition one must consider two places, the place of the One occupied by the event which occursfor instance the symptomand then a second place that is virtual, that of the chain where the event which had previously held the place of the One comes now to take its place in line. When it occupies the place of the One, it is alone, identified with the One; when it takes its place among the others in the chain, it is a signifier among others. Each time that an elementa symptom or any   page_52 Page 53 other manifestation of the unconscioustakes the place of the One, at once the past repetitions that have already taken place, as well as the future repetitions, are opened. Let us reconsider our formula from the first lesson: when a symptom occurs, it announces, in the present, the repetition of future symptoms and recalls that it is the repetition of symptoms that are already past. The symptom that occurs occupies the place of the One which is a limit, while the other past and future symptoms represent the metonymical chain. If I gather the sequence of symptoms that are already past and future symptoms, and abstract them by forming a common whole, I discover, then, two agencies: a lone symptom, the one which is present, and the virtual collection of symptoms past and future. I would say that the unconscious is an infinite but limited chain, infinite because it is infinitely active in the production of a metaphor, and limited in its activity by the metaphor that is produced. The chain does not remain static but displaces itself in an alternating and repetitive movement. Today a particular statement or symptom occurs, but tomorrow another symptom will emerge in the same place, in the place of the One. Although the statement will have been forgotten, another, different symptom will appear, but always in the same place of the One. One could summarize the logic of the repetition in a schema (figure 2) in which the example of the event that causes the One to function is a statement [un dit] enunciated by the analysand against his or her will, and the chain of other signifiers is represented by the totality of sayings [dires]. What is said signifies the act of enunciating a saying. The saying on the contrary signifies that which is going to be said, what will perhaps one day be said, or even what has already been said. These are the sayings that while waiting to be said or while having already been said, remain in a virtual and unconscious state. I enunciate now a statement but I do not know when or where another statement will reappear: perhaps it will surprise me in a dream tonight or in an unanticipated event tomorrow. In a word the saying can be defined as a statement that has not yet been said or even as a statement already said in the past while waiting to reappear, while the what is said has the value of an act; it is the act of saying. What is said is always an act while the saying remains suspended in the virtuality of a past and an expectancy. We should formulate this better and make it more complete by adding that what is said is no doubt an act, but which condenses into itself alone, punctually, the entirety of the chain of

 

page_53 Page 54 Unconscious chain of sayings (S2)

What is said (S1) Figure 2 The unconscious only exists in the act of what is said unconscious sayings. We could then propose that the signifying said is the activation of the unconscious or even that the unconscious exists in the act of what is said. In order to be complete, I must recall that the logic of the sayings/said couple can be translated in the Freudian terminology of repressed representations/return of the repressed. This allows me to say quite simply: the said is the return of the repressed sayings. 12 The unconscious exists in the act of what is said, it is reduced then to what is said; and at the same time, it is structured like a language, it has the amplitude of a structure. Doesn't this present us with a contradiction? These two formulas are in no way contradictory. When the unconscious exists, it only exists in the act of a sayingnot before and not after; while as a structure the unconscious is supposed, and this, after the act has been posited. When we maintain, with Lacan, that the unconscious is a knowledge structured like a language, it is indeed a matter of a structure that is supposed, supposed on the basis of what is   page_54 Page 55 said. Let us put that in a better way. The unconscious is a structure that has been actualized, activated in the form of what is said that has the property of a signifier. The unconscious belongs to the order of the Onethat is the statement that actualizes itand to the order of the structurethe chain that actualizes it. The unconscious is both what is said and the whole. When you say that the unconscious exists in the act, what do you mean by the word "existence"? First, one must understand that the unconscious is a whole bordered by an element that has been extracted from within its frame. If we accept the coupling of a whole and of an element extracted from the interior of the whole and that reappears at its edge, we can define the structure of the unconscious as a whole minus 1, bordered by that 1. Thus it will be a whole with a hole inside it, but limited by an edge. The element S1, will always be plus 1 or minus 1. What does plus 1 or minus 1 mean? This means that the 1 is always outside of the whole. Now whether it is plus one or minus one depends on the way we see the whole. If we look at the whole in terms of its inner structure, we will say that an element is missing: it is thus a minus 1. If we rather view it from above, that is in terms of its extension and its border, we will say that the one missing from the inside of the frame is situated now as a limit that surrounds and delimits the whole: it is a plus 1, as a rim that borders the network, or as a written trace (figure 3).

Specifically, the concept of existence reveals above all the fact that the element S1 is the external limit of the structure. Ex-sistence always pertains to the order of the One and to the order of exteriority. 13 The One "ex-sists" and causes the whole to exist, that is, it gives the whole the necessary consistency to remain a coherent and structured chain. The One ex-sists so that the whole consists. This way of writing 'ex-sist' was Heidegger's, but Lacan adopted it to give a new status to the notion of existence. The word "ex-sistence" means primarily, then, that it is a unique and external element, and secondly, that this element is the place holder of the whole and thirdly, that the whole is organized as a connected web that lacks a thread (the hole), the one that has become the edge. It is this logic that the psychoanalyst must become accustomed to. Something must be put outside for the rest to remain. This logical schema can be applied to different configurations, as for example to the myth of the father of the primal horde in Freud's book Totem and Taboo. The sons of the horde need to kill the primal   page_55 Page 56

Figure 3 Structural Matrix: the Whole, the hole, and the One father and devour him in a solemn way in order to "consist" as a clan. It is necessary to put the One outside to remain together under its aegis. Now the one excluded is precisely the father, the figure of the father is one of the most remarkable prototypes of exclusion. It is for this reason that the paternal function, the paternal place of exclusion, is generally so difficult for a father to assume. With the logic of the unconscious we have then two terms, the existence of the One and the consistency of the others. Now to this elementary couple one must add the hole. The structural configuration of the unconscious involves a triad: the hole, existence, and consistency. One can define the hole as the position that Onenow on the external   page_56 Page 57 edgeno longer occupies. The hole is the lack left by the One ''that has left'' and taken a place at the limit of the network (figure 3). We recall here that the hole permits the movement and the displacement of the units of the network. As the One insures the consistency of the whole, the hole insures its dynamic. In order to really complete this logical schema, I

need to add a fourth termperhaps the most important of allnamely, the subject of the unconscious, an expression which I will discuss at length (see p. 133-149). Let us say provisionally that the subject of the unconscious is the effect which occurs when the whole structure is in motion. Now you can see the diversity of conceptual contexts that we have used to try to approach the same problem, that of giving thought to the unconscious as being both the One and the whole of signifiers minus that One, the whole with the hole produced by lack of the One. We have successively used different conceptual couples: metaphor and metonymy, the One and the chain, the limit and the infinite chain, the said and sayings, the return of the repressed and the repressed representations, the signifying pair S1, and S2, and finally the act and the unconscious. Let us note that the second partner of each of these couplesmetonymy, chain, infinite chain, sayings, repressed representations, the S2, and the unconscious as structuredmust be imagined as a network bearing a hole. That hole is the place left vacant by the signifier which has provisionally gone to occupy the place of the One. Now all these conceptual approaches could be reduced to the most innocent question. If what is said announces the future sayings and repeats past sayings, then one wonders: "Where are my dreams of the past? Where are those to come? Where does my past dwell?" This is not only our question, but was also, for example, that of the philosopher Martin Heidegger. For us, to question the past is our way of questioning the unconscious: Where is the unconscious? But Lacan did not wonder where the unconscious is but rather wondered how it is organized. In an early phase he proposed, "The unconscious is structured like a language," but that was not enough. He continued by saying that "the unconscious must necessarily obey a logic." If one had asked him, "But what logic?" he would have responded, "A logic of signifiers." And we would still have insisted obstinately, "But where are these signifiers?" "It hardly matters!" he would have answered.   page_57 Page 58 Scientists work in this way as well; without demanding an exact meaning for things, they go forward. When an insoluble problem comes up, they set it aside, name it, and proceed with their research. I believe that the Lacanian approach follows the same orientation. Lacan did not question the nature of the past, or future, or time in general as a metaphysician would; he proceeded as we often proceed in science. He substituted the question of "how" for that of "where," and by asking how, he names and formalizes. A problem appears, it proves insoluble, one then baptizes it a letter, and gives it a name, and with this name the work continues until progressively the opacity of the question clears up. Henri Poincaré always recalled that the most difficult step in research is the baptism of the aporia with the right name, at the right time. Rather than adopt the Freudian terms of the repressed and the return of the repressed, Lacan preferred to name and above all to write. He formalized, used letters, numbers, and names. A name always implies a writing. But what did he write? He noted what is said [le dit] as S1 because it is 1 and always 1, and S because it is a signifier. He noted the totality of sayings, the totality of elements that are linked and repressed, as S2. To write and formalize our concepts in this way amounted to asserting: "Well we begin again now by forgetting the meaning of the word." With these two notations, S1, and S2, we operate within a logic. We forget the signification of each term but we do not forget that S1 belongs to the dimension of the One, and that S2 belongs to the dimension of the whole. We sketch in this way, a rigorous logic of the relation between the One and the whole. The One is related to the whole by virtue of its exclusion. At the outset we are innocent, astonished, and we pose the most simple questionthat of the place of the unconscious, that of the "where"; then we operate with formal names such as S1 and S2. Then we look back and ask again: but what is the relation of all these conceptual names with the simple questions that I asked myself? The mental work of the analyst is as follows: to move from the most simple question to the most formal conceptssignifiers, subject, object a, etc.and then back.

How has logic allowed the field of the unconscious to be formalized?   page_58 Page 59 I have often insisted on the fact that we are neither logicians nor linguists, but that nevertheless, we need to study the fundamental texts of the logicians, draw all the propositions that can shed light on our discipline from them, without, however, ever giving up the indisputable priority of the teachings of clinical practice. Certainly analytic discourse is different from scientific discourse, but psychoanalysis must always remain attentive to what other disciplines teach it in order to understand the experience we undergo with our patients. For example, one often observes the following clinical fact: the subject is speaking, he utters unexpected words, and suddenly stops and cries out, "I had never thought about that?" This astonishment, as we saw, indicates the signifying quality of a statement, and immediately provokes a question in the patient with respect to the way in which such a word happened to emerge from within him or her: "How is it that this word comes to be in me and puts me into question?" On the basis of this major clinical phenomenon of a subject that says more than it knows and wills, psychoanalysis establishes the theory of the signifying pair S1/S2 that showsas we have developedhow a signifier activates the unconscious. Now, to the point, you ask me what logic can teach us concerning the dynamic relation between one signifier and the chain of unconscious signifiers. One possible response to your question would be to briefly recall three influences that logic has had upon Lacan's theory. I am thinking of Peano's axiomatics, Frege's logic, and set theory, in particular as expressed in Cantor's work. These are three logical conceptions that enable us to approach the problem of the signifier differently, three conceptions that I have devoted myself to in other publications. Peano's axiomatics consider the place of zero and what follows it, in the context of the series of numbers. 14 For his part, Cantor shows us the infinite and limited character of sets according to the two principles that he proposes: the principle of generation and that of passing to the limit. And finally, Frege, above all, by establishing the distinction between concept and object, permitted Lacan to better formalize the status of the subject and the signifier.15 I do not suggest that we scrupulously apply these principles to the domain of analysis. I would rather say that we make use of them for our own ends. And Lacan has precisely been reproached many times for using concepts borrowed from connected disciplines and modifying them according to the needs proper to the psychoanalytic field. It proved unavoidable that in order to use a concept imported into psychoanalysis effectively, one had to modify it at the risk of depriving it of its original meaning. I am   page_59 Page 60 thinking of the idiosyncratic use that Lacan made of logical quantifiers in order to account for the specific relation of men and women vis-à-vis the phallic function (the Formulas of Sexuation). 16 Fundamentally, there are two logical quantifiers: one "existential" and the other "universal," the first is written ( ) and the second ( ). Lacan's rendering of the negation of these quantifiers is written as ( ) and ( ). Lacan has a whole way of conceiving the circulation of concepts from one discipline to another. Take for example, his elaboration designed to showwith the borromean knotthe intimate articulation that holds between the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary. It would seem that Lacan, in this case, had not only borrowed and modified a concept belonging to a domain as foreign to psychoanalysis as knot theory, but enriched this relatively recent work in topology in return. Among the numerous examples of imported concepts the best known is that of the signifier, borrowed from Saussure. The psycho-analytic sense, however, is different from the linguistic meaning. Years ago a linguist reproached Lacan for his wrongful use of the term "signifier" and for having read Saussure superficially, in a cursory manner [en diagonale]. I could easily imagine the way Lacan would have responded. Cursory? he would have replied. One must agree what reading in a cursory manner means to you. If to read in a cursory manner means to read superficially, I reject your objection. If on the contrary it means that I use a diagonal system to establish a relation between the whole and the order that is, the very system which has enabled Cantor to discover the transfinite number, then yes, I have read Saussure in a cursory manner in order to found the psychoanalytic concept of the signifier. And this reply would have been appropriate, because Cantor in fact used the diagonal method of counting to show that the union of denumerable sets was itself denumerable. He introduced the writing of aleph zero ( ) as a notation of the cardinal number of denumerable sets and as the smallest transfinite cardinal number. This is how "reading diagonally" [lecture en diagonale] led Cantor to produce a new element. And knowing Cantor, Lacan would have added still in my

fictional account: If your remark means that my reading of Saussure, following Cantor's method of counting diagonally, has led me to find a new element, then your remark is correct, because the concept of the signifier that I have forged is not in Saussure, it constitutes an entirely new production.   page_60 Page 61 You have understood that from the epistemological point of view there is an immense terrain to study, that of the relation between the exchange of concepts between disciplines, and the impressive fecundity of new productions that result from the exchange. The subject follows the symbolic channel . . . : it is not only the subject, but the subjects, taken in their intersubjectivity, that take part in the procession. . . . The displacement of the signifier determines the subjects in their acts, their destiny; their refusal, their blindness, in their success and in their fate, regardless of their innate gifts and their social conditioning, regardless of their character or sex, the train of the signifier will follow, in spite of those conditions . . . Jacques Lacan I would like to return now to the logic of the signifying pair, and draw a first very important consequence from them, for our work with our analysands. If we accept the postulate that a signifier always remains joined to a chain of signifiers, what would this mean for our practice? Well, it means that a signifier is never destined for a person but is "destined" for other signifiers with which it is associated and leads its own signifying life. In effect, the signifier articulates itself with a second signifier quite apart from the fact that I produce it or that it makes an impression on me. I would like to illustrate the Lacanian formula: a signifier is only a signifier for another signifier. Let us consider the case of a symptom and consider it as signifier and not as a sign. I recall a patient who consulted me because he could not prevent himself from blushing when faced with an attractive young woman. At such moments he felt the heat that came over his face, he blushed and was constrained to run and hide. This is what we call an erythrophobia. Our patient recounted an occasion when he was sitting in a cafe. He suddenly noted the presence of a pretty young woman three tables away. At that moment he blushed and anguished at the idea of being exposed in public. From a psychopathological point of view, erythrophobia is certainly the symptom of a phobic structure. From our psychoanalytic point of view in what sense is the erythrophobia a symptom? What is of interest to a psychoanalyst?   page_61 Page 62 Primarily, what interests us is the way in which the patient relates what has happened to him or her, the words that are used or the metaphors that are invented. Then, the slips of the tongue, errors or mistakes that come out in the narrative of the malaise. Finally, what concerns us as practitionersrecall one of the characteristics that we have brought out while defining the symptom: the fact that the analyst becomes part of it. It is particularly important to us to recognize the effects of the symptom in ourselves. While speaking to you of the case of the patient, I happened to touch my cheeks with my hands. Perhaps this gesture is simply demonstrative of my explication but it could be directly linked to the erythrophobic symptom of which the patient complains. Even such a gesture that occurs spontaneously for us assumes the value of a signifier linked to signifiers of the unconscious of my patient. What does the fact that the gesture would have signifying value mean? That means that outside of me, beyond me and my patient, the gesture of my hands and the anguished reddening of his face are associated in a bond that is apart from either of us. In other words, I am not sure, and my patient is equally unsure, about how his or her unconscious desire is repeated through me. This position of the analyst that I adopt before you, not only by implicating myself in my patient's symptom, but above all by recognizing the signifying value of the symptom, is the direct opposite of the practitioner who, taking the blushing as sign, would say: "But of course he becomes red like a penis"; or who even by seeing a child's drawing of the mast of a boat would say: "That is the phallus." Let us imagine now another, more subtle interpretation of erythrophobia. "This symptom," another practitioner would think, "in reality represents the feminine position of the patient with regard to his

father.'' This analyst knows and could explain how he arrived at this conclusion which is already much more rigorous and correct than the preceding caricature. Now even so, with an interpretation so elaborate the analyst has taken the symptom as a sign and not as a signifier. Why? Because he has interpreted the symptom by giving it a meaning. But then, you will say, what attitude must be adopted when we approach the symptom as a signifier? The only reaction which would attest to the signifying impact of the symptom is a surprise. The psychoanalyst who is struck by the signifier remains speechless, indeed, without a thought, silenced and startled. If you want to know when you have understood the symptom as a signifier rather than as a sign, there is but one indicator, the astonishment that has taken you.   page_62 Page 63 I insist that a signifier is that which resists any meaning: the signifier is in no way destined to receive a meaning, even that produced by the most appropriate interpretation. The signifier goes through the subjects and goes beyond the meaning that the analyst or the analysand are able to give it. But I expect you to immediately ask me: "If the symptom-signifier resists any meaning, including the best interpretations, and perdures in this way out of reach, how could one hope for any relief for our patients?" I would respond by saying that the way to treat the symptom-signifier is to replace it with another signifier, and that the best interpretation that an analyst can offer does not serve on the basis of the meaning that it reveals but by the place of the signifier that it occupies. As the analyst's surprise attests to the impact of the signifying scope of the symptom, the patient's surprise is similarly the incontestable indicator of the signifying impact of the interpretation. The ungraspable character of the signifier brings up the problem of the psychoanalyst's listening. Here is a caricatured objection of someone who takes the power of the signifier too literally: "Fine, he will tell me if the signifier repeats itself alone, if it is linked to the chain, if it resists any meaning that is proposed, if it goes farther than knowledge or thought; the analyst will have nothing to do but sleep in his or her chair, since in any case the signifier cuts its own path." In fact, with our conception of the signifier, this could be a possible objection concerning the function of the analyst. I would answer that from a strict point of view the analytic function sustains and insures the mobility of repetition. Ultimately it is the analyst's task to provide for the replacement of the signifier that occupies the place of the One. Because even if the unconscious is automatically active, even if the repetition compulsion remains inevitable, it can run into the obstacle of seeing a signifier get stuck in the place of the Oneas in the case of a tenacious symptomof even seeing jouissance invade the place of the One, causing the signifying system to stagnateas in the case of a psychosomatic illness. 17 In other words, the analyst keeps the fluidity of signifying repetition alive, as well as desire. And specifically the question remains of knowing how to recognize the gestures, interventions, replies, and responses that the analyst must accomplish in each circumstance to assume his or her function of accompanying, preserving, and fostering desire in the cure.  

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Here are the clinical consequences that I wish to draw from Lacan's theory of the signifier. We can recall the abstract definition of the signifier: "A signifier is that which represents the subject for other signifiers"; we can dwell on this and rework it, but we must never lose sight of its clinical effect. As soon as you interpret a signifier, that is to say, that you give it a meaning, it ceases to be a signifier and becomes a sign. But it is important that I correct this last statement. I do not mean the signifier intrinsically ceases to be a signifier because it is interpreted. No, a signifier remains ineluctably a signifier. From the moment that you interpret it, however, you transform the signifier into a sign for you. Because from the moment that a signifier is a signifier for someone, it is a sign and no longer a signifier. But intrinsically it continues to be a signifier? Absolutely. It is for that reason that we can affirm that the symptom has two aspects: a signifying aspect outside of us and a sign aspect with us. But do not misunderstand me. However radically heterogeneous they may be, these two aspects do not exist without each other. What I mean to say is that the signifier only emerges from meaning. The signifier can only follow its proper path outside of us if and only if we take it for a sign that we speak. To be sure, I am privileging the

signifying value of the symptom in the analysand and the signifying value of the interpretation in the analyst. This value, however, only appears if we actively favor, in analysis, the production of meaning. The symptom can always be interpreted. One can always give it a meaning, and the first to give it a meaning is the patient who suffers it. And if it happens that the patient does not produce meaning, does not seek the cause of his or her suffering, the analyst is thus entitledwe have insisted on this point during the first lessonto interrogate, and ask: "Do you have any idea of what is happening to you?" "What, according to you, would be the cause of your malady?" I pose these questions, not only in the context of preliminary interviews, but particularly at the moment of the cure when the patient seems to have settled into the monotony of the ritual, as if they no longer had the desire to go through analysis. The patient comes and talks, but is absent from his or her speech, and the analyst conjointly is no longer interested in listening. It is this kind of situation that I am thinking about when I assert the necessity of leading the analysand to take their symptom as a sign, and to produce a meaning and construct a theory concerning his or her suffering. Let us note that it is to the extent that the patient speaks and explains her or himself, that transference love is   page_64 Page 65 engaged and developed. In analysis, love is one of the major figures of meaning which sustains signs. The more one speaks while searching for meaning, the more one loves the one to whom one speaks of it. In short, in order for a symptom to have the decisive weight of a signifier, it is appropriate that the practitioner maintain and favor the meaning provoked by the same signifier considered as a sign. The signifier is only at issue if it is immersed in a bath of meaning. Now I would like to return to the signifier, not in relation to meaning, but with respect to its connection with other signifiers. When we affirm that the signifier leads its life in an autonomous manner, that it goes through us without our knowledge, or that it is articulated with other signifiers, we are referring to the fact of repetition. Thus in the arrow that indicates the S1 is a signifier for other signifiers S2 (S1®S2), we have the graphic representation of the phenomenon of repetition. We have understood, I think, with the example of my gestural "lapse" that occurred when telling you about the erythrophobic patient, that the process of repetition is not circumscribed in a single person, but unfolds in the space of a bond between two persons, as if the signifier leaped from subject to subject. To the extent that my phobic patient maintains a transferential bond with the analyst that I am, it happens that the repetition of his symptom is inscribed in me and is manifested in the form of a spontaneous gesture like the one today. The metonymic chain of unconscious signifiers is common to us, while the place of the One of the metaphorical signifier has changed its location: before it was him, and just now it was me. If we understand how the unconscious functions, we will admit that repetition is not circumscribed by the so-called individual imaginary unity. Thanks to this logical conception of an unconscious that is extended between two subjects, we have broken with three intuitive prejudices: chronological time, Euclidean space, and individual unity. If we work with the notion of the unconscious, if we think and rethink it constantly, we clarify our practice and we see our prejudices with respect to chronological time, Euclidean space, and individual unity, fade. We will no longer speak in terms of a person, nor in terms of past, future, or present time, nor any longer in terms of a container in order to designate the place of the unconscious. We must practice thinking in other terms. To the extent that we improve as practitioners and refine   page_65 Page 66 our listening, we are confronted by the task of thinking the unconscious outside of time, space, and the individual. Lacan is not the only author to have fought against these prejudices common to psychoanalysts. I am thinking in particular of Bion who, in a way that was different from Lacan, raised the problem of time and space in psychoanalysis. Two questions ran through the work of this Anglo-Saxon analyst: what is the time of the emergence of an interpretation in the practitioner, and in what time and what space does an interpretative saying produce effects in the analysand. Bion even wondered whether we should not imagine the space of analysis as a "galactic space." I would have liked him to go more deeply into these questions, but I think that the simple fact that they were formulated was already valuable. As you

can see, these interrogations turn the intuitive notions of space and time in analysts upside down and are not only found in Lacan's work. I believe that they are inherent to the analyst's engagement in his or her work. I wanted to help you appreciate how these problematics are not arbitrary, speculative, or abstract. They arise when one questions, for example, the relation between clinical work with our patients and teaching. What is the link between the fact of being with you in the process of teaching and the patient who speaks to me of erythrophobia? What relation can be established between the fact that I relate this case today, and the transferential experience with that patient? In geographical space, there is at this moment an ocean that separates usthe patient in France, and me in Colombia. Nevertheless, from the psychical perspective, we are intimately linked. In chronological time, a number of years also separate usfor it has been already two years since the patient spoke to me of his symptomand yet, to evoke his case today and mimic, as I have, his gesture of touching his face, this occurs with such a force and such presence that it overcomes and overturns clock time. Where is the inside and where is the outside of a cure? Where is the present and where is the past in an analysis? What are the signs that indicate that a symptom like erythrophobia is repeated in the analyst? I believe I have already answered you: it is by speaking of a patient or, for example, by identifying with him or her as I just did, that   page_66 Page 67 one of his or her symptoms is repeated in me. When one works for many years as an analyst, one comes to realize the following: someone is there in front of us, laying down, speaking and complaining. We listen to him or her as well as we can, and we try to shed light on the path that the patient follows. But at intense moments of the cure, the analyst discovers with surprise that the signifiers of the patient's life are repeated in him or her The analyst's life is fiddled by the return of her or his patient's symptoms. You see how your question is relevant. There are different modalities of the repetition of symptoms in the analyst, as for example this gesture here, in front of you, that Freud perhaps would attribute to an identification with the patient. We have said that the symptom is an act whose scope is unknown to us. Once discovered, however, can we predict the next place of its reappearance? Can we follow the thread of the signifier that appears in one and then disappears and reappears in the other? Never One can never really follow the thread of a signifier If one follows it the signifier will remain autonomous in its own movement, but for us, it would be converted immediately into a sign. It is as if I tell you, ''We interpret, we think, we give a meaning to things, but realize that above and beyond any meaning that we give them the things continue quite on their own." It is for this reason, I believe, that the repetition of a patient's symptom in the analyst can be actualized in the act of teaching, of holding a seminar like this one, or even of making a gesture with the hand, in the context of a cure, in the act of formulating an appropriate interpretation. If I think that the work with my patients is at the source, for example, of my teaching activity, a question immediately arises: in the act of teaching are we inside or outside of analysis? What is the line that separates the inside from the outside? When can we say that there is no longer a border? The psychoanalyst must not believe that the universe of his or her analysands is confined to the walls of the office, nor that when he or she leaves the office he or she leaves behind the place of the symptoms. Certainly not. But then, must we conclude that no longer having any boundaries, the analyst only lives in the world of psychoanalysis? It is true that in the universe of signifiers, there are no borders and that, as in the case of any subject, the analyst is affected by them. There is however, a kind of odd sieve that regulates the incidences of the signifier I am referring to a practitioner's partner. The spouse is in fact a decisive person who provides psychical walls, permeable and regulatory walls serving to stifle the repetition of the   page_67 Page 68 patient's symptoms in the practitioner. In a way, the partner acts as a barrier which alleviates the excess of tension due to listening.

You can see that if we accept the idea of the unconscious as signifying repetition, we will then conceive of the function of the psychoanalyst, and of its impact in his or her life in an entirely new way. This is why one can agree with Lacan that there is no metalanguage. What does this statement mean? The statement that there is no metalanguage means that there is no meta-language or object-language. In effect, from the moment when a language attempts to externalize itself and speak of an object-language, it fails. It can never entirely complete itself and close itself on itself. The metalanguage cannot escape the weakness which opens any language to the outside: and this is why it fails to envelop and contain a supposed object-language. Why am I presenting this commentary on metalanguage? Precisely in order to take account of the following: one cannot speak of the unconscious without being affected by the unconscious itself. What does this mean? That we cannot speak of the unconscious as if we were beyond its reach. This means that we accept the active character of the unconscious, its capacity to produce effects constantly; we also admit that it has the power to affect all speech, and first of all, ours when we speak of the unconscious. If an analyst claims to speak of the unconscious in a detached way without any personal involvement we know for certain that he or she is not speaking of the unconscious. "There is no metalanguage" means that there is no purportedly external and closed language that refers to the unconscious, without the unconscious breaking that language. Any language is exposed to the affects of the unconscious. There is no speech that is not affected by the unconscious. I am referring to full speech, that is, speech that has weights. "There is no metalanguage" means: there is no way to speak of the unconscious with words that mean something without that speech itself being affected by the unconscious. Let us emphasize that the thesis concerning a metalanguage is one based on logic: it was in fact the logicians who invented the difference between object language and metalanguage. But while the logician was devoted to the formal construction of the proposition, the psychoanalyst asks: in what way is that same proposition affected by   page_68 Page 69 the unconscious? Whereas the logician works on the logical formalization between propositions, the analyst asks: who is the subject who speaks behind these propositions? The difference between psychoanalysis and science is that psychoanalysis takes the subject to be the material of its work while science in principle excludes and forecloses the subject. Scientific discourse rejects the subject, that is to say, it does not call scientific desire into question and is ignorant of the effects that the object of research has on the research. Aside from the fact that these researchers work with a formula, science's interest is above all to rigorously follow the way in which the formula develops and becomes fertile. This is the signifying character of a formula that develops independently of those who created it. From a strictly formal point of view, it matters little as to who has made advances in calculus. As you see, calculus would be a good example of a signifier, but notice carefully that it is a signifier without a subject. Why is it without a subject? Because calculus is not a signifier in the psychoanalytical sense of the term, that is, it is not an act that is misunderstood by the one who posits it. What interests us in calculus is that it develops by the production and inclusion of new elements. The difference between the signifier as calculus and the signifier that concerns us, is that behind the signifier as scientific formula there is no subject. In contrast, behind all the signifiers encountered in the course of a cure, psychoanalysis finds a subject, despite their nonsensical character. For us, there is no signifier without subject while for science on the contrary the signifier excludes the subject. When you speak of the subject, which subject do you mean? Is it in fact the subject of the unconscious as thematized by Lacan? Yes. Absolutely. From the point of view of psychoanalysts, scientific discourse is a discourse which excludes and forecloses the subject. One can then say that the "foreclosed subject" is the subject that is absent from scientific discourse. Now, you ask which subject I mean. Is it the individual? No. I have already shown you that the egoistic unity

of the individual is subverted by the concept of the unconscious. Thus it is necessary to think of another status of the "individual" one that is different from the individual that we normally think of as a person having a specific name and body. What is that other status of the "individual" that is neither an ego nor a person and   page_69 Page 70 and which, I claim, is at the center of our analytic work and absent from scientific discourse? It is the "subject of the unconscious" as introduced by Lacan. For a broader development of this nodal concept of Lacanian theory, I suggest that you refer to my seminar that was devoted entirely to the problem of the subject (FL, 133-149). I would like to conclude this second lesson with a kind of logical fiction inspired by Lacan, a fiction that demonstrates what the subject of the unconscious is from a quite particular perspective, that of its formal birth. Freud had already imagined the birth of the subject in the form of the myth of the incorporation of the primal father by his sons ("primary identification"). Rather than a mythical conception of this birth, Lacan proposes a logical conception. Through the logical articulation between the concepts of the real, the hole, and the signifier, Lacan will attempt to account for the birth of the so-called subject of the unconscious. Whereas Freud asked how the ego could arise from the incorporation of the father's body by the children, Lacan asks how the subject can arise from a very specific logical process. Thus we can ask: how is the subject of the unconscious born? This is a difficult problem that requires that we raise another question: how can a subject be born out of nothing? How is it that in a place that is empty of any being, something comes to be? To respond to this we must appeal to the term "privation." Recall that this term was used for the first time in psychoanalysis by Ernest Jones, with respect to feminine sexuality, in connection with concepts of frustration and castration. It is interesting to note that Lacan uses this term of privation in a radically new sense. He makes a leap which involves making use of the concept of privation to explain the birth of the subject in a logical way. How is it that from a planet absolutely devoid of all things, a being is born? How can a being emerge out of nothing, out of the real? In order for a being to emerge from the real, it is necessary that the real be pierced by a hole, there must be something missing in it, or if you prefer, the real must be deprived of something. Here we have the entire force of Lacanian thought: in order to conceive of the positive emergence of a subject in the real, we must first think of the real as a whole from which an element is missing. Let us be clear on two points:  

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Imagine that the real is not some deserted planet but on the contrary quite full, infinitely full, so full of things and beings that it is homogeneous to a void. The real is not a void in the sense of an empty abyss but in the sense of being infinitely full, a place in which Everything is possible. In this place where everything is possible, if there is one impossibilityand one impossibility alonea lone obstacle, a sole lack, then there will be the birth of a positive being. The positive being, that is, our subject of the unconscious, is only the correlate of a hole torn in the infinite fullness. In short, for Lacan, the birth of the subject of the unconscious can only be understood on the basis of a hole torn into the real by the emptying out of one element and one element alone. In other words, the subject only occurs as One where the realin the sense of the infinitely fullis affected by a lack. Let us change the terms one more time and say: if the real is the place where Everything is possible, the subject of the unconscious will be born precisely in that place where the obstacle of an impossible looms.

 

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EXILE THE PASSION FOR HEALING FEIGNED FORGETTING THE FEMININITY OF THE PSYCHOANALYST OBJECT a WHAT IS A HOLE? THE CORPORAL FORMS OF OBJECT a NEED, DEMAND, AND DESIRE THE BREAST: OBJECT OF DESIRE  

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Third Lesson Concept of Object a In the last lesson you defined the role of the analyst as being that of assuring the fluidity of the repetitive movement of signifiers. Will you go as far as to propose that the mobility of repetition is the therapeutic goal of analysis; that repetition is synonymous with recovery? Today I would like to study the Lacanian concept of object a with you. First, however, I will respond to your question by recalling that the analytic function consists, in fact, in keeping the unconscious in an active state. However, it is not sufficient for the analyst to have as their sole goal the act-by-act externalization of signifying formations. At the same time the analyst must encourage the externalization of the analysand's most internal agencies. Let me explain myself. I think that analysis creates the conditions for the subject to become a stranger to him or herself. We do not hesitate to assert that psychoanalysis should tend to create a radical separation, an essential loss that reorganizes the psychic reality of the subject. I call this loss, ''exile." Rather than wishing to bring about changes in the patient, or to situate the finality of analysis in terms of a transformation or a recovery, psychoanalysis aims to create conditions for the subject to encounter that which is most intimate to its being, as if coming from the outside, and as if unfamiliar to it. I would like to condense this encounter with the unfamiliar which is in each of usthe most impersonal agency of our beingin a sentence inspired by one of Freud's most celebrated aphorisms: "There, where the Id was," wrote Freud, "the ego must come to be." If we translate the term ''ego" by "subject" and the term "Id" by the phrase, "most intimate and at the same time most unfamiliar thing of our being," we will arrive at the following maxim: "The goal of psychoanalysis is to bring the subject to encounter the unfamiliar and impersonal id, not within us through introspection, but outside of us if only as a hallucinatory perception." As psychoanalysts, what should   page_73 Page 74 we expect from our work? We should expect our patient to evolve, or rather that he or she go through the exceptional experience of self-exile, of perceiving oneself if only once as being other than him or herself. If I were to situate the therapeutic orientation of psychoanalysis I would use this theme of exile. To be exiled from oneself constitutes, in my view, a form of recoveryas if the encounter with the unfamiliar enhanced the cure, an alleviation of the symptom.

With respect to the therapeutic aims of analysis, I would like to recall Lacan whofollowing Freudtook the recovery of the analysand to be a secondary effect of the cure, a beneficial side effect, even an epiphenomenon that occurs independently of the will of the practitioner I can well imagine that this position is disconcerting with respect to what one would legitimately expect: the alleviation of the patient's ills. However, we must admit that the occurrence of the recovery does not depend on the application of a technique, but rather on the way in which the practitioner conceives of and expects the cure. If the psychoanalyst seeks to. cure we can be sure that he or she will not obtain it. If, on the contrary, that desire is restrainedbelieving that the cure is a beneficial side effect that does not depend on him or herthen there is a chance that the patient's suffering will be alleviated. 18 Essentially we are applying here a genuine ruse of reason in relation to truth: in order for truth to come to be, one must appear to avoid it, indeed, to forget it. To be sure, when the patient suffers or when a symptom repeats itself obstinately, it becomes very difficult for the practitioner to avoid the trap of the passion for healing [furor sanandi]. We know that the analyst is often seized by this passion to heal that is proper to a doctor: it is a passion brought on by the overpowering demand of the patient, a passion coming from the narcissism which results when the practitioner is given the total power of the healer It is indeed the demand that engenders the blind passion to heal, a passion that is akin to another passion, that of wanting to understand. The will to cure and the will to understand are two of the analyst's tendencies that are opposed to the processes of exclusion and exile. Now if the recovery cannot and must not be what is sought by the analyst, what can they hope for? What do I expect? I expect the occurrence of a simple phenomenon. I expect neither the change nor the recovery of my analysand. I expect an experience, the occurrence of an impromptu event in psychoanalysts. I prepare myself to be surprised. The best that an analyst can hope for is that his patient will surprise him. Certainly, it is not that the patient deliberately wants to surprise the analyst: generally, when it is calculated, it fails. No. The surprise must strike the patient   page_74 Page 75 and the practitioner at the same time. In sum my recommendation to the analyst would be the following: in order for your patient to be delivered from their suffering, do not try to undertake it and remain open to surprise. Now there is a very specific state that predisposes the practitioner to be taken by surprise. Lacan calls this essential attitude of the analyst before the event, semblance [le semblant]. The meaning of the word "semblance" is opposed to the colloquial sense," to seem to be" or "to act as if." The semblance practiced by the psychoanalyst is different from an imitation, it is rather a state, an inner disposition toward oneself, and not an attitude assumed for others. Semblance is a slate free of any idea, feeling, or passion, so far as to be a surface clear of any inscription. It is not easy to genuinely persuade ourselves that we know nothing. It is not easy to empty oneself; nevertheless, this is the only way we can adequately assume our role as analysts. As Freud wrote: ''The psychoanalyst behaves most appropriately if they abandon themselves . . . to their own unconscious mental activity, if they avoid as much as possible conscious reflection and conscious expectations, so that nothing they have heard is fixed in their memory. In this way, they engage the patient's unconscious with their own unconscious." It is this state of semblance that I call the feigned forgetting. One must feign forgetting, practice forgetting, let oneself be surprised, and remain in a state of pure innocence. One can refer to this state with one of Lacan's expressions, "to deceive," or ''to dissimulate" [faire la dupe]. I note that la dupe is feminine, as there is a link between femininity and semblance. The feminine position is characterized precisely by its secretive manner, its wielding a veil, not in order to disappear from the other, but in a modest gesture of covering oneself up, a gesture so spontaneous that it seems to be a natural extension of the body. Dissimulation [duperie] is a characteristic state of femininity, a femininity that has turned toward itself and not toward the other. I am thinking in particular of ancient Greek dancers and their inimitable art of wielding the veil in a celebration of funeral rites. 19 There is therefore a typically feminine way of concealing: it is precisely what I call "dissimulation." In this sense we can recognize a difference between femininity and masculinity with respect to dissimulation. Femininity and masculinity are rather positions defined according to the way in which eachindependently of their sexinhabits their body with a particular of concealing. Those are different modalities in the concealment of the   page_75 Page 76

object, that is, two distinct ways of covering and adorning jouissance. When a women conceals, she conceals as concealing for herself, without concern for the other; that way she allows us, the other, to glimpse the mystery. A man, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with hiding from the other and consequently he attempts to dissimulate, so much so that his gesture is flagrant. In fact, when the woman conceals she offers a mystery and allows for surprise, but man dissipates the enigma and stifles questions. It should be noted that the words "man" and "woman" must be understood in terms of the feminine or masculine position that is occupied by any human being irrespective of their actual sex. The semblance of the psychoanalyst is thus neither an affectation nor a carefully planned act. As in the case of femininity, it is an internal subjective disposition toward oneself and not another. It is due to this state, in which the psychoanalyst seeks neither to heal, nor understand, but to act without knowing, that he or she may be surprised by the truth: the truth of the analysand or his or her own, in the form of an interpretation. I would like to translate the fecundity of the position of semblance by recalling a helpful passage from Lacan. "The analyst is the one who, by putting object a in the place of semblance, is in the best position to do what must be done: to approach truth as [unconscious] knowledge." I will paraphrase this sentence in the following way: The analyst is the one who by remaining silent (semblance), is in the best position to interpret, that is, to transform the symptom into a signifier which opens to unconscious knowledge. I would like now to approach the concept of object a more precisely, a concept to which I have devoted a number of chapters of a book. 20 Today, I will begin by recalling what Lacan held to be of importance for his theory. Lacan believed that he had invented and developed object a. It is an object that assumes the characteristic of being written by a symbol, the letter "a." This symbol "a" does not represent the first letter of the alphabet, but the first letter of the word "other" [autre]. In Lacanian theory, the other is written with a lowercase "a'' and an upper-case ''A." The upper-case A is one of the anthropomorphic figures capable of overdetermining the signifying chain, while the small other, of which the letter "a" identifies the object, designates our double [semblable], our alter ego. Now, the invention of   page_76 Page 77 object a responds to several problems, but above all to this question: "Who is the other? Who is my double?" In his article ''Mourning and Melancholia," when Freud refers to the person that one has lost and for which one mourns, he writes the word "object" and not "person." Freud already delineated a foundation for Lacan to respond to the question "who is the other?" and to construct his concept of object a. Who is that other whom I loved and who has disappeared and for which I mourn? Freud says "object,'' Lacan will say ''object a." "I have read 'Mourning and Melancholia'"Lacan confides"and for me it sufficed to read this text to find object a." That does not mean that the lost other is called object a, but that object a responds to the question "who is the other?" Why? In order to be better understood we can make the question of the other more complex and ask: "Who is the one facing me? Who is it? Is it a body? Is it an image? Is it a symbolic representation?" Let's put ourselves in the place of the analysand who, lying on the couch, asks, "What is this presence behind me? Is it a voice? a breath? a dream? a product of thought? Who is the other?" The analyst will not respond, "The other is . . ." but will simply say: "in order to respond to such a question, let us construct object a." The letter a is a manner of naming the difficulty, it holds the place of a nonresponse. Recall the spirit of the Lacanian approach which instead of resolving the problem gave it a name. The best example of this approach is precisely object a. Indeed, object a is certainly one of the most remarkable examples of Lacanian algebra; I would even say that it the paradigm of all psychoanalytic algorithms. What is object a? Object a is only a letter, nothing more than the letter a, a letter having the central function of naming an unresolved problem, or rather, of signifying an absence. What absence? The absence of a response to a question which is constantly repeated. Since we have not found the solution that we hoped for and required, we mark it with a written notationa simple letterthe opaque hole of our ignorance; we put a letter in the place of a response that is not given. Object a designates thus an impossibility, a point of resistance to theoretical development. With this notation we canm spite of our obstaclescontinue our research without the chain of knowledge being broken. You see object a is finally a ruse of analytic thinking in order to circumvent the rock of the impossible: we circumvent the real by representing it with a letter. Now what is the question for which the response is a, that is to say a simple letter that is empty of meaning? This question could be

 

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formulated differently according to theoretical contexts but one which addresses object a directly is "Who is the other, my partner, the person who is loved?" When Freud wrote that the subject mourned for the lost object, he did not say "for the person who was loved and lost," but "for the lost object." Why? Who was the person who was loved that one lost? What signifies for us that other that one loves or has loved, is present or lost? What place does the lost person occupy for us? But is it really a person? . . . One could suggest that, "It is an image. The person loved is our own image that we love." This is right, but not sufficient. Another response would be: "The loved person is not an image, the loved person is a bodily extension of our own body.'' This is also right, but is also insufficient. A third response, finally, would describe the person loved as the representative of a history, or a collection of past experiences. More precisely, this person would bear the common mark or the common feature of all the persons loved in the course of a life. In this respect, one can refer to Freud's Group Psychology and an Analysis of the Ego, in which he distinguishes three types of identification, one of which is the identification of the subject with a feature of the object, that is with one feature of all the persons that we have loved. Freud provides us in this article with an observation that is important for understanding how a man/woman couple is formed: we love the one who carries the feature of the preceding love object and this to such an extent that could go as far as to claim that in one's life all the persons that we have loved share one feature. Indeed, when one has a new encounter, one is often surprised to note that he or she carries the feature of the person who was loved before. Freud's brilliant idea was to reveal that this mark which persists, and is repeated in the first, the second, and in all other successive partners in a history, is a feature, and that this feature is nothing other than ourselves. The subject is the common feature of the objects loved and lost in one's life. This is precisely what Lacan calls the unary trait [le trait unaire]. If we reconsider the three possible responses to the question "Who is the other?" we would say: the loved other is the image that I love of myself. The loved other is a body that is an extension of mine. The loved other is a repetitive feature with which I identify. But none of these casesthe first, imaginary (the other as image); the second, fantasmatic (the other as body); and the third, symbolic (the other as a feature which condenses a history)reveals the essence of the loved other. In the end we do not know who the chosen other is. Now it is   page_78 Page 79 precisely here that object a appears as holding the place of a non-response. We will see that of the three approaches to the identification of the other (imaginary, fantasmatic, and symbolic) the second relates most directly to the Lacanian concept of object a: the chosen other is that fantasmatic part of my body undergoing jouissance, which both extends and exceeds me. How is object aconsidered as this nonresponse to the enigma of the otherarticulated with the signifiers of the structure of the unconscious? The question "Who is the other?" is one of many ways to situate object a but it is not the only one. Another question, for example, is one that we already posed at the end of the first lesson: what is the nature of the energy of psychic life? Or, what is the cause that animates our desire? Since we cannot respond to these questions we write the letter a. With this writing we can follow the movement of formalization with other written signs without being concerned with insoluble questions. Thus, instead of searching in vain for the unknown nature of the cause of desire, I represent it with the letter a. If I pose the question "Who is the other?" it is to clarify that the invention of object a is not the arbitrary decision of an author, but responds to a necessity, an exigency of clinical practice. Once the question "who is the other?" is posed, analytic theory forgets this question in order to work only with the formal notation "object a." There are simple questions that are essential because they are at the basis for a concept and that one must nevertheless abandon temporarily in order to work only with the formal entity as if the initial question no longer existed. The last time we condensed the different

logical schemas of the unconscious into one fundamental question: ''What is the past?" We then bypassed this fictive yet essential question in order to deal only with the signifying pair S1, S2. We adopt the same strategy now with respect to the enigma of the "other'' and object a. Let us set aside for the moment the problem of the other and deal with the formal status of object a. This is how I could respond to your question on the relation of the a with the totality of signifiers and the signifier of the One. To begin, I will define object a formally as that which is heterogeneous in the network of the signifying whole. This means that the system produces something which is an excess, and which is heterogeneous or foreign to it. This production is similar   page_79 Page 80 although of a completely different orderto that of the externalization of the signifier S1. With respect to the object, I would no longer speak of an external element, but of a residue, a "surplus" of the system. Object a is the heterogeneous as an excess produced by the formal system of signifiers. It is a production that appears as an excess that is very different from the signifying element which, as a limit, gives consistency to the whole. The object is not an element homogenous to the signifying whole but a heterogeneous product that gives it consistency. The system thus needs two factors in order to be maintained: an external element S1, and a product that is eliminated, the a. The external signifier S1 is homogeneous to the signifying whole, its relation to it is symbolic; on the other hand, the residual product, a, of a real nature, is heterogeneous to the signifying order. The symbolic order signifies that all its components, including the one that constitutes the limit (S1), are homogenous, that is to say that they are all ruled by the laws of signifying logic. Object a alone, on the contrary, escapes this logic. We could certainly identify object a as a hole in the structure of the unconscious, that is, as the place left vacant by the signifier of the chain having become a limit. But identifying the object as a hole [un trou] is only legitimate if the hole is conceived not as static but as a sucking void. Object a is the hole of the structure if you imagine it as the source of a sucking force that pulls and animates the signifiers, giving the chain consistency. Now when one imagines the object as such a vital hole, it is the figure of jouissance (surplus-of-jouissance) that comes to the fore. One should be clear here, for the relation of object a to the hole is quite nuanced. We shall say that object a is the hole in the structure of the unconscious if we accept three points: (1) the hole is an attracting pole which animates the system (cause); (2) the force of this hole is called jouissance (surplus-of-jouissance); (3) jouissance, rather than a cauldron of energy at the center of the whole, is a constant flux circling the edges of the hole. But in order to understand the object/hole relation more clearly I would like to set aside the formal point of view, and approach the corporal dimension by posing the question: "What is the hole?" Let us forget the formal level for the moment and ask ourselves what psychical representation we have of the hole. It is not a conscious   page_80 Page 81 and visual image as in figure 3, but the psychical image inscribed in our unconscious. How for example can a man or a womanI am thinking in particular of a patient suffering from impotencerepresent this paradigm of a hole which is the feminine sex, namely the vagina. It would seem easier for the mind to represent the clitoris or the vaginal lipsthe parts that protrudethan to represent an opening. We can formulate it otherwise: everything takes place as if the psychic representation of a hole, and more particularly of the vagina, is subjected to repression. Contrastingly, the psychic representation of a protuberance, such as the clitoris, the breast, or the penis, lend themselves better to the imaginary and emerge more clearly on the surface of consciousness. You will note the difference between the repression of the

representation of the vagina, on the one hand, and the overdetermination of the representation of the protuberance, on the other hand. It is easy to forget or ignore a hole, but we are easily captivated by a protuberance. One never quite knows what a hole is while one is immediately sensitive to an appendage. What is the characteristic then of a hole such that it provokes this repression, and what is it about the protuberance that it attracts the overdetermination? Obviously, I do not have an answer to such a question. However, it is an important one, for to raise the problem of the intrinsic nature of the hole is to raise the problem of the intrinsic nature of orifices of the body, of the erogenous openings of the body. Thus, to ask "What is a hole?" amounts to asking "What is an orificial opening?" But, can one say that an erogenous orifice is a hole? Or, shouldn't we consider that, rather than a hole, the orifice is instead an edge, more precisely, edges, or mucous folds that create and efface a hole as they pulsate. I would say then that in our erogenous world, there is not strictly speaking a hole as one would normally imagine it, as an opening delimited by a circle, but rather contracting and expanding edges that create ephemeral hollows. Now these edges palpitate if they axe animated by a flux of an energy that permeates them, energy called jouissance. This is what we are interested in. We began from a formal view of the hole located in the structure of the unconscious (figure 3) and have reached the enigma of corporal orifices, and deduce that these are edges animated by a jouissance that produces and creates the hole. There is no hole without the jouissance which causes the edges to palpitate. 21 In stun, in erogenous life and consequently in our unconscious psychical life, holes are only engendered in tension and movement. You will note that our considerations on the orifices are only justified if we think of the orificial edgesand the flux of jouissance   page_81 Page 82 which runs through themas being caused by the presence of another body which is itself desiring. . . . the breast, the scyballe, the gaze, the voice: these parts are detachable yet intrinsically belong to the body: they are what is at issue with respect to object a. Jacques Lacan Following these reflections with respect to the hole, we understand that object a must be considered in its essence as the flux of jouissance which runs through the edge of the orifices of the body, and in this respect is the local cause that moves and activates the unconscious. In Lacanian theory, however, there is another approach to a according to which the object is not only the in-itself of jouissance but a series of parts that are detachable from the body. We will see that these corporal entities are not material fragments of the body, or organic elements, properly speaking, but rather fantasies, figures, and simulacra 22 that envelop the real of jouissance. Following the development of infantile sexuality presented by Freud in the Three Essays, the child separates itself successively from a series of objects which, after having been in the service of a bodily function of the child, have been assimilated and then rejected. According to the different stages of its evolution, the subject "assimilates" and loses, successively, the placenta, the breast, excrement, and even the gaze and the voice. These are five figures of detachment that Lacan considers among the various corporal examples of object a. There are many kinds of corporal losses, to be sure, but the most paradigmatic and representative of object a are the five examples just mentioned. One might ask, for example, of a patient speaking of a problem with their monthly menstrual cycle, if the menstrual blood can be considered as one of the examples of object a. A priori, I will say no, except in a particular conjuncture which would permit placing the menstrual blood among the figures of object a. But I would say with more confidence that pain, in certain circumstances, could be a detachable entity and more appropriately a kind of object a. There are in fact precise criteria that allow us to judge whether or not a certain detachment of the body must be classified as object a.   page_82 Page 83 We began by asking, in general, who is the other? And in the most specific case of 'Mourning and Melancholia," who is the other who has disappeared, what is the lost object? Now we just brought up the detached parts of the body which under certain well-defined conditions could be considered as object a. But, any isolated thing in the body is not

necessarily a species of object a. In order for a detachment to take place, and for that separation to be considered as object a, there are three conditions: one imaginary and two symbolic (figure 4). Two particular kinds of object a, the breast and excrement, are determined by an important imaginary condition. They present a prominent form that sticks out from the body in a protruding projection that can be grasped, detached, even snatched from the body. The protuberant aspect of a breast, for example, invites grasping by the hand, taking by the mouth, or even biting. Therefore they are, first, corporal figures that stand out from the surface to which they are attached and whichas detachableinvite the grasp. I will not go into detail with respect to the imagery of Jerome Bosch, whose painting testifies to all the fantastic appendages which seem to attract the hand's grasp or the avidity of a devouring mouth. I insist that this imaginary condition only applies to specific parts of the body. An elbow, for example, does not seek to be grabbed or snatched. Obviously, you have understood, I imagine, that the archetype underlying all preeminent and detachable corporal forms is nothing other than the appendage that we call the phallus. The first symbolic condition consists in the fact that the places of the body which are destined to be separatedin particular, the breast in the process of weaning and the excrement in defecationremain in direct relation with the natural orifices that palpitate, such as the mouth for the breast and the anus for the stool. Certainly, we identify this condition as symbolic because the anatomic protrusions, the edges of the orifices, are signifiers. They are signifiers that cut the object and render it partial. These signifiers are the contours that support the circulation of the flux of jouissance that gives it its permanence. The two other objectsgaze and voicewhich are in no way dependent on the imaginary condition, are nevertheless determined by the same symbolic condition of being produced by edges which like the mouth and   page_83 Page 84

Figure 4 The object is a detachable part of the body and its detachment is determined by three conditions: one imaginary condition and two symbolic conditions the anus vibrate in their way: namely, the eyelids that blink to produce a gaze, and the walls of the glottis that vibrate to produce the voice. The voice and the gaze depend on the symbolic condition provided by the anatomical character of the orifices. From the point of view of the imaginary, these are objects that are difficult to imagine, for neither yields any representable form. It is impossible, for example, to outline the voice or the gaze. We recall finally that these contracting slits that open and close - the symbolic condition that allows us to say that this bodily emission is a figure of object awere what Freud referred to as the erogenous zones. 23

Now we can take up the second symbolic condition. It consists in the fact that the objects only detach or separate from the body by virtue of the act of speech. It is always an act of speech that separates them from the body. But what speech can separate the breast from the body, for example? What speech has the power to cut the body? The first speech, the most primitive speech that separates, at the same time, the breast from the body of the mother and the same breast from the mouth of the infant, is fundamentally the cry. For it is by the cries that demand milk that the child asserts itself and in a way becomes autonomous as a subject of desire. By distinguishing itself from the body of the mother,   page_84 Page 85 the subject seems to take the breast with it. It transforms the nourishing breast of the mother into a mental breast that belongs to it from then on. The cry has for us the value of a demand, and as in the case of any demand, it involves a speech in return. But who demands of whom? It is a matter, in fact, of a double demand: the demand of the subject to the Otherin this case the other with a capital A, the motherand reciprocally the Other's demand to the subject, from the mother to the child. It is only on the symbolic condition of the double demand from the subject to the Other and from the Other to the subject that the breasts separates. But why claim that the demand is a cutting? How are we to understand that speech slices the body? It is to say that as speech, demand never exactly specifies the object desired. We are aware of the fundamental inadequation between the thing and language, between what I want and the speech that I use to obtain it, between the breast that I clamor for and the cry of my appeal. When the child cries in hunger, the mother believes that it is cold and in this way the misunderstanding succeeds. In short, to say that the demand is a signifying cut amounts to saying that it misses its object, that it transforms the real object that it seeks into a mental abstraction, a hallucinated image. It is precisely this image that we call the object of desire, or object a. Thus the breast that is demanded becomesthrough the effect of speechthe hallucinatory breast of desire. The child can very well satisfy its hunger and at the same time hallucinate the breast as if he had not eaten. Why? Because the hallucinatory breast is the breast of desire. What does "the breast of desire" mean? This means that the relation of the child with the psychical breast is directly linked to the relation of the mother to herself. The breast that the child desires depends on the desire of the mother to give the breast. What is this maternal desire? Not that of nourishing her child but a desire that borders on erotic desire. It is rare in general that the mother gives the breast without experiencing the act as marked by a certain eroticism, as somehow other than simply an act of nourishment. We find here the same problematic as that of Oedipus. The Oedipus problemFreud tells usis not only the child's desire for the mother, it is more importantly that the mother desires the child in an erotic sense. The key to Oedipus is that it would not have been an incestuous desire if there had not been two desires at work: that of the mother and that of the child. The mothers that I have worked with have taught me, from breast feeding up to the Oedipal moment, that their maternal desire is as intense and as intolerable as the incestuous desire of the child.   page_85 Page 86 We understand then that the breast that interests us is not the organic breast of the maternal body but the psychical breast that is produced when the maternal breast has been symbolically separated and lost through the action of speech. The child is hungry, demands to drink, nurses, satisfies their hunger, and then falls asleep. Nonetheless, while sleeping the child hallucinates the breast as if they had not had their fill, still hankers after it no longer for food but for desire, that is, to maintain their desire. The breast that is separated from the body of the mother and from the mouth of the child becomes a psychical breast, it is the breast that will appear as an image in the hallucination of a child whose hunger is satisfied but whose demand is not. We recall here a passage from Ecrits where Lacan speaks of the detachment of the breast in the following way: "it is between the breast and the mother that the separation takes place, that makes the breast the lost object that is a stake in desire" (E, 848). To be precise, when object a takes the form of the hallucinated breast, we recognize its status as the object of desire, but strictly speaking, ultimately, object a is not the hallucinated breast. It is energy, the indefinable surplus-of-jouissance or perhaps the hole adorned with the hallucinated semblance of a breast. In a word, object a is not the hallucinated breast of desire, but the in-itself that the breast-semblance conceals, an in-itself covered by the image as a membrane can cover an intact and unchanging core.

If we return to the body in its properly organic dimension, what do you think of the maternal breast, that is of the breast that you identify as that which provides nourishment? The breast that the child sucks, in reality, is not of interest to psychoanalysis . . . Does it pertain to the domain of pediatrics? Pediatrics? Perhaps. As psychoanalysts we should know how the pediatricians teach the young mother to hold the nipple with their fingers in order to offer it to the child. It is always a difficult matter for first-time mothers. I think that it is not easy because the mother is aggravated by desire, because the desire is intolerable for her. I believe that there is an intimate connection between not knowing how to offer the nipple to the child and the intolerable nature of the desire. I do not know whether or not pediatricians have given thought to this, but it would be interesting to discuss it with them.   page_86 Page 87 You speak of the separation of the baby from the maternal breast, without having once used the term weaning [sevrage] Do you mean to say that the separation of the breast as object a would be the same as a weaning? Physiologically speaking, weaning is a progressive cessation of breast feeding, and above all the replacement of milk by more solid food. You know that weaning is above all an avatar in the order of corporal needs and not in the order of desire, even if the decision to wean is in large part due to the desire of the mother. No, weaning such as I just defined it cannot be identified as the detachment of the breast as object a. The separation of the breast that we consider is rather "symbolic weaning" produced by the simple fact of speech. Weaning in the analytical sense of the term, proceeds from the first human expression, as soon as the subject is capable of producing symbols, any sort of symbol from the first cry to the most elaborate speech. Moreover, your question brings to mind the way in which Lacan interpreted anorexia. As we have said, the child can be satisfied in terms of their need, and nevertheless, in terms of their desire, they hallucinate the breast. Their stomach is no longer empty but they retain a mental appetite of desire. Now, anorexicsin general found among young womendo not want this double state of our infant satisfied with respect to hunger and unsatisfied with respect to desire. They want the dissatisfaction to be total so that they will be dissatisfied with respect to hunger as well as desire. The anorexic says: "No, I do not want to eat, because I do not want to be satisfied, and I do not want to be satisfied because I want my desire to remain intactand not only my desire but that as well of my mother." Anorexia is a cry against all satisfaction and an obstinate maintenance of the general state of insatisfaction. When I refer to anorexia I situate it in the general context of hysteria because it seems to me to be a suffering that is typically hysterical. Clearly, there is no worse attitude toward an anorexic that wanting to feed them. It can only reinforce their protest and insistence to retain their desire at all cost, to defend at all cost the fact of not being satisfied, and to want in this way to preserve their desire. Thus to the anorexic, what opposes desire is the satisfaction of needs because the more that the need is appeased the less they will be able to maintain their desire in a state of arousal.  

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Page 88 When you say that the child hallucinates, what exactly does it hallucinate? The child hallucinates the breast, or rather, the child hallucinates the object of desire. Of whose desire? Of the mother and of the child. In reality the child hallucinates an object that belongs neither to the mother or to themselves, but is located between them. At this point we pose a question: to whom does the breast that is lost belong? To the mother or to the child? Neither one nor the other. It is an object that falls in between them as in the case of any object a. Lacan represents the fall of the object with Euler's two overlapping circles (figure 5), one circle representing the subject (child) and a second circle representing the Other (the mother). Object a falls in the middle at the intersection of the Other and the subject. You speak of losses and of symbolic weaning. Could one say that object a corresponds to the Freudian notion of the lost object? The lost object is only one of the possible figures of this non-response which is called object a. Moreover, we must guard against what would be an exclusive view of object a considered as a loss. Object a can be theorized in different ways, above all as a surplus-of-jouissance where far from being a loss it is an accumulated surplus. We think of object a as a loss when it a bears semantic figure related to the erogenous places of the body: the breast, the gaze, the voice, etc. All of these figures are in fact disguises of object a, masks charged with a corporal signification, a cosmetic covering that Lacan categorizes as "dissimulations of Being." I insist, however, object a itself is in itself an opaque real, a local jouissance, that is impossible to symbolize. Thus to speak of object a as a corporal loss, is only a manner of speaking, an "organic" way of referring us to the object, an organic and corporal dissimulation of the object. This reservation aside, it is legitimate to use the expression "lost object" or ''loss." At times you speak of a demand that is not satisfied; and at other times, as in the case of the anorexic, of desire that is unsatisfied. How does one distinguish between these two types of insatisfaction? First, let us emphasize once again that the infant's demand seeks the nourishing body and misses it, while desire, for its part, seeks impossible incest and finds the erotic breast. We can thus assert that the   page_88 Page 89

The object belongs neither to the subject nor to the Other Figure 5 The three stages of the production of object a demand is unsatisfied because it never obtains the real object that it seeks whereas desire is unsatisfied because it never obtains the impossible goal that it seeks, namely incest. But while demand is unsatisfied by the concrete object that it misses, and desire is unsatisfied by being unable to attain impossible incest, another difference remains: the demand misses its object and remains disappointed while desire misses incest but finds a substitute, the hallucinated object. Later we will encounter this substitute in the guise of fantasy. As you know, Lacan distinguished the triad of need, demand, and desire. If the child demands to eat, what is the need? Hunger. But whether he has eaten or not, whether he has had enough in terms of his need or remains unsatisfied, the child, as a speaking and sexual human being, sees their demand fail and will inevitably hallucinate the object of desire. This means that beyond the demand, the young child desires.   page_89 Page 90 In what does desire consist? In nothing other than a hallucination. The hallucination of the breast is desire, perhaps the purest form of the realization of a desire. Why? Because as the hallucinated object of desire, the breast is something that is entirely created by the combined desires of the mother and the child. This hallucinated breast, quite different from the corporal breast and even more so from the nourishing milk, is the fruit of the mother-child bond of desire. It testifies to an incontestable reality: on the one hand, mother and child cannot find their satisfaction in the simple act of nursing, and on the other hand, they are unable and unwilling to find their satisfaction in the incestuous act. They are satisfied neither by a need that is fulfilled, nor by a demand that fails, nor an incest that is impossible for them. To desire the breast is to avoid the path of need and the path of incest. Desire is certainly intolerable but it protects the subject against the human tendency in all of us that seeks the extreme limit, the point of rupture, the absolute satisfaction of incest, in one word, the jouissance of the Other. Desire with its hallucination is certainly intolerable but it can protect us by stopping us on the path to jouissance, a jouissance which would be a thousand times more intolerable. One realizes that all the satisfactions of desire can only be partial satisfactions that are gained on the path to the quest of a total satisfaction that can never be attained. I would like to be very clear. What does the child desire absolutely, irrespective of their age and any concrete circumstance? Incest. This is impossible and will remain forever unsatisfied. But with what would they be content? With the partial satisfaction of the hallucination of a breast which is not the breast that nurses, but a breast that is produced by three conditions: imaginary fullness, the relation to the mouth as an erogenous orifice, and finally, the double demand. Finally, all these objects, whether we call them ''objects of desire," or "species of object a"that is, the placenta, the breast, excrement, the gaze, the voice, or painall these different objects sustain and maintain desire short of the supposed absolute satisfaction that would be the incestuous possession of the total body of the mother. The child will never possess the mother's body as a whole, but only a part. And that part will only be possessed in the mind, in a hallucination or another psychical production that we have not yet studied: the fantasy. We take note that the hallucination and the fantasy, although different from a clinical point of view, are equivalent formations from the point of view of the psychical ''possession" of the partial object of desire.   page_90 Page 91 But how can we say that the child would like to possess the total body of the mother? The idea that in itself, desire desires to possess the entire body of the mother, or if you prefer, that desire is incestuous desire, is a supposition postulated by psychoanalysts. It is true that in order to found such a supposition we are relying on information that I have not brought forth because I have taken a different path in my exposition. To justify this eminently theoretical, indeed axiomatic, postulate concerning the incestuous nature of desire, it will be necessary to bring in the problem of castration and the phallus in psychoanalytic theory. But in any case, we do not hesitate to assert that it is we analysts who advance the premise that desire can never attain the incest that it seeks. Let us add that the claim that the

baby hallucinates the breast and partially satisfies its desire is also an analytic conjecture. Freud was not the only one to elaborate it. There was also, importantly, Melanie Klein. Perhaps you know how Melanie Klein proceeded to found her theory in which the breast occupies a major position. In her early days, she would go to a nursery and spend hours observing babies and taking note of their manifestations: manifestations that she took to be corporal expressions of psychical phenomenon, including hallucination and more generally unconscious mental processes. When the babies napped she observed their faces, their mouth movements, their facial expressions, and any other gesture that confirmed her hypothesis that the infant at that very moment was hallucinating the breast. I would like to return now to the second condition. We have said that the object is separated by the effect of the child's demand. But we have also specified that in reality in order to abandon the nursing breast and produce object a as a kind of hallucinated breast, more is required than the child's speech alone; the mother's speech is also required. We recall that the symbolic condition of the production of the object is a double speech, a double demand. The infant can only demand the breast if the mother recognizes it as her child. Let us refer now to figure 6. Of the two circles, one corresponds to the demand of the child that is addressed, when crying or shouting, to the mother: "I am hungry." This is what we call the demand to the Other. A second circle corresponds to the demand of the Other to the child, a demand that is implicit in the first and which, formulated reci  page_91 Page 92 procally, would be: "Let yourself nurse." "I am hungry" is a demand that goes from the child to the mother. "Let yourself nurse'' is a demand that goes from the mother to the child. In the drawing, one sees that there is no demand of the subject that is not reciprocated by the Other. These two demands trace a single trajectory, that of the cut. The object is detached then, the child hallucinates the breast and by hallucinating identifies with it. The child is the breast that it hallucinates. In our example the subject having become the breast offers itself to the devouring Other: "Eat me mother.'' We will encounter this identification with the object when we study the structure of fantasy. Before summarizing this lesson I would like you to recall Freud's remark contained in one of his last notes in his notebook, entered as he neared death. This remark concerned the double relation of the child to the breast, namely, having or being it; having the breast or being the breast. Freud wrote the following in a telegraphic style: The child lives 'to have' and 'to be' the breast. Children like expressing an object-relation by an identification: 'I am the object.' 'Having' is the later of the two, after loss of the object it relapses into 'being.' Its model is the breast. 'The breast is a part of me, I am the breast.' And later this becomes 'I have it,' that is, I am not it." 24 I'll let you enjoy these touching and enigmatic sentences. For me, I give you the result of my reading. Freud distinguishes the child's relation to the breast in four ways. First: The breast is a part of me. This is the parasitic relation of the infant on the body of the mother, clamped to the breast. Second, I lose the breast. This is a loss that corresponds to the stage that we have described all along in our development of the constitution of object a. Third, I am the breast that I lose. This is a process of identification of the subject with the object, the mainspring of the structure of fantasy. Fourth, I have the breast, that is to say that I am no longer it (autonomously).

 

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The indentification of the subject with the object ( ¨ a) which is equivalent to the desire to be eaten by the mother: Eat me, mother" Figure 6 Object a results from the accomplishment of a double demand. When the object is detached, the subject identifies with it (fantasy) By way of conclusion, I would like to focus our considerations again on object a, seen from the perspective of the needdemand-desire triangle, according to six propositions. With respect to need, we have the nursing breast, the milk, and hunger, whether satisfied or not. With respect to demand we found that the child's demand is addressed to the mother (as a cry) and the demand of the mother is addressed to the nursing child (let yourself nurse). These two demands, one the demand to eat and the other the demand to receive, are, strictly speaking, reciprocal calls to recognition and to be recognized. The conjunction of these demands takes the form of the reciprocal love of the mother and the child. The child's demand being speech, it misses its object, the nourishing breast. The demand remains unsatisfied but   page_93 Page 94 opens the door to desire. With respect to the mother's demand, it encounters the same avatar as the child. With respect to desire, we have: The incestuous desire to possess the totality of the body of the mother as the impossibility of its attainment. The result is dissatisfaction. Let us be clear. Every time that we use the expression "a desire that is unsatisfied" we are talking about incestuous desire.

This insatisfaction of incestuous desire mentally translates into the hallucination, not of the total body of the mother, but rather of one part of that body, namely the breast. The hallucination of the breast of desire is a substitute for the incestuous possession of the maternal body. We see that as the hallucination of the breast substitutes for the incestuous possession of the mother, so the partial body substitutes for the whole body. If we use the Lacanian vocabulary of the concept of jouissance, we must say that the jouissance of the Other that corresponds to the total body is here substituted for by the surplus-of-jouissance (object a) which corresponds to the partial body. For the child, the Other, that is to say its most intimate partner, the mother, is reduced in this way from the perspective of desire to being the hallucinated breast. That is to say that the impossible object of incestuous desire (the mother) becomes the hallucinated breast, the partial object of desire. The Other is reduced to object a. Specifically, the subject is also reduced to and identified with this object of desire. This double reduction of the mother and of the child to object a, is an alternating reduction in the nodal operation that generates the psychical formation called fantasy. In summary, we have explained that the production of object a goes through two stages. First, we considered object a as a detachable part of the body according to three conditionsone imaginary condition and two symbolic conditions (the full image, the orifice, and the double demand). By distinguishing need, demand, and desire, we have also shown that the object as an object of desire is not related to a   page_94 Page 95 physical part of the body, but is above all a hallucinated product. Then we maintained that the object belongs neither to the subject nor to the other. We will complete this portrayal next time with a third stage in which we will explain the identification of the subject with the hallucinated object of desire. It is this identification which is the basis for the structuration of a fantasy. This being said, I would like to return to a point that I clarified and recall that Lacan's object a is not, strictly speaking, the hallucinated breast, the object of desire. It is rather the hole, the enigmatic and unnamable jouissance that Lacan calls the surplus-of-jouissance. The adverb plus, you will recall from our first lesson, emphasizes that the object is always an excess or an excess of residual energy that cannot be assimilated by the subject. This is a surplus of tension which in hallucination takes the familiar form of a nipple. Clearly the hallucinated nipple is only one appearance among others by which the surplus-of-jouissance is presented. For this surplus of unnamable and enigmatic jouissance, referred to as a, can borrow any corporal, visual, auditory, olfactory, or tactile form; these forms are involved in the encounter of desire (unsatisfied, incestuously unsatisfied) between the child and the mother, and more generally between the subject and the Other. Object a can be experienced as a particular odor in the olfactory hallucination, as the softness of the skin in the tactile hallucination, or even as the inimitable sound of the maternal voice in the auditory hallucination. Certainly, all of these forms combine in an infinite number of sensory variations of the hallucinated images of desire.  

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WHAT IS PROPER TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? THE PSYCHOANALYST AND THE ID THE CLINICAL EXPERIENCE OF THE FANTASY THE FORMAL MATRIX OF THE FANTASY THE BODY: LOCUS OF JOUISSANCE THE EYES OF THE VOYEUR THE FOOT OF THE DANCER  

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Fourth Lesson Fantasy The analyst functions in analysis as a representation of object a. Jacques Lacan Let us return to the path of our development with respect to object a by situating its function in that psychical formation called "fantasy" that is so present in the clinical setting. But first, a question arises: why, you will ask me, do you privilege object a in this way? We are essentially interested in object a in order to try to trace the radical function of the psychoanalyst in an analysis. My concern is to demonstrate the value of Lacan's proposition when he locates the analyst in the position of object a in the experience of the cure, and correlatively, to clarify what distinguishes analytic relation from any other transferential relationship. Let us say immediately that what is proper to the analytic experience lies in the singular position of the analyst as object a. In fact, there is not one specific trait but two that characterize analysis and separate it from other social bonds. The first, as I just stated, is the particular role of the analyst, the second is the particular speech of the analysand. Each of these traits corresponds to the two fundamental pillars of psychoanalysis: the unconscious and jouissancethe analysand's speech pertaining to the unconscious and the role of the analyst pertaining to jouissance. We can look first at this particular aspect of the analysand's speech that distinguishes analysis from other transferential relations. To this end, let us imagine a believer who confesses to a priest, and inquire as to what differentiates the speech addressed to the confessor and the speech addressed to an analyst. I will give, with Freud, the following response: the believer in the confessional confides all he knows to the priest while the patient confides all that he knows to the analyst   page_97 Page 98 as well as all that he does not know. I am thinking here of an analysand who, with these same words, announced to his analyst, "There is all that I know and that I hope to be able to tell you; and then, all that I do not know that I will tell you." In effect, the specificity of an analysis lies, we recall, in the event of a statement enunciated by the patient without knowing what he or she says. This event, we have already emphasized, activates the unconscious. Now, for such a signifying event to take place, there must be a listening. That is, a listening that awaits the event and the speech of the analysand that presupposes that listening. While helpful, this response remains, however, insufficient. There is yet another essential trait that is particular to the analytic relation and distinguishes it from any other transferential relation involving a priest, a professor, or a leader This trait pertains to jouissance and consists precisely in the way in which the psychoanalyst acts and in the particular position of the analyst as object a, a position such that the analyst's listening contributes to the generation of events. Let me explain. The psychoanalyst is not a partner who governs me like a leader or teaches me like a professor, or who

confesses me like a priest, but is a resolutely unique other who, during the gradual unfolding of the cure, will become an integral part of my psychical life. Paradoxically, the analytic relation will progressively cease to be a relation between two persons as it becomes a unique psychical place that includes conjointly the analyst and the analysand, or rather, the place of the in-between which envelops and absorbs the analytic partners. Analysis is in fact a singular place that contains the psychical life of the analyst and the analysand. Now, in this unique placea kind of unique psychical apparatus that the relation between two persons has becomethe role of the analyst can be understood as the role of the drive in mental functioning. In other words, once granted that the bond between the analyst and the analysand is organized as an immense and unique psychical apparatus, the place of the analyst corresponds to the place reserved for the object of the drive. Freud would then have identified the role of the analyst as that of the object of the drive in service to the Id, a name that appropriately designates the reservoir of the drive. 25 Lacan traced the territory of the drive by distinguishing three types of jouissance: jouissance of the Other, phallic jouissance, and surplus-of-jouissance. The psychoanalyst, or rather, the analytic function, corresponds to, among these categories, surplus-of-jouissance; or to reconsider these terms in the context of this essay, it corresponds to object a. Clearly, as soon as   page_98 Page 99 the analyst occupies the place of the object, he or she will necessarily assume a listening posture. I am thinking for example of a psychoanalyst's way of being silent at moments that are crucial in the cure. What matters is not just any silence, but a compact silence which evokes the density of the surplus-of-jouissance, a dynamic silence which causes and reactivates the unconscious. We find again here the same function of the hole that assures the mobility of the structure. This form of silence, along with the practitioner's other acts, attests that he is in the position of object a. One could have formulated this same idea by using the expression semblance of object a, and suggest that analysis occurs when the direction of the analyst is the semblance of a, that is, when he or she represents the jouissance (surplusof-jouissance) in the cure. Going further, one should even say that in the cure the analyst represents the energy of the orifice, the flux of permanent jouissance that crosses the edge of the erogenous orifices. In sum, in the position of object a, the analyst represents the energy that makes the unconscious work, or if you will, the heterogeneous that causes the whole and makes it cohere. Now, if we were to summarize the trait which distinguishes analysis from any other transferential relation we would say that from the point of view of the analysand, what is proper to analysis is found in the fact that the subject is exceeded by the signifier it producesit belongs to the unconsciousand, from the point of view of the practitioner, is found in the fact that the psychoanalyst adopts the position of the semblance of object a in the curethis belongs to jouissance. We arrive then at the question of fantasy, a term that we have mentioned every time when we have spoken of the identification of the subject with object a. But before unraveling the clinical scope of the fantasmatic formations and the mechanism of their genesis, let's quickly review our conclusion from the last lesson. We established that, in order for some part of the body to assume the status of object of desire, there must occur three conditions of objectal separation (imaginary fullness, erogenous edges, and double demand). We then showed how the object of desire is constituted as a hallucinatory object. It is there in the very fact of hallucination that the formative mechanism of all fantasy is produced: the subject becomes object.  

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Prior to clarifying the logic that subtends fantasy I would like to pose a question: How does fantasy present itself in the clinic? Suppose that a practitioner in the course of a supervision session says to me, "I would like you to show me where

to find object a in the narrative of my patient." In theory I should respond, "since object a represents an abstract and formal value, designated by a letter, it is necessarily ungraspable and consequently I cannot point it out to you." But the correct reply is different: "If you wish to find object a within a given analytic sequence, begin by looking for the fantasy. Inquire after your patient's fantasy at that stage of the cure and you will determine the place of object a." For beyond its formal status, object a essentially finds its clinical expression in fantasy. However, this is still not the best response. In order to respond in an adequate manner it is necessary to specify that the fantasy is unconscious. For Freud the fantasy was both conscious and unconscious like psychical formation in constant movement. He called it the "black-white'' in order to show that fantasy changes its register constantly in a coming and going between the conscious and the unconscious. Now we can state more generally that the fantasy remains unconscious. If we reconsider the question of the analyst in supervision the best response would finally be: "In order to locate object a in analysis, begin by locating it in the unconscious fantasy." But you will ask me, "How is one to detect concretely the unconscious fantasy in the cure? What are the signs that enable a practitioner to locate an unconscious fantasy?" You would be right to refer to such indices, not only in order to recognize the unconscious fantasy, but also in order to reconstruct it. However, before pointing out the signs of the presence of the fantasy in the cure I would like to remind you that the general term "fantasy" includes a wide range of fantasmatic productions, such as originary fantasies; others, more circumstantial, pertain to specific phases of the cure; and most importantly, one which is rarely mentioned as a fantasytransference itself. That being the case, how is one to recognize and reconstruct an unconscious fantasy in the cure? To respond, I propose the following indicators: A fantasy includes: a scene, some charactersin general they are few in numberan action, a dominant affect, and the presence in the scene of a definite part of the body. A fantasy is expressed not only through the analysand's narrative, but also at times in his or her actions, dreams, and reveries.  

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repeated and remains generally unforgettable. It is repeated in the context of a session, in several analytic sessions, even in the course of the life of the subject. It is a matter of a scenario that the analysand relates in minute detail, but which remains enigmatic for him or her. They describe all its aspects, know that it is intimately important to them, and even recognize the emotions the fantasy incites in them. At times the fantasy is the necessary stimulant, the trigger of orgasmic pleasure. In spite of its involvement the subject lives the fantasy as an additional element that is imposed upon it and is repeated against its will. It is a narrative that depicts an imagined scene, its places, its colors, its time, its light, and its sounds. We must identify as well the characters of the scene where the action unfolds: adult-child, child-animal, therapist, child . . . and ask the analysand if he or she is present there and what his role is: protagonist or spectator. It is appropriate as well to situate the principal action that unfolds by drawing attention above all to the verb that the analysand uses to describe that action in his or her narrative. The fantasy is always adorned by a sentence that is organized around a verb that can be easily identified in the patient's narrative. For example, the verb "to beat" in the famous fantasy "a child is being beaten," or the verb "to bite" in "the child was bitten by the dog,'' etc. We also note that in the formal sense the verb of the sentence that designates the fantasmatic action materializes the signifier that we have already identified as being the rim of the erogenous orifices, as well as the trace of the cut of the double demand. The verb in the sentence of the fantasy represents, then, the cut between the subject and the object, it is the signifier that both separates and reunifies the subject and the object. One also needs to distinguish the affect, that is to say, the emotion or the tension, which predominates in the principal action and which influences the characters. But by what affect is the action charged? Let us clarify immediately that this affect is not equivalent to jouissance (surplus-of-jouissance), which in general is not felt, even if it is the

unconscious driver of the fantasmatic action. In this respect we should not confuse the three different levels on which the subject is affected: one is the surplus-of-jouissance that unconsciously causes the fantasy; another is the affect or emotion that is experienced by the characters and dominates the fantasmatic scene; and yet another is the pleasure or the pain that the very appearance of the fantasy provokes in the analysand.  

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In order to locate the unconscious jouissance which is at play in the actionwhich is different from the affect felt by the protagonistwe must consider which particular part of the body is involved in the action. This jouissance has the status of object a. Later we will find the place of this object when we approach the logic of the fantasy focused on the identification of the subject with the object. The drama of the action unfolds as a perverse scenario. But rather than a plot that complicates and resolves itself, it is a living tableau, a freeze-frame image where the action is limited to a few gestures of perverse nature. We note that the perversity contained in the fantasy cannot be assimilated to perversion considered as a clinical entity. The apparition of the fantasy and its perverse contents are experienced by the analysand as a shameful habit that must be kept secret. This is why fantasies are only reported quite late in an analysis. In sum, the signs that allow the identification of the unconscious fantasy at a given moment of the cure are: the repetition of the narrative; the enigmatic and surprising character of the scenario imposed on the subject; the characters of the scene; the action played out, the dominant affect; the part of the body involved; and finally the perverse scenario. For these objects . . . , the breast, excrement, the phallus, the subject will gain or lose them, and is either destroyed by them or preserves them, but above all, it is these objects, according to the place where they function in its fundamental fantasy. Jacques Lacan Now we arrive at the logic that sustains fantasy, and try to respond to the question: what are the structure, the mechanism, and the function of an unconscious fantasy in the process of the cure? We note, first, that the formal matrix of a fantasy is essentially composed of four elements: a subject, an object, a signifier, and images. The collection of these elements is organized, as we have said, according to a precise scenario. In general, it is perverse and is expressed through a sentence of the patient's narrative.   page_102 Page 103 The principal organizing mechanism of the fantasmatic structure is the identification of the subject as it has become an object. If we recall our commentary on the passage where Freud speaks of the child and the breast we will situate the fantasy at the third moment, the one where Freud tells us that the child, having lost the breast, becomes the breast itself. To say that the child not only loses the breast but in fact becomes it, or that the voyeur, for example, not only looks, but becomes the look, is the best way to understand what fantasy signifies. We note that the distinction between the moment of the separation of the object and the moment of the identification of the subject with the object, is purely theoretical. In practice, we must recognize that the loss of the object occurs in the same movement of the identification of the subject with the object of desire. In fact, there is no real loss without the subject's identification with what it loses. From the psychoanalytic perspective, we are, in the fantasy, that which we lose.

If we reconsider the example of the trajectory of the oral double demand (figure 6) which, like a cut, removes the breast, we discover three moments: First, the moment of the child's demand of the mother: ''I am hungry." Second, the moment of the mother's demand of the child: "Let yourself nurse, my child." And finally, the third moment; that of identification. Once the breast is separated and installed as the object of desire, the subject identifies with it. The fantasy is then complete. The subject becomes the oral object, or rather the child becomes the breast which is offered for the hunger of the Other. The sentence of the third moment becomes: "Eat me mother.'' The identification of the subject with the breast constitutes the key to the oral cannibal fantasy. Clearly, this oral fantasy, as in the case of other fantasies, including anal, sadomasochistic, etc., interests us in order to understand not only the mother/child relation, but above all that the dynamic of the transference is the same as the dynamic of the fantasy. How often do we see emerge, in the work with the analysand, this fantasy of being devoured by the analyst or of devouring him! I am also reminded of the adult patient who confides to the analyst: "I have to tell you, this is not easy, but what I have wanted, for some time now, is to have you inside me, to devour you." The fantasy, "I would like to eat you," could have been interpreted as the patient's fixation at the oral stage. But this approach would not have enabled us to make progress. On the contrary, if we return to the situation of this analyst in supervision who reported to me a similar statement from their analysand, "I would like to devour you," I would have to reply, "You asked me where to find object a in the analysis? Well, object a is at   page_103 Page 104 the center of the fantasy of devouring and here can be referred to as the breast." Lacan formalizes that moment when the subject identifies with the detached object while giving the fantasy its architecture, with the notation $ ¨ a. To affirm that the subject is the object means that the agent of the fantasy, that is, the organizing element of the fantasmatic structure, is not the actual child or analysand. The fantasy is not the work of someone but the result of both the action of the object and the cut of the signifier. The object a is the motor force of the fantasy, and the signifier (represented by the ¨) is its efficient cause. In other words, the motor force of the fantasy is a knot of jouissance around which the fantasmatic scene is organized. This can be put in another way. When, through his narrative, or through his actions, the analysand allows the structure of the fantasy to appear, then we should not hesitate to conclude that the subject of that fantasy is not the patient but rather the object of desire and the signifier (verb) that marks the place of that object. We can thus affirm that the fantasy is a form of jouissance, the frame erected around the surplus-of-jouissance. The patient who confides to his analyst, "I would like to eat you," is a person inhabited by an oral fantasy. That is to say, the analysand's local jouissance is the breast and the subject of this fantasmatic experience is both jouissance and the signifier that marks the jouissance. The subject in question is the subject of the unconscious, that is to say, the subject who is the effect of the unconscious experience of producing this fantasy, and not the person who shares their feelings. Clearly, the structure of the fantasy $ ¨ athe conjunction/disjunction between the subject of the unconscious and object ais a formal matrix that we can activate by assigning to each of these two alternating places one or other of the analytic partners. Consequently, when the analysand states, "I would like to eat you," the object a of desire, the breast, is represented in this instance by the analyst. The analyst is, in this case, the principal place of jouissance. Inversely, it can be the case that the analysand can play the role of an object that is devoured by the analyst. We recall that Lacan has specifically elaborated the logical articulation of the terms of the fantasy in the context of topology by using the topological surface called a projective level or cross-cap. 26 This topological object serves admirably to demonstrate how the two terms of the subject of the unconscious ($) and of the object (a) are linked and separated, joined and disjoined, by the intermediary of a signifier that performs the function of the cut. We remember that we situate this signifier clinically in the concrete form of the   page_104 Page 105 sentence which states the fantasy, and particularly through the verb that indicates the action.

What relation can be found between hallucination and fantasy ? Freud never dearly distinguished the structures of the dream from fantasy and from hallucination. He recognized that these three psychical forms cannot truly be distinguished. He grouped them under the title "hallucinatory psychoses of desire." This denomination is extremely interesting to me because Freud, on this basis, broke with the false intuition of relegating psychosis to a separate world. That beautiful expression, "psychosis of desire," places us in an indeterminate sector where, compared to a dream, hallucination, or fantasy, the psychosis remains present. I have called these psychical productionsfantasy, hallucination and dreams"formations of object a,'' in harmony with the Lacanian expression "formations of the unconscious.'' Why refer to them as formations of object a? I attempt to regroupunder one headingthese different psychical productions that are formed by a common mechanism: the subject becomes the object that it loses. In the fantasy, object aas object of desiretakes different corporal forms. What then is the most general notion of the body that subtends this vision of the object? First, I would like to situate different approaches to object a. Most basically, object a can be considered, from a formal point of view, as the hole in a structurethe array of related concepts being the One and the totality. The object can also be considered from an energetic point of view as the surplus-of-jouissancethe array of related concepts being the two other categories of jouissance, and of the unconscious being structured like a language. It can be further considered in its status as an object of desire, a kernel of the fantasy, a spectrum of corporal forms (the breast, pain, etc.)the constellation of related concepts here being need, demand, desire, and fantasy. Finally, from the practical point of view, the object can be considered as the place of motor force of the cure, a place that is occupied by the psychoanalystthe constellation of related concepts being semblance and interpretation. We arrive now at our question on the body in general. What is the body for psychoanalysis? For the psychoanalyst, the body is not the   page_105 Page 106 same as it is for the anatomist, physiologist, biologist, or even the philosopher According to Lacan, the body in psychoanalysis is the locus of jouissance. Are we to reject, for all that, the biological or philosophical conception of the body? No. Are we ignorant for example, that there are biochemical alterations in manic depressive psychoses? No. But those are not our concern. Our questions are different. If I am with a manic depressive patient, for example, my interrogation will touch on the relation that his or her psychosis has with pain, with mourning, or with loss. How does the patient handle the illness"handle," in the sense of experiencing his or her own pain, of hearing the voices of the superego and of its self-reproaches. Whatever the organic substrate of a mental illness may be, the symbolic dimension in which the patient will express his or her suffering and produce dreams will prove unavoidable. The symbolism of the dream will always remain as a pressing call to be heard even if we discover one day a chemical origin of oneiric life. The body that interests us is not at all the one of science, but the locus of jouissance, the space in which a multiplicity of instances of jouissance circulate. Our question then cannot be so general as "What is the body?" but rather "How does one experience jouissance?" The questions of the psychoanalyst would be: "How does my analysand suffer?" ''How is he satisfied?" and more directly, "Where is jouissance?'' To formulate the question of the body in this way already shows my involvement in the transference, and inversely, my analytical position will be defined according to the way I question the body as a place of jouissance. This does not exclude the possibility that occasionally I may pay attention to the somatic disturbances which can appear in the course of a patient's life. It is not because we are psychoanalysts that we neglect corporeal accidents from which our patients may suffer To the question "Where is jouissance?" I would respond that one of the best examples of bodily jouissance would be the body's exposure to the maximum test of a great pain. Let us be clear: jouissance is not pleasure, but a state beyond pleasure; or to use Freud's terms, it is an excessive tension, a maximum tension, while on the contrary, pleasure is a

diminution of tension. If pleasure consists rather of not losing, or of losing nothing and expending next to nothing, jouissance, on the contrary, involves loss and expenditure, the exhaustion of the body in a paroxysm of its efforts. In this sense the body appears as a substrate of jouissance. It is precisely in terms of this state of the expenditure of the body that psychoanalytic theory conceives of the jouissance of the body.   page_106 Page 107 Let us take the case of the voyeur who, hiding behind the trees, watching lovers in the dark and through the gaze, experiences jouissance. A real voyeur not only experiences jouissance with his eyes but he does what he can to be noticed by the couple. Then incensed, they yell at him and throw stones at him. This aspect is fundamental. There are no voyeurs who are not also masochists. The intruder watches, while hoping to be discovered and to undergo jouissance as much by the gaze as by the pain of humiliation. Without the presence of the humiliation, which in general marks the failure of the perverse scenario, we know for certain that the subject cannot be certified as a pervert. The subject would instead be a neurotic who attempts to be perverse. In this respect, I would like to disabuse you of that misunderstanding that identifies a pervert with a neurotic who experiences jouissance through a fantasy with perverse contents. For, in fact, all neurotics dream and fantasize about being perverse without being able to. If the neurotic experiences perverse fantasies, the pervert concretely acts out these fantasies, without however being able to realize them. The neurotic dreams, while the pervert acts out the dream until it fails. The pervert is thus the one who acts out the perverse fantasy of the neurotic, up to the point of its humiliating failure. With failure and humiliation the pervert experiences anxiety, becomes depressed, and feels ridiculous and stupid. No doubt, there is something painfully comical in perverse behavior. If the neurotic is comical it is because he plays at being a pervert unsuccessfully. The pervert is also comical when one sees something that has been carefully constructed collapse like a house of cards. It is then that he undergoes jouissance as a result of being belittled in a degrading manner, and finds his satisfaction in masochistic pain. But where can we locate perverse jouissance? When the voyeur experiences jouissance with the gaze, or suffers humiliation (surplus-of-jouissance), his body is at the greatest tension and is expended until completely gone. He loses vision and any organic sensation as if his body were absent. When he looks, he loses sight, and when he suffers mortifying failure he loses the kinesthetic sensibility of his body. When we had proposed the formulation "the cut causes a detachment," we thought of the example of the perversion in which the body undergoes, in the eyes and the muscles, the greatest of jouissance. That the body undergoes "jouissance" is to say that the body "loses." We note that the erogenous zone relative to the gaze is the eyelids, and the erogenous   page_107 Page 108 zone relative to pain is the totality of corporeal sensationsand in particular the muscles. We note, moreover, that our example is perfectly suited to illustrate the jouissance that is the jouissance of the Other. Jouissance beyond measure is incarnated, in the very example of the voyeur, by the absolute jouissance that the pervert wishes to gain in the image of the surprised couple who are making love. For the pervert, the Other undergoing jouissance is the couple locked in an embrace in a delicious ecstasy. On this point, the difference between the neurotic and pervert is not simply that one dreams of jouissance and that the other enacts jouissance (surplus-of-jouissance) but above all that the neurotic supposes that the jouissance of the Other is an impossible jouissance, while the pervert takes it to be realizable. The neurotic imagines the jouissance of the Other and vaguely supposes it, in different forms, such as death, the supreme happiness, or madness. The pervert is different, in that he does not imagine jouissance but seeks it, tracks it, and believes it possible to capture. When he hides behind a tree the voyeur wants to grasp the ecstasy of the lovers without having any prior image in mind. We understand then how, for the analyst, the body can be fundamentally reduced to a partial jouissancein our example,

the gaze or masochistic painpolarized according to its erogenous zonesthe eyelids or the muscles. It is for this reason that the questions the analyst poses with respect to the body are "What is the relation of the body to jouissance?" or "How does the body undergo jouissance?" or more exactly, "What part of the body undergoes jouissance?" These questions remind me of an anecdote from a time when I was already working on the theme of jouissance. I had arrived at the conclusion that the question to be posed by the psychoanalyst was "Where in the body is jouissance to be located?" At this time I was accompanied by a friend, also a psychoanalyst, to a magnificent ballet, "L'après-midi d'un faune," interpreted by a remarkable couple of Italian dancers: Paolo Bortoluzzi and Carla Fracci. In a particular sequence of intense beauty, Bortoluzzi held a bar and in a slow pendulumlike movement raised the left leg to the front and to the rear while barely skimming the floor. In the simplicity of this movement I had the impression that the dancer achieved the zenith of his art. The leg seemed, with the point of the foot, to trace a dazzlingly nimble writing. This figure appeared to me as the culminating moment of the ballet. When leaving the theatre, I asked my friend to investigate   page_108 Page 109 with meas analystswhere jouissance had taken place in the performance. Our first reaction was that jouissance was, without question, in the gaze of the spectators, starting with ourselves. To complete this thought, we would have had to settle whether the fascination of the spectators pertained to the dimension of sight or gazing, to the pleasure of sight, or to the jouissance of gazing. In this regard, we note that the perverse voyeur, of whom we have just spoken, gazes but does not see. I cannot say if we spectators experienced pleasure or jouissance, if we saw or if we gazed, but in any case our interrogation remained insistent. Where was jouissance located in the performance of the ballet?" If we did not encounter it in the spectators it must emanate from the bodies of the dancers themselves. But what aspect of the body? We parted without an answer, but when I arrived at my house, I found myself still pondering the question. A thought occurred to me that I wrote to my friend that very night. I believe, I wrote to him, that I found the place of jouissance in the ballet: curiously enough, in Bartoluzzi's foot. Why the foot? For two reasons. First, because in the culminating sequence, the dancer's foot concentrates all of the tension of the body in an equilibrium. Moreover, Bartoluzzi had trained his body to such an extent, and he used it so much, so much life had gone through this fragment of the bodyjust imagine the discipline and the rigor of this man who was already a recognized artistthat I did not hesitate to write that Bartoluzzi had actually lost that foot, that from the point of view of jouissance, he constantly parted from it. The foot had become the place of the body which no longer belonged, in reality, to the dancer. My investigation of the location of jouissance in the dance performance has helped me better understand what loss means when one has lived. In our example, loss is not situated at the primary level of the relation between the infant and the mother but in an order related to sublimation and to art. In order to understand jouissance, we are relying here on the same conceptual "apparatus," but of a different order. The signifying cut in our example is not represented by demand but by the discipline of the dancer's body, by the extreme suppleness, by the countless times when the body has been forced to grasp the exact and harmonious point where the foot brushes the floor artistically. Thanks to this example of the dancer you will note that the signifying effect on the body does not necessarily take the form of a spoken statement or of a formulated demand. The signifying effect here is represented by the discipline to which the artist's body must submit. The signifying repetitions here are represented by innumerable hours and days, and the unceasing work that produced the loss of the dancer's foot.   page_109 Page 110 Our analysis leads us to the following conclusion. The adequate question will not be "Who undergoes jouissance?" but rather, "What thing within us undergoes jouissance, which part of the body undergoes jouissance?" Once we arrive at the idea that the body is the place of jouissance we can ask" Is the subject aware that it undergoes jouissance?" In the same way that the unconscious causes the subject to speak without its knowledge of it, jouissance deeply affects the subject without the subject being aware that it is affected. There is a suffering of the body, as is common to a dancer like Bortoluzzi, that he is unable to measure and that he condenses into that sublime gesture of the movement of the foot. We are always able to recognize the sensation of pleasure, but not measure what is lost. We can never recognize nor measure the extent of the trial to which the body is submitted. That is to say that we can feel pleasure but not measure jouissance. This allows us to recall a proposition from the first lesson: the subject is excluded from jouissance.

How can we consider jouissance in the case of suicide? What sort of suicide? For, there are several kinds of suicide, including hysterical, melancholic, schizophrenic, and others. The melancholic subject, for example, kills himself in a way that is totally different from that of the hysteric. In general, the suicide of the hysteric is not an act but an action that goes beyond the intention of the subject as if he had gone much too far, farther than he wanted to go. A suicidal act, for instance, is when the subject actually crosses the threshold of the jouissance of the Other. He or she posits an act and crosses the ultimate frontier. But let's disabuse ourselves of the notion that all suicide is a leap that crosses a limit. The place of jouissance will be distinct according to the clinical variants of suicidal actions. This is why I ask you what sort of suicide you mean? The one that you consider as an act. First, let's recall that in order to know the kind of suicide with which we are concerned it is appropriate to examine the particular mode that has led to the death. It is on the basis of the manner in which one kills oneself, by hanging, by knife, by gun, by poison, etc., that one can recognize, after the fact, the kind of suffering that brought about death. However, we can never give a precise sense to an act as radical as suicide. In order for me to respond to your question, the only affirmation we would risk is that the suicide of a writer such as Yukio Mishima or Montherlant, for example, is an act by which the writer crossed the frontier of a jouissance without measure. They touched the   page_110 Page 111

 

Paolo Boroluzzi Suite académique, Marcello, Bortoluzzi (1976) page_111 Page 112

limit of a jouissance that is different from that which is localized in a part such as the gaze, the breast, pain, etc. When it is a question of the suicide-act we are no longer in the dimension of the local or the limited but in a dimension that is radically incommensurable. That being the case, I would like you to understand these comments simply as a possible approach to the phenomenon of suicide. The radicality of the suicidal act always calls for us to be extremely cautious in our reflections. The suicide act is only one example of the confrontation of the subject with the jouissance of the Other, one example among others that shows the subject opening the door of that place from which we are necessarily exiled. The ecstasy of the mystic is still another form of exceeding the limit of the jouissance of the Other, of a jouissance implicating the entire body in a supposed divine encounter with God. Let's recall our reflections from the first lesson. The most correct denomination that situates the agency of jouissance of the Other is its designation as the place where there is no signifier. This is a definition via negativa. If we wish to advance our analytical elaboration we need to think of that place as a nameless place and as the place of sex. Which sex? When we say "sex" we are not referring to genital sex. No. We are speaking of the body's greatest capacity to undergo jouissance. In other words, psychoanalysis defines the primary agency of jouissance of the Other as being the place of an unnamable sex, a sex that we are unable to qualify as either feminine or masculine. We are interested in the body as jouissance and yet we ignore the difference between feminine and masculine jouissance. This is exactly the meaning of the statement "There is no sexual relation." Indeed, the body only interests us as a place of jouissance, but when it is a question of defining jouissance, or knowing what it means when a body is carried to the limit of its capacity for jouissancethe jouissance of the mystic, for example, or the jouissance inherent in the act of suicidethen we recognize the existence of jouissance but we cannot define its nature. Now if psychoanalysis recognizes the unfathomable nature of jouissance this is far from a simple confession of powerlessness. If psychoanalysis were to limit itself only to declaring that "jouissance is a mystery," it would only be another mysticism that is fascinated by the abyss. Theoretical work does not simply involve stating here is the real that is unknown," but tries to delineate or write the limits of the real. Lacan's formula "There is no sexual relation" is precisely an attempt to delineate the real, to trace or delimit the lack of the signifier of sex in the unconscious. ''There is no sexual relation'' is a statement which means that in our   page_112 Page 113 unconscious the sexual signifiers are not linked together. We recall Lacan again here: "Hence my statement: there is no sexual relation, meaning: formulable in the structure." 27 When psychoanalysis proposes that it is axiomatic that there is no sexual relation, that does not mean that we ignore the love between a man and a woman, or that we ignore the occurrence between them of partial jouissance, either phallic or surplus-of-jouissance. No. Lacan's dictum states that there is no relation in order to oppose a certain idea that would translate the sexual relation as the culminating moment of a unification of two bodies. Lacan opposes this idea that the sexual relation between a man and a woman forms one being. That was the myth of Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium. Now there is no need for our clinical experience with our patients in order to know that in general, between a man and a woman, the encounter remains inevitably discordant. How do they engage in jouissance? We do not know. We know that a woman undergoes jouissance in a manner that is different from that of a man. The two bodies cannot become one, for there is a divergence of sexual jouissance. Let us explain. In an actual sexual relationship, one body relates to a part of the body of an other. Men and women each undergo jouissance with a part of the body of the other. If one of the partners contradicts me by stating that he or she engages in jouissance with the entire body of the other, I would respond, "Perhaps it is with the entire body of the other, but it is with that body insofar as it is reduced to an object." Remember the "arrangement" proposed by Sade in Juliette. "Lend me, Madame, the part of your body that satisfies me and undergo jouissance if you wish with that part of mine which serves you."

In a concrete sexual relation it is not a matter of a jouissance of the entire body of the Other as would be the case of the mystic who undergoes jouissance with God. Indeed, when mystics claim they are open, with their body, in their ecstasies, to God, it is with their entire bodies that they undergo jouissance. But on the contrary when it is a matter of an actual sexual act, it is with the body of the Other that has been reduced to an object that one undergoes in jouissancethe Other, reduced to the other. Our question returns: "Who is the other?" "Who is the partner in the sexual relation?" "At the moment of orgasm who is the other?" The other is a partial object, therefore the two partners are reduced to the status of an object, the one for the other.   page_113 Page 114 SEXUAL BODY SPEAKING BODY IMAGINARY BODY A TOXIC EXCESS OF JOUISSANCE THE TUMOR OF THE EYE THE ANALYST'S REVIVAL OF MEANING THE LOCATION OF JOUISSANCE IN THE CURE? THE FUNCTION OF LISTENING  

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Fifth Lesson The Body Jouissance can only be apprehended and conceived in terms of the body. In whatever way that it undergoes jouissance, whether well or badly, it only pertains to a body to experience jouissanceor not. This, at least, is the definition that we will give jouissance. Jacques Lacan Some of you have asked me to go more deeply, in this final lesson, into the question of the body in psychoanalysis. By now you realize that even if I have not devoted a lesson to it, the psychoanalytic concept of the body has been present throughout the entirety of our work and more particularly, in the sections in which I treated of the notions of object a, desire, and jouissance. Before beginning, I would like to make a preliminary remark concerning the relation between the psychoanalyst and theory. These past days our work has taken place under the heading of our relation to theory. Now, what in fact does theory mean to us? The place of theory in analysis, if we state it in one word, is that of truth. This does not mean that theory states the truth, but rather that it functions in service of truth. It determines, in us, consciously or unconsciously, a particular mode of analytic action. I could, for instance show you very clearly the articulation between jouissance and the body. We would develop these notions in great detail and it could be that, tomorrow, in your consultation, at work with your patients, these notions that we will have studied together will not seem to be true. One can leave a seminar like ours, enlightened with respect to the concept of the body, but without this new knowledge producing any change in our listening. Now, the value of theory is precisely to provoke effects upon our listening. Theory can be true on the condition that truth is conceived of as an   page_115

Page 116 efficient cause. Psychoanalytic truth is not defined on the basis of the adequation of a word to a thing. It is not a statement that would express the essence of a thing. No. For analysts, the value of truth lies in its power to determine an act in the cure. This remains the best perspective with regard to theory. However, this disposition or openness to the effects of truth does not imply that we should not pay attention to the classical works of psychoanalysis. Quite to the contrary, one must read passionately. One must read to understand, to learn, to link concepts together. This is certain. But realize that this passionate will to engage the theoretical texts is not sufficient. It is also necessary that the words, the concepts, and a certain logical thinking have the power to provoke concrete and visible effects in the analyst's work. What are these effects? I will delineate three: First, quite simply, the theory has the practical value of offering us words that allow us to speak in a common language about all the phenomenon produced by the unconscious, which we perceive in our analysand and in ourselves. Second, the constant use of the analytic concepts and words in the work of the psychoanalyst favors a singular refinement of sensorial organs, a broadening of the field of auditory and visual perceptions, and in particular a sharpening of the perception that allows us to perceive the presence of the unconscious jouissance, beyond the features and appearances of our analysand. Third, the real and practical effect provoked by theory is its consolidation of our membership in the social community of analysts who speak the same theoretical language and carry the same ideals with which each of us identify. We have studied hard and dwelled on theory and yet I realize as time passes and as my knowledge increases that the scope of a theory cannot be measured in terms of knowledge, but rather by the degree to which it has an effect on the work with our patients, and even our way of living, I will even say, our lifestyle. I just wanted, before speaking of the body, to alert you: be open-minded, not only in order to learn the theorythere you should be passionatebut above all remain open and tell yourself: "Theory will cause me, unconsciously, when I do not expect it, to adopt a special listening." Theory would not have this power to have an effect on us, and through us on our analysand, if we were not passionate about the action of working a text, of wringing it of its meaning, of bearing down with the body until the concept becomes our efficient truth. It is necessary to be passionate about theory so that in turn it can have an   page_116 Page 117 effect on us, and makes us act without our knowledge. We will thus be in the position of the analysand who must love or hate or be dominated by the passion of the transference so that his saying has validity. Yes, in relation to theory, the psychoanalyst is subject to the effects of truth as the analysand is subject to the effects of the unconscious, with the difference however, of being passionate. Very well. Let's get to the problem of the body now. How did this question arise for you? It was because of the difficulties that emerge in our analytic practice. I am thinking more specifically of psychosomatic afflictions and organic troubles of the body that appear in the course of the cure. In order to respond to you I would first like to return to the more general status of the body and to redefine it following two fundamental parameters which, we recall, delimit the psychoanalytic field. These parameters are in fact speech and sex. Anything that is not covered by the domains of speech and sex lies outside of our purview. It is as if on the front of the theoretical edifice of psychoanalysis it was engraved: "Those who enter here agree and know that what is encountered within is determined by speech and sex." Contrary to the surgeon who faces the body of the patient and treats it as an organism without concern for knowing that it speaks or if it undergoes jouissance, the psychoanalyst must constantly refer directly or indirectly to these parameters of sex and speech and conceive thus two aspects of the body: the speaking body and the sexual body. Already, in our two previous lessons we had arrived at quite a sophisticated definition of the body in its status as a sexual body, reduced to the part undergoing jouissance. We have seen from this perspective that there is no such thing as a total body, but that the body is always a part, and more substantially, that it is the local jouissance accumulated in that part. We recall the examples of the dancer's foot and the voyeur's eye that allowed us to understand just how much the body was pure tension, pure jouissance, condensed in one organ or the other. On the basis of our reflections on object a,we placed ourselves from the outset in the perspective of the sexual body. But what is a sexual body? Why is it called

sexual? This is because the body is jouissance through and through and because jouissance is sexual. For we should not forget that jouissance is nothing other than the thrust of unconscious energy when it is engendered by the erogenous orifices of the body; when it is expressed either directly through action or indirectly through speech or fantasy; or when it is that impulse that is   page_117 Page 118 always guided by the unattainable horizon of the incestuous sexual relation. Jouissance, effectively, can only be sexual because the ideal goal toward which it aspires is sexual. Consequently, everything that it touches and involves in its flux is sexualized, whether an action, a saying, a fantasy, or such organs of the body that have become erogenous. Analysis is distinctive . . . in that it states the following, which is at the core of my teaching: I speak without knowing. I speak with my body, and this without knowing. I say thus always more than what I know. Jacques Lacan If we now consider the other fundamental parameter, language, we must respond to the question: What is a speaking body? "Speaking body" means that the body with which psychoanalysis is concerned is not the body of flesh and bone, but a body taken to be a collection of signifying elements. The speaking body can be, for example, a face, insofar as a face is composed of lines, of expressions, and of different characteristics as well as the connections between them. Now let us be clear, the adjective "speaking" does not indicate that the body speaks to us, but that it signifies, that is to say that it involves signifiers that speak. This particular face, in all its complexity of distinct elements, is more than a suggestive expression. When a face causes a feeling, it is a body-image; but when the same face causes an unexpected comment, it is a body-signifier. Let us imagine an analyst going to meet his or her patient in the waiting room, and who, while welcoming the patient, notices their face. I believe that the analyst must be completely aware of the analysand's face at this moment. For me, this is a habitual gesture; it is more than a welcome, it is the first step in the session that is about to begin. Many analysts do not shake hands. I shake hands and moreover, I look at them. I am attentive to the face and the allure of the patient and to their manner of settling into the session. But the body that evokes my feeling of sympathy or antipathy is not the signifying body. On the contrary, a face will signify to the extent that it causes, within me, an unexpected intervention in the course of the session. At the very moment when I greet my patient, I clear my mind of all thoughts, turn toward his or her face and perceive the emotion that can   page_118 Page 119 be found there. We enter the room with the couch, he or she lays down, speaks, and I listen to them. At a particular moment of the session, I surprise myself by suddenly intervening, referring not so much to the contents of his or her speech, but to the articulation of that speech in conjunction with a facial feature that I had captured when we first met, without really perceiving it. That face signifies because, like truth, it determines the psychoanalyst's intervention during the sessions. Thus the signifying body is not one that speaks to me, but one with the power of determining an act in the cure, without my knowing it. But we must add a third perspective in order to define the body in psychoanalysis. The body, we have seen, is a speaking body as well as sexual, but it is alsoand this will be my third propositionan image. It is not my own image in the mirror but the image reflected back by the other, my double [semblable]. It is an other that is not necessarily a fellow human being, but any object in the world in which I live. I perceive the image of my body first and foremost outside of my body. It returns to me from without in order to give form and consistency to my sexual body, that of jouissance. As an image, the body would rather be that watch, my watch, or even that copper lamp or that house in which I speak to you. These objects are an image, my image, insofar as they (the watch, the copper lamp, the house) take on an affective value. I would claim that if something is to have intimate meaning for me, the house for example, as an image of my body, it must become no less than an extension of my body. Thus I call the bodywith this third definitionany body-image that unifies two characteristics: first, that of originating from the outside, from another human or any object around me having

a form that speaks to me; and second, that of being full and ready to embody the sources of my jouissance. Thus the sexual body as well as the body that undergoes jouissance remain hidden by the imaginary semblances that I grasp outside. We see that the body can be considered from three complementary points of view: in the first place, from the point of view of the Real, the body is synonymous with jouissance; as regards the Symbolic, we have the signifying body, a collection of differentiated elements, each which determines an act in the other; and finally, the imaginary body, which is identified with an external and full image that arouses meaning in a subject. These are the three perspectives that I propose to adopt in order to define the body within the psychoanalytic field.  

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With respect to body-jouissance: if for psychoanalysis the body is always partial and is only jouissance, would that mean that the purely organic body, the flesh-and-bone body, would be the whole body, I mean, the body separated from the part that undergoes jouissance? This is a pertinent question but at the same time one that is difficult because it concerns the delicate relation, one that is full of nuances, between the body and jouissance. Everything depends on the meaning that we accord to the terms. It so happens that Lacan formulated two apparently contradictory principles in order to define jouissance. In 1967 Lacan often referred to the concept of jouissance in its relation to that of the body. The following are the two formulations that Lacan repeated many times: "There is only jouissance of the body," and in the same epoch, he confirmed to the contrary "a disjunction between the body and jouissance." According to my reading, these statements are not contradictory as long as we accept the fact that the word "body" is used with a different meaning in each of the formulations. In the first, "There is only jouissance of the body,'' one must understand the word ''body" as a partial body. This is the meaning that we have understood throughout our seminar. We note that we could have given another interpretation that would also be quite legitimate, and which would involve a simple affirmation: the necessary and sufficient condition of jouissance is the existence of a living body. There would only be jouissance in a living organic body. If there is no life, there is no jouissance. For a body to undergo jouissance, it must be alive. Lacan's second formulation, jouissance is distinct from the body," has a complementary meaning to the first statement on the condition that we translate the word "body" as we have just done, as "the body of flesh and bone." This is the organic body, understood as the underlying nonjouissance from which the partial jouissance condensed in a corporal segmentsuch as the dancer's foot or the voyeur's eyesemerges. Jouissance is in effect radically separate from the body, if the body is considered to be organic, that with which psychoanalysis does not concern itself. One can read Lacan's second formulation by translating it in the following way: partial jouissance is separate from the organic body considered as a whole body, the body of the Other, the fictive body from whence a partial jouissance would be detached. Finally, the problem that Lacan raises with his two principles relative to jouissance refers to the dialectical relation of the part to the whole. Within this couple, psychoanalysis privileges the part because   page_120 Page 121 in the life of the unconscious one only encounters the partial. We know that in the dimension of the Real, the Symbolic, or the Imaginary, we always remain within the limits of the partial. If we consider the status of the body as real, we will find that jouissance is always partial and consequently, since the body is jouissance, we will conclude that the body itself is also partial. We would even propose that the body is compressed and reduced in the very fact of undergoing jouissance. If we now consider the imaginary status of the body, it is again its partial nature which is confirmed. When I recognize this house as a form charged with meaning and that this meaning is itself the image of my body, it is the dimension of the partial which prevails, because it is not the whole house, but one of its aspects that gives me stability. A face, as well, is only a signifying body as partial body, for the discrete element at the source of an act in analysis is always limited to a part of the body, a glance, a grimace, a freckle. Inevitably there is but one element that acts, and it

belongs to the order of the One, because the image is always a part and because jouissance is always localized. As we can see, the problem of partiality resides in the ambiguity of the word "partial" because it leads us to suppose the necessary complementarity of a Whole. If I say that the object is a partial object, my affirmation supposes the prior existence of a Whole from which the object has been detached. This statement is legitimate if the totality from which an object is extracted is a fictive totality. This is what Lacan means when he affirms that the Other does not exist. In psychoanalysis, any totality is fictional. We have two of the most illuminating illustrations of the body as a fictive totality. First, the total image of the body perceived by the infant in the mirror stage. Recall that for Lacan, the child discovers an imaginary unity of the body in the mirror, a body which is in reality only multiple and uncoordinated sensations. The other example of the global and fictional body is that of the mother in relation to the partial objects detached from her, such as the breast. We have already considered this during our third lesson. That said, we should not be too negative with respect to this totality, for totalities are necessary to the constitution of the imaginary as well as necessary to the functioning of the symbolic. The fiction of the Whole that Lacan would include as one of the major figures of semblance is as indispensable to symbolic life as the original lie that Aristotle qualified as the proton pseudos.  

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But I would like to approach the problem that you raise, of the practitioner faced with the overwhelming presence of the body in the cure. The first way of orienting oneself in the face of such a difficulty is to have a theory and to test it. In order to situate oneself properly for listening, certain conditions are necessary: first, to have a theory; then, to substitute a fantasy for it which is both derived from concepts and from the concrete statements of the patient. Then, prepared in this way, to dispose oneself to listening while having forgotten all that, theory and fantasy, without trying to overcome the forgetting. Now, exactly how can we theorize about the psychosomatic disorders and the organic illnesses that emerge in the course of the treatment? What theory can be employed? With the three aspects of the body that we just analyzed, it is clear that in these disorders, one of them breaks the knot of the Real, of the Symbolic, and of the Imaginary, causing a major disruption in the analytic scene. Which body? This is the body of the real that undergoes jouissance, and which, through an overflowing of jouissance, overturns the flesh and bone of the subject. Now, which of Freud's theories explains the organic emotions encountered in the course of analysis? Freud, in fact, gave attention to the body's organic affections by explaining their psychogenesis by an excessive intensification of the erogenous role of the organ that disturbs its physiological functions, even injuring the tissues. In a remarkable lecture held in 1910 and devoted to the historical troubles afflicting vision, 28 Freud considered the organic disturbances of vision and laid the foundations of a psychoanalytic theory that would be capable of explaining the role played by the psyche in a somatic change. A bodily organ which performs physiologically in a normal way suddenly becomes massively infused with libido, a libido that transforms it into the equivalent of a genital organ. The functional role is diverted to the erogenous role. But it happens that the libido builds up and stagnates there to such an extent that the organ is affected at its cellular level. In order to describe this morbid state as an excessive jouissance, Freud employs the expression toxic changes'' in the organic substance caused by a "suppression of sexual component instincts" or an "exaggeration of the erotogenic role" of the organ. We can see clearly how the real body of jouissance confiscates the organ and destroys its tissues as a toxic agent as it invades the space of the cure. It is precisely with respect to these atypical manifestations of the body in the course of the cure as well as other externalizations of the overflowing of jouissanceas in the case of the occurrence of an acting   page_122 Page 123 out or hallucinationthat I could propose the concept of "formations of object a" as a complement to the Lacanian theory of object a. The psychical formations are characterized by a fundamental fact: jouissance governs and seems to have broken the dam of repression, or, in other words, seems to have overturned the phallus. Faced with these formations of a, the practitioner always touches on the limits of his action and his place is subverted to

such an extent that he is forced to redefine his role. When jouissance erupts massively in the cure, whether as a suicide attempt, a serious acting out, or even a somatic suffering, we are inevitably challenged with respect to the capacity of our theory to account for these clinical facts, as well as with respect to our ability to preserve the integrity of analysis and manage the impact that, for each of us, the trial of facing the real in a cure signifies. I would like to illustrate the presence of a formation of jouissance of object a in the cure by relating a case to you of an analysand who suffered a serious organic illness during analysis. Some time back, I accompanied a patient to the door of my office. Without giving much attention to it I took note of her face and I had the sudden impression that her eye was slightly exophthalmic. I asked spontaneously, "What is wrong with your eye?" "Nothing," she replied. ''It has been some time since I felt it." And nevertheless with her hand at her temple she added, "Well, these past days I have often had a headache.'' Immediately I responded, "Haven't you sought help?" She responded in the negative. I suggested that she meet with a specialist. I did not know if this ocular anomaly had already been present for a time. As it turned out, she was taken immediately to an opthalmologist who, following an exam, diagnosed a benign tumor located at the supraorbital enix and having also attacked the frontal bone. Shortly after my departure from Paris she underwent a successful operation. With this short clinical vignette I want to show above all a certain disposition essential to analytic practice. It is a disposition that escapes a conscious and intentional calculation, and which, with time, becomes completely natural: to look the patient in the face, to encounter the patient's body as I encountered my patient. I only perceived the anomaly   page_123 Page 124 of the eye in the course of my listening, a listening over two years of analysis, and that made me sensitively receptive: to welcome, then enter, almost as if I entered into the patient's eye; as if I entered into their eye through my own eye, directed by my listening. Otherwise, I am certain that I would never have perceived the exophthalmia. In order to grasp it I had to be included in the body of the analysand. What body? In the body that was reduced to the diseased eye. And what was the eye if not an organ of jouissance, a body undergoing jouissance? But I must rather say and suggest that in order to grasp the exophthalmiaa sign of morbid jouissanceit was necessary that I myself be, simultaneously, the jouissance of the tumor and the jouissance of a look. Recall the Lacanian proposition that calls the analyst's position as being that of the surplus-of-jouissance, of object a. We therefore have two different figures of the surplus-of-jouissance, and thereby, two facets of the place that the analyst must occupy in order to assume his or her function: being the tumor itself and being the look that sees the tumor. You explained the appearance of the tumor as a subversion by the real of the knot of the Symbolic-Imaginary-Real triad. Would you say that the body of the patient is reduced exclusively to the lone noxious presence of the real? It depends on one's point of view. It is true that the somatic suffering of the analysand breaks the balance between the three aspects of the body in favor of the supremacy of the real in the transference; yet analysis is there, that is, the analytic context and the analyst are there to ensure that the real, even in its most recalcitrant form, is reincorporated into the world of meaning. Any event, insofar as it remains included in the transferential relation, can be envisaged simultaneously according to the different perspectives of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. From the point of view of the Real, in effect, the patient's tumor is reduced to the density of a jouissance that makes the patient seriously ill. When we affirm that this lesion of the organ appears in the dimension of the Real, we mean not only that it is situated beyond any symbolic relation, but also that it lies beyond our knowledge. To say that the tumor belongs to the real means that we understand neither the substance nor the nature of its jouissance, nor the cause of its occurrence. Now, if we consider the symbolic perspective, the eruption of this anomaly in the body constitutes a signifying event on the way to a cure. Even if we tried to ignore jouissance as such, our role, I insist, would be to make this event meaningful. That is, as meaningful, the   page_124

Page 125 event is offered to us as a sign from which we extract a meaning, if only the meaning that I elaborate with you at this very moment. In the sessions that I pursued with the analysand, I did not interpret the emergence of her illness as a chance event, but as an event that was predetermined, psychically predetermined. We have known since Freud that chance disappears from the moment that we provide a meaning. We believe that chance exists insofar as it remains inexplicable, that is, real. In other words, the event remains fortuitous as long as it is not interpretedchance exists; and it ceases to be fortuitous as soon as one gives it a meaningand chance no longer exists. In this regard I would like to cite a short sentence from Freud: "I believe in external (real chance), it is true, but not in internal (psychical) accidental events." 29 The first meaning, quite general, which appeared to me, was my beliefa kind of causal suppositionthat the eruption of the tumor and the reaction of the analyst were events that "waited" to be produced and were to take place inevitably. I had thought, but had not communicated to the patient, "Basically, I have the impression that you came to analysis precisely so that I would ask you, at a particular moment, what is wrong with your eye?" You have in this case different gestures of the analyst that envelop the brute fact of reality with meaning and envisage the tumor from a symbolic point of view. The first gesture was to motivate the patient to consult a specialist; this was common sense. The second was the invention of a teleological hypothesis in order to attempt to explain the inexplicable cause of a tumor; and finally the gesture that we are exhibiting now, that of discussing this clinical experience with you. It remains for us to consider, briefly, the tumor from the perspective of the Imaginary. I had the opportunity in the months that followed to work with the patient and asked her to draw the image of the tumor, which was placed between the meningus and the orbital arcade, on a piece of paper. All of these gestures that generate meaning show that, faced with the real, the analyst has no other choice than to occupy the place of the master, the one who produces meaning. It is as if the analyst, by giving meaning to an event which is by nature heterogeneous, attempts to reconstruct the symbolic chain that, until then, had structured the transferential relation. It is a chain that was broken at the moment when the massive eruption of jouissance broke one of the signifying   page_125 Page 126 links. By giving meaning, the psychoanalyst assumes the place of the master and enters the chain in order to take the place of the detached link, that is, the place of the foreclosed signifier. By giving meaning, the psychoanalyst performs a function that opposes foreclosure. He performs, as it were, a counterforeclosure. Thus, anything that begins and develops in analysis can be considered according to several perspectives that are in no way incompatible. Nothing prevents the lesion produced in the real from being inserted in a historical sequence that is overdetermined and therefore symbolic. The fact that the patient comes to analysis, that she began the cure, that this episode has taken place already, and that what will develop in the course of the next sessionsall that is symbolic. But that does not prevent us from considering the tumor in itself as an excess of jouissance, as a real that has invaded the transference immeasurably. Let me add in order to be complete that as in the case of any psychical formation that is produced in the course of a cure, whether it is a formation of the unconscious or a formation of object a, that episode is located, as well, in the Imaginary. How is the initiative that you have taken to direct the patient to a doctor to be understood? Isn't that interfering in the patient's life? Couldn't we say that you have left the normal context of analysis? First I must tell you that during the days surrounding this episode, I often thought that the patient expressed in that moment and in her body the tension of a jouissance that was not her own but one that belonged to the analytic relation itself. I never doubted that I shared the tumor during the cure because I am convinced that, as is the case with the individual unconscious, the place of jouissance in the cure is also that of the in-between. When we say that the body is a part and that this part undergoes jouissance, it must be understood that the place of the body in analysis is that of the interval between the armchair and the couch, and that this place is precisely that of the analyst. That being said, when you ask me the meaning of my intervention when I referred the patient to an opthalmologist, I would answer from the outset that faced with such a fact of jouissance, and faced with any fact of the unconscious, the analyst's responses can be quite diverse and at the same time remain coherent. I am in profound disagreement with this

prejudice that limits the analyst to the superficial alternative of being a pure analyst or being nothing at all. This is a   page_126 Page 127 dogmatic and artificial vision of the analytic function. I believe, on the contrary, that analytic action includes several possible positions that the practitioner may takeall of which are legitimate. The strictly analytic position, as Lacan showed us, is that of representing object a. But this position, which for the most part is rare, is clearly not the only one. If we reconsider the terms of the four discourses established by Lacan, it happens that the analyst occupies in turn the position of the master who governs, the hysteric who seduces, the knowledge that teaches, and certainly, the analytic position proper, the driving force of the cure. What are the different positions that we can concretely locate, in the episode that I have related to you. I envisage three. First, that of occupying the place of jouissance, or as we have often said, the place of object a. And that in a twofold way: being in the place of the tumor itself, and being in the place of the gaze which has seen the tumor. We must formulate it abruptly: the analyst is incarnated by the tumor, an intense center of jouissance, as if welcomed into the suffering of the eye. But from this example yet another position occupied by the analyst is revealed, that which is indicated at the moment when, concerned with the need for a doctor, the analyst advises the analysand to consult a specialist. If I had to qualify this last position, I would call it, following Lacan, "the position of the master," to the extent that this act of advising lends me an authoritative role. In this respect, I would like to return to certain details of the clinical episode with the patient and confirm the soundness of the position of the master. When the patient learned the diagnosis and understood the need for the operation she was deeply anguished and upset. I suggested the following: "We should not rush, for its always preferable to consult another surgeon and receive a second opinion." Throughout this period I maintained this position. I had no difficulty doing so. When the date of the operation was set, I took the initiative, with the agreement of my patient, to telephone that neurosurgeon to let him know that I wished to be kept apprised of the prognosis and developments. He responded nicely by explaining the nature of the problem in detail and showing his surprise that this patient had been referred to him by a psychoanalyst, just in time for him to intervene before the tumor worsened. The night of the operation, as I had requested, the surgeon told the patient of our telephone conversation, which had the decisive effect, in my view, of assuring her of the involvement of her analyst in addition to supporting her confidence in her surgeon. After the operation I learned that everything went according to plan. 30   page_127 Page 128 Needless to say, I am not telling you a typical manner of proceeding; this was my particular mode of intervention in a very specific case. Confronted with a similar situation, other practitioners would probably intervene differently. If you were inclined to intervene in a way similar to mine, and you hesitate, above all do not intervene. When an analyst hesitates between speaking and remaining silent it is better that he or she be silent and maintain reserve, which is the healthiest position. The analyst does not work only by saying: "this tumor is a formation of object a, a toxic excess of jouissance," but the analyst also positions him or herself as a master concerned with regulatingas possible the disjunction that holds between the organic body and jouissance of which Lacan speaks. It is as if the analyst attempted in different ways, including that of mastery, to assume the exclusive function of the phallus in order to avoid jouissance becoming excessively morbid and destroying or devouring the organic body. The third and final position of the analyst revealed by this clinical sequence is that of the analyst, who by his or her presence and listening materializes the signifier, One signifier that reintegrates the symbolic chain at the place of the missing link and sets the process of repetition back in motion. To say that the analyst is in the place of a signifier that jump-starts the chain, or to say that the analyst is in the place of phallus that regulates jouissance means the same thing. But we must not forget that if the analyst is able to rejoin this function of the One (S1) and thereby, that of the whole chain (S2), it is due to the fact that he or she did not hesitate at the right moment to generate meaning. You understand now that all these positions, far from being incompatible, coexist in the practitioner's work. Let us summarize briefly. The analyst who perceives the exophthalmia is in the place of object a represented by the tumor and the gaze; the analyst who refers the patient to a doctor, shares her difficulty, and hypothesizes to take account of a fact

that is ultimately inexplicable, is in the place of S1, which is represented by the mastery that generates meaning; and finally, the analyst who by his or her listening is also in the place of S1, but in this case, as that signifier that is missing from the chain, resets the loop of repetition and causes analysis to continue. Still from the same perspective of the presence of the body in the cure, how is one to distinguish theoretically between an organic lesion such as a   page_128 Page 129 tumor of the eye, and a symptom of conversion hysteria, as for example a temporary diminution of the visual field? Your questions lead me to the distinction that I have been able to establish between the formations of the unconsciousfor which the neurotic symptom is the prototypeand the formations of object a, for which the organic lesion is a good illustration. I will delineate the difference between these formations in two sections. First, their difference as seen from the perspective of the transference, and then more theoretically, their difference considered in terms of a metapsychology. Let us recall first our position in the first lessons on the unconscious. You will easily admit that the emergence of an unconscious formation such as the hysterical symptom to which you refer is a signifying activation of the unconscious, and consequently of the transference. At that moment, the signifiers arrange themselves through and without the knowledge of the analytic partners and, by gathering punctually in the act of a saying or a forgetting, weave the transferential bond. One of the partners speaks, and, by not knowing what he or she is saying, activates the transference. By speaking, he or she attests to the fact that the signifiers are circulating and will continue to circulate between analyst and patient. Now the psychical formations of object a (we have had an example of this in the ocular tumor) also bring about the transferential bond, but in a sense which seems odd. They bring about the bond through fusion and not by attachment. They weld the analyst and analysand in a dense and immeasurable place, a place that we identify as the place of the surplus-of-jouissance (object a). This place is not present, like the signifier, as a saying that is inserted into a linguistic sequence, but it is manifest as an act, as an overpowering fact, unexpected and at times brutal. The act is the clinical expression of these formations of the object, and it is in an act that the transference is condensed. Whether it is a question of unconscious fantasies, episodic hallucinations, a suicide attempt, or even a tumoral lesion such as just mentioned, all are configurations marked by the imprint of a well-defined action and are perfectly separable from the narrative of the analysand. Whether they are represented by a saying within the narrativein the case of a fantasyor enacted outside of itin the case of an acting out, an hallucination, or a deliriumthese formations are seen by the analyst as active figures in which a part of the body that   page_129 Page 130 undergoes jouissance prevails. To fantasize, to hallucinate, to suffer from a diseased organ are "acts" of which the agent is not the subject, but an autonomous and delimited region of the body which dominates the whole of the transferential reality. At the time of the appearance of the formation of the object, the ordinary elements of the reality of the cure (signifiers, meanings, images, fiction) seem absorbed in a single active center in which they all converge. At that moment, transference is no longer splayed out, structured like a language, but is condensed in an action and in an objectal activation. In the formations of the unconscious, the act was an activation and the signifiers were linked through their connections in a network. Now, in this case, the act is a blockage, and object a crystallizes the analyst/analysand relation in a dense and final jouissance. In short, I classify under the name Formations of object a these various psychical formations that are encountered the cure more often that one thinks and which actualize the transfer in a dense fact, heterogeneous to signifiers, or to the

contrary compatible with the signifiers as in the particular case of a fantasy. If we now consider the distinction between the formations of the unconscious and the formations of object a according to their psychical structure, that is, according to the mechanism that produces them, we then discover that the formations of the object are produced by foreclosure. Thus the symptom of conversion hysteria is explained by repression: the symptom, as in the case of the hysterical diminuition of the visual field, is the substitute (S1) in the body of a representation that is repressed in the unconscious (S2). In the formation of a neurotic symptom, the signifying articulation of the S1/S2 is maintained. In contrast, the organic lesion, as in the case of all formations of the object (except for the fantasy), results from a mechanism of foreclosure. That is to say, no substitute (S1) of the repressed representation (S2) occurred where it was expected. And consequently there was neither metaphor nor symbolic chain. The relation of the signifier (S1) with another signifier (S2) is here broken. It is as if in foreclosure the signifier is no longer linked to other signifiers, as if the signifiers no longer articulate among themselves. The particle "for" in the Lacanian statement, "A signifier represents the subject for other signifiers," has been, in foreclosure, abolished, and the signifying link undone.   page_130 Page 131 But concretely, how is the analyst able to distinguish in practice a psychic formation produced by repression from a psychic formation produced by foreclosure? We can distinguish two minimal criteria: In the first place, in the case of a hysterical symptom provoked by repressiona diminution of the visual field, for examplethe affected organ (in this case the eye) garners the symbolic value of being one link among others in the signifying chain. In the second place, importantly, the psychoanalyst can be considered an integral part of the same chain of signifying elements. He or she is from the outset one element among others of the chain. We would even say that by listening he or she represents the chain. This function of listening, as a field open to any possible event in analysis, can be rendered with the Lacanian notation S2. S2 symbolizes listening. It is precisely this signifier S2, through the production of meaning, that I tried to reestablish during the difficult period of my analysand's operation. On the basis of my listening (S2), I was able to represent a signifier (S1) which was inserted into the unconscious chain in order to launch the transference. Nevertheless, the most typical analytic gesture which permits the analyst to relaunch the chain remains interpretation. An interpretation, with all its signifying impact, will have the power to insert itself in the circulation of signifiers to restart repetition and allow the substitution of another signifier for the hysterical symptom. Now, this eminently signifying function of the analyst and his or her interpretative action does not work right away in the case of an organic illness that occurs in the cure, such as my patient's tumor. For in principle, an organic lesion resists integration into any chain or symbolic order. Faced with an organic lesion, the analyst is deprived of all signifying power and his or her best interpretation is powerless to penetrate the density of jouissance. There remains, however, the difficult possibility of "attacking" the organic lesion indirectly, as we have seen in our detour taken by the production of meaning. In our example of the tumor, I could not offer an interpretation but needed to resolve to give meaning, an action which proved efficacious in the end. In a word, if you wish to differentiate the organic lesion from a conversion symptom and more generally a formation of object a from a formation of the unconscious, one will have to observe above all the conduct of the psychoanalyst and the effects of his or her action with respect to the patient.   page_131 Page 133

Appendix: The Concept of the Subject of the Unconscious

to trust nothing but the experience of the subject, which is the sole matter of psychoanalytical work. Jacques Lacan It would seem that being on this podium leads me to ask you, the audience of Dr. Lacan's seminar, for your lenience. 1 For it was only yesterday, Monday at noon, that M. Lacan asked me to speak to you about a question I had mentioned to him. This question is about the theory of the subject of the unconscious. Whereas, at the beginning of the year, my protect was to study the connection between unconscious knowledge and interpretation, as things evolved, the question of the subject took over and became the main problem. This morning, I will limit myself to a short review of the possible ways to approach the concept of the subjectways which most of you certainly already knowin order to then present a few questions to you. I will divide this presentation into three parts: the relation between the subject and unconscious knowledge; the relation between the subject and logic; and finally, the relation between the subject and castration. Our point of departure will be psychoanalysis itself, which is found in that aspect of language expressed by the phrase: "I don't know what I'm saying." If the desire of the hysteric is at the foundation of transference, the "I don't know what I'm saying" is the founding fact of the notion of the unconscious for Freud, and, as we will try to show, of the notion of the unconscious as knowledge [savoir] for Lacan. In fact, this ''I don't know what I'm saying" is not only at the beginning of the history of psychoanalysis, it is also the opening line of any ordinary psychoanalytic undertaking. On the basis of this ''I don't know what I'm saying," which is not always stated as such by the analysand, the analysis begins with a demand for knowledge, sometimes explicit, but inevitably insistent.   page_133 Page 134 The demand for knowledge is what is proper to neurosis. The neurotic is defined by the fact that his demandclear and unambiguousis one for knowledge; he wants to know, he wants the Other to talk to him and teach him. He wants his demand to be met by another demand. It is in this situation that analysis begins. Let us leave aside for the moment an essential aspect: toward what jouissance is this illusory trade between demanding and providing knowledge established? But let us remain with this "I don't know what I'm saying." What don't I know? I do not know that what I am saying is a signifier And what is a signifier? No problem! as my daughter would say. A signifier is what represents a subject for another signifier! Who here does not know this formulation? The tinge of irony in saying "No problem!" is very revealing, as we have reached the point where the signifier does not astonish or puzzle anybody anymore, while paradoxically, in psychoanalytic theory, we use the concept of signifier to define astonishment: a subject feels astonishment precisely when the impact of the signifier is felt. To be astonished is to bear the effect of the signifier, not taking it immediately as a sign, not grasping it, not understanding it. For, having understood, one is no longer astonished. Therefore, not being astonished is being too sure of one's knowledge. And in a sense, that is what happens with the formulation "what is the signifier?"; one is too sure, too close to what one understands. Again: what is a signifier? There are several ways to approach it. One of these ways will be my guiding thread: the signifier, precisely, is that which is not to be understood, an incomprehensible representation. With Lacan, a break occurred which decisively overturned the theory of knowledge. It consists in the fact that the subject carries a representation which is not addressed to it. This break had not happened before in philosophy, with one exception to which we will come later. Traditionally, representation is given to the one who carries it; representation is to represent for somebody. But what is new with Lacan is that the representation carried by the subject is cut from it, not addressed to it. The subject carries it, but the addressee is elsewhere. This break can be traced back to a rather old concept, that of "incomprehensible representation." Where does it come from? Two beautiful books on the Skeptics that I recommend to youLe Scepticisme et le Phénomène by Jean-Pierre Dumont, and a classic, Les Sceptiques Grecs, by Victor Brochard 2are of help here. Let us not forget also the classics by Sextus Empiricus, who, being himself a Skeptic, was one of the best historians of this Greek school. In this philosophy, representation was considered to be something incomprehensible. For   page_134 Page 135

sure, they did not say, as I just did, that it is not addressed to the subject, but they went quite far. One of them, Carneades, stated: "An incomprehensible representation is inevitably linked to other incomprehensible representations, constituting themselves together into a chain." Reading this, of course, I could not help thinking about our signifying chain. But I will not dwell on this any longer. "I don't know what I'm saying"; why? Because this statement is a signifier and, as such, is not addressed to the speaker, but to another signifier. It is addressed to the Other I speak, I produce sounds [des sons], I construct significations [des sens], but what is said escapes me. It escapes me because it is not in the subject's power to know with which other statement this statement will link itself. "The signifier is addressed to the Other" means that it will attach itself to another signifier, elsewhere, next to it, later So, what don't I know? I don't know the effect on youon the Otherof what I say. And because I do not know what I am saying, I say more than I intend. I want to emphasize here, even though it is not our theme, that it is when I do not know what I am saying that the question arises. What question? The most pressing one: "What is happening to me?" Or, put in psychoanalytic terms: "What of this missing signifier of the Other in me? Where will my statement attach itself, and where does it come from? " By simply stating this question, the subject sets up or erects the Other as desiring. You ask yourself: what is my dream, what does it mean? You ask yourself: why do I suffer from this symptom? You ask yourself: why do I forget? In so doing, you set up the Other as desiring. In a word, I do not know what I am saying because my statement goes elsewhere, is addressed to the Other despite myself, and comes from the Other despite myself It comes from the Other and it is addressed to the Other, it begins from the Other, and it goes back to the Other. There is yet another reason for this "why I do not know what I'm saying." The subject which states its statementI emphasize: the subject which statesis not the same when the message happens to come back to it. We are no longer the same, because in the act of saying, I change; the expression "subject: effect of the signifier" means precisely that the subject changes with the act of saying. Let us take a closer look. You know the function for Lacan of the I in the statement. Because of Lacan's frequent references to Jakobson and Jespersen, there is an odd tendency to attribute their conception of the "I" to him, including for example, the concept of "shifter", when he   page_135 Page 136 in fact does not maintain it. When a subject says "I", this I does not indicate the subject of enunciation. In this regard, Lacan is not always clear; however, in Ecrits, there is an unequivocal formulation: the I that appears in the statement designates the one who performs the act of enunciation; until this point, this is what all linguists would say, but what they do not say is this: this I designates the subject of the statement, but does not signify it. This I does not tell us anything about the subject of enunciation. Therefore, we can wonder: to whom does this I refer in the statement "I don't know what I'm saying"? Since it cannot signify the one who performs the act of enunciation (subject of enunciation), whom does it signify? We are thus led to the question: who am I, at the point where I speak, where I carry a signifier? In short, what do I not know? 1. I do not know that I was there under such and such a signifier. Or that such and such a statement was the signifier, my signifier, the signifier of the subject, of me as subject (I have to use the expression "me as subject" in order to be clear, but of course, the two are radically different). Thus, I was there, under a particular signifier, and that, I do not know. I do not know that I was there, at the point of non-knowledge. And this point of non-knowledge signifies that which has escaped the Other and is addressed to it: thus, the missing point of the Other. 2. Not knowing what signifier I was under the aegis of, I thereby cannot know the other signifier to which it was addressed. In other words: in saying, I do not know what signifier is expecting me. 3.

I do not know who I am.

In summary, on the one hand we have the fixed subject, tied to the signifier of its act of saying: a saying which it carries

unknowingly. On the other hand, since signifiers succeed each other, the subject is in fact nowhere. I repeat, for this is one of the conclusions which I would like to reach: the subject is in the act of enunciating the statement, but, since the latter comes from the Other and is addressed to the Other, since everything happens between statements, the subject remains suspended, lost, erased in the thousand signifiers in the chain. We are the subject of the act, and paradoxically, in this act we disappear. We are and we are not the subject of the act. I say "we are." But, according to what was just said, "we are" is incorrect. For if I say that the subject is in the act, and then that it is erased in all the statements succeeding each other, the question remains: who is this "we"? I say "we are'', but how could we indicate   page_136 Page 137 otherwise that "we cannot speculate about the subject without beginning from this fact that we ourselves, as subjects, are implicated in this deep duplicity of the subject"? (J. Lacan). In order for you to better understand this subjective caesura, I want to turn to literature, to Pirandellan drama, namely Six Characters in Search of an Author, a classic of theater which was recently shown in Paris. You probably know the plot of this remarkable play: six characters, appearing out of nowhere, climb onto the stage, find the director, and beg him to take them as characters for a work yet to be written. What plot are they proposing? A tragi-comedy. The scene that I want to focus on for this reading begins with the arrival of the father in the house of rather dubious seamstresses. As he is about to seduce if not force one of the prostitutes, ignorant of the fact that she is his stepdaughter, the daughter of his wife, he is suddenly discovered by his wife. At the point where they are already on the bed, the mother enters and cries out: "No, no, she is my daughter!" Here truly is the serial novel set-up. Pirandello's genius was to write a serial novel, in the best Italian, the best Sicilian style, decorated, framed, I would say, by a German play. For, in the middle of this almost farcical scene, Pirandello gives his characters lines which seem to me to be taken out of German philosophy. Here then, is the line of the father as he tries to convince the director that he should hire him.

 

And this, for me, is the heart of the drama: I'm intensely aware you see that people are wrong to think of themselves as just one person. Each one of us is lots and lots of people. Any number because of all the countless possibilities of being that exist within us. The person you are with me is quite different from the person you are with somebody else. But we go on thinking we're exactly the same person for everybody, the person we think we are in our own mind and in everything we do. But this isn't the case at all! It comes home to us best when by some ghastly mischance we are caught out in an un-typical act. We suddenly find we are sort of dangling from a hook! I mean we can see that the act isn't "us," our whole self isn't in it. And it would be a savage injustice to judge us on that act alone, never to let us off the hook, to hold us to it, chain us up for life on the strength of it for all to see, as if that one action summed up our whole existence! So now do you see how treacherous this girl is being? She caught me out in an unrecognizable situation, in a place where for her I should never have been and doing something which in her eyes I should never have been able to do; and now she insists on seeing this page_137 Page 138 undreamed-of contingency as my reality, identifying me with this single fleeting shaming moment of my life. This, sir, is what I feel most strongly of all . . . 3

Let us not be mistaken. We are dealing with a father and, moreover, he is trying to convince, that is, to force and to use signifiers. But what is interesting in his tale is the way it tells us that the division of the subject, the drama, means not being fully in the act. I used the word drama, but another expression by Lacan better describes the subjective tear: that of the "pain of existing" [douleur d'exister]. What does it mean? That signifiers are constantly succeeding each other, one by one, and that we, their carriers, change with it, to the point of losing forever any established identity. We are the subject of a signifier, and of all signifiers. The signifier comes from the Other and returns to the Other, and awaits you from that place. What place? Where a signifier is lacking. Have I been able to show that being a subject is an event that takes place in the Other? And here I am coming back in another way to the question I engaged last year about the unconscious. You must keep in mind that when a patient is there before you, when a small child is drawing in front of you, when you have before you a pervert (if, perchance, one

comes for analysis), when you are with any locutor whatsoever, then the subject facing you is itself an interlocutor in the Other. And I believe that the passion of the ego, that "passion of ignorance," is so deeply rooted that one forgets, and one cannot imagine that it is in the Other that the subject is constituted. This is how Lacan says it: "to subjectivize means that the subject is constituted and takes place in another subject: the Other." We can thus see that the subject, which is dissolved before the act and after the act, is constituted as erased in the field of the Other. How does all of this play out in the analysis, is it not an abstract speculation? What other analytic goal can we expect, if not that, during analysis, the subject speaks, not in order to produce significations, but rather to signify itself? This means that a subject speaksand therein lies the paradoxonly to vanish. It produces an act and disappears immediately thereafter. As psychoanalysts, we solicit, we expect the moment when the subject quits, comes to the Other, vanishes, and, thereby, sets the chain of unconscious signifiers in motion again. The subject says, and saying, becomes subject and disappears. Before the act, it did not exist, and after the act, it does not exist any longer. The subject "ex-sists" outside of this chain, but nevertheless in relation to it. This is what could be called the antinomy of the subject.   page_138 Page 139 We can first conceive of this antinomy through a topological object long used in Lacanian theory. Instead of defining the subject, the Moebius strip will show it to us. But it would be wrong to identify the subject directly with the strip and to say, pointing to it: there is the subject. No, what interests us in the Moebius strip is the fact that its property of having only one side changes if a median cut is performed (at least that is the case for a band twisted only in a half-turn). At that point, that is, at the point of completing a dosed curve (reaching its point of origin), the strip proper disappears; a band remains which is no longer a Moebius strip. Thus, it is not sufficient to represent the subject in space, we also need the act of cutting, of tracing a closed curve. The act of saying is of the same order, since the signifier determines and splits the subject in half: it represents it and makes it vanish. Let us now approach this antinomy from a second perspectivethis time, a logical one. In this respect, let us return to the analysis, long established in Lacanian discourse, of the relationship between the One and the Zero in correspondence with the relation between the subject and the signifier. I will limit myself to the essential points of this correlation in order to answer the question we are dealing with here: namely, how one can account for the theoretical fact that the subject is impossible, and yet named, and even more than named, counted as One (whether minus-One or plus-One)? How can such a fleeting thing as the subject ever be fixed with a signifier? This connection with the definition of the Zero given by Frege is useful here: it is a number endowed with two properties: on the one hand, it designates the concept of an impossible object, not with regard to reality, but to truth, as it is not identical to itself; on the other hand, with respect to the series of numbers, the Zero counts as one. The Zero is thus defined as a concept of the impossible and as an element occupying a place in the numerical series. Similarly, the subject, while excluded from the signifying chain, nonetheless remains represented by a signifier, and, as such, is a countable unit. There is, therefore, a close connection between the subject and the Zero, even closer and more important if one considers the function they share: they both insure, by their very place, the movement of the numerical series. Thus, when we define the subject of the unconscious as an effect of the signifier in the speaking being, we mean to say that the defile of the signifiers through us, makes us a constant, a Zero, a lack, a lack-support which precisely supports the whole chain. At this point in the argument, before entering into the problem of castration, let us anticipate the question which I wanted to put to you:   page_139 Page 140 why, if the whole system is signifying, if the order is signifying, introduce the term subject? Why does Lacan insist on keeping this term, since in principle, everything would lead one to say that there is no subject. This is the case because it is already clear that, from the point of view of Lacanian theory, there is room for the existence of the subject. If you say: the subject is under the signifier, and then deduce that it is no more, you are making a mistake. The subject is divided, and thus it is also in the chain. Lacan meant to keep the term subject, and even to use it to distinguish psychoanalysis'

from formalism. While the latter rejects the subject, for us, psychoanalysts, the subject is the matter of our praxis. Even in his relationship to Freud, Lacan maintains the necessity of the subject. There is a beautiful passage about the satisfaction of desire (you will remember that desire satisfies itself with symbols, or signifiers) where Lacan states: "Freud tells us: 'desire satisfies itself,' while I would offer: the subject of desire satisfies itself." Why does he not let go of the question of the subject? On the basis of this distinctionthis nuance in relation to Freudone might wonder whether it is not the concept of satisfaction that leads him to maintain the subject. Is it necessary to invoke the subject when speaking of jouissance and satisfaction? In my opinion, this is not the path to follow; one could even say that the relationship between the subject and jouissance is one of opposition, and, tentatively, state: where there is jouissance, there is no subject. The problematic of jouissance, therefore, cannot account for Lacan's insistence on the concept of the subject. Before discussing the problematic which this concept of the subject will help resolve, let us turn to our third relationship, that of the subject to castration. It is in relation to castration that we will find in Lacan a first answer, one inspired by the notion of aphanisis, taken from Jones, to which he refers in most of his seminars in order to critique italbeit not without admiration. In this respect, some important concepts in Lacanian theory bear Jones's seal so clearly that I thought that if Lacan likes Freud like a twin, it is Jones that he desires. So, when Freud writes: desire satisfies itself Lacan says: the subject of desire satisfies itself. Jones proposes: aphanisis of desire, Lacan says: aphanisis of the subject. Thus, it is not that the subject is absent from the chain of signifiers, its is not that we are not the thousand and one events happening in succession; rather, the point is that the subject is, but so to speak as erased, that the subject "aphanizes itself," fades in the Other. If we go back to castration and to the distinction made by Lacan some years ago between I having the phallus and being it, we will see   page_140 Page 141 that the concept of aphanisis takes on a double meaning, depending on the place that the subject holds in relation to the signifier or to the phallic object. I cannot go into much detail here about a point I have already treated elsewhere. But let us simply ask ourselves, as a reminder, what we mean when we use the well-known expression "being castrated"? Three meanings are invoked. First, that the speaking being confronts sex with two means, the signifier (whether symptom or not) and the fantasy, which are both makeshift and unable to solve the bind of jouissancemeant here as the non-existence of sexual relation. Second, that the recourse to signifiers is a constraint and a submission: a constraint to a useless repetition since supplementation does not happen or fails, and a submission to the term which orders this repetition: namely, the phallic signifier. To have the phallus means: having nothing at all but nevertheless remaining in submission to the phallic function. Third and finally, that, in this labor of bringing signifiers to light repeatedly throughout a life, the subject fades passively and "aphanizes itself." This is one of the forms of disappearance. The other form, related to being the phallus, depends on quite a different function, that of fantasy, where we see the subject disappear hidden behind the fantasized object. Thus, we must roughly distinguish between two classes of aphanisis, or two ways of not being there anymore (which is something else altogether than not being): one way having to do with repetition, and the other with occultation. Hence, we can easily see that castration is not the negative operation of the removal of an organ; on the contrary, it is a labor of unceasing proliferation of successive signifiers. And, if anything suffers privation, it is not the penis, but the subject itself. To castrate is to decapitate, for the more the signifiers insist and reappear [se répètent], the more the subject is less. If, in summary, we change our vocabulary to ask anew what castration is, we can say that it is an initiation, an entry of the child into the world of limits in order to encounter jouissance, not to know it but to signify it, at the cost of disappearing. Once more we reach the same conclusion: the child enters the world and vanishes. Let us go back to our earlier question: what kind of obstacle is lifted by the term 'subject'? I would like to propose that the bind removed by Lacan is the age-old alternative between being and non-being. According to my interpretation, it was necessary that he refrain from ontologizing the subject, from turning it into a substratum; in other words, it was necessary for him not to identify the subject with what is  

page_141 Page 142 represented. It was necessary for the subject not to be merely something tied to representation, what Berkeley would express in his famous phrase as: "To be is to be perceived," or for us, as: "the subject is the represented subject." The point was thus for Lacan to avoid this subject-substrate which is exclusively equated with a representation. If the subject were only this, a pure representation, we would naturally be led to erect it into an absolute, substantial entity. But, in order to escape the net of metaphysics, the subject had to be otherwise. Thus, on the one hand, Lacan keeps the notion of the represented; on the other hand, so that the latter does not turn into a substrate, he introduces the notion of a subject which is erased in the whole chain of repressed signifiers. The reverse is also valid: the necessity that the subject does not disappear entirely explains Lacan's recourse to the notion of a represented subject. This double take is, of course, the divided subject. I want to be clear on this point: the trick was not so much to have divided the subjectthat could have been done according to being and non-beingas to have divided it between the representation and the set of representations. What is the point of this? That in this way, he divides the subject according to the being represented, while at the same time, he shatters it into so many enunciations, so many signifier ordered in a chain. As such, he keeps the subject and above all the chain: the chain of unconscious representations or of signifiers. I want to insist again on the fact that the division of the subject is not between being and non-being, but between the One and the Other, between a signifier which represents it and its fading in the chain, or else, to go back to our letters, between S1 and S2. Yet the solution of dividing the subject while staving off both of these risks rests entirely on the representational function: a signifier represents the subject for another signifier Without this concept of representation, the division of the subject would be unthinkable, since it is through a signifier that the subject remains tied to the system of representations. But, and this is the question which I put earlier to M. Lacan and now want to offer to you: isn't this tie to representation too thin to keep together two aspects as heterogeneous as the signifying determination and the effect of a vanished subject? How can representation bring together both determination and exclusion, the cause of abolishment and what is abolished? For some of you, this question might give rise to objections; some of which might be implicit in this presentation or even be stated outright in it. However, I would prefer for the moment not to let the question die, and to let it carry us along, at the risk of possibly having to retrace our steps later.   page_142 Page 143 Hence, on the basis of this critique of representation as that which divides the subject, it seems to me possible that, rather than dividing the subject horizontally, one should try to multiply it vertically into so many signifiers organized along a chain. We would have, in other words, a subject in levels, or in layers. This spatial conception of the subject occurred to me as I was considering a certain kind of logical surface, called a Riemann surface, 4 defined by an analytical function. Riemann, a scientist and mathematician of the nineteenth century, had ingeniously solvedin the context of the theory of analytical functions with complex variablesthe abnormal case of a multiform function. This would be the caseI am only mentioning it in passingwith a variable (relative to a complex number, for example, the square root of z) to which more than one function corresponds. In order to remove the obstacle of an irregularity that might prevent other calculations (integral calculus), Riemann leaves, so to speak, the field of algebraic functions proper, and turns to geometric space, if not indeed to imaginary space. Accordingly, he performs a multiplication of the variable into as many values as there are functions. Thus, instead of attempting to reduce the number of functions while relating a function to a variable, he finds the same relation by splitting the value of the variable; in a word, instead of reducing the functions, he multiplies the variable.5 Yet this multiplication has, at least in Riemann's scheme (it has been modified since), a spatial, topological support. He erects a vertical stack made of layers, each of which corresponds to a value, and the whole covering the set of complex numbers. According to the type of surface, the number of levels or layers can go up to infinity. It is precisely this structure which is called a covering surface, or Riemann surface. The analogy between an analysis of this type and the subject seems to us striking. Why not suppose, for a moment, that the subject undergoes the same multiplication, the same layering which Riemann performed on the value of the variable, and why not suppose also that, if the subject is thus multiplied according to the signifiers which make up the chain, it

identifies itself to them in the end? We realize that this would mean freeing the subject from any ties to the system, since it becomes the system; we also realize that this assimilation of the subject to the chain has already been given a name, the subject-supposed-to-know; we realize, finally, as I have tried to show, that the negation of the subject and the dependency of the subject are not to be confused, that it is one thing to say of the subject that it is not, and another, that it aphanizes itself. We realize all of this. But usually, when we, psychoanalysts, deal in theory as well as analysis, this subject slips between   page_143 Page 144 our fingers; we think and theorize as if in fact the notion of subject were just an added ornament, a useful ''wild card" in the theoretical game. Everything happens as if we were "subjectivists" in thought but formalists at heart. Now, when we propose, with the help of the Riemann surface, to view the subject as layered and fading, we are pushing to the limit our intuition that neglects the subject; better, we are perhaps questioning this intuition as a symptom instead of persistently seeking to correct it. The ground would thus be cleared to clearly recognize the necessity for deepening the actual aphanisis of the subject, and, by the same token, as a consequence, to rework the imaginary dimension of the ego. On the basis of our formulations about the subject, the themes of the ego and intuition especially come to the fore. 6 If the subject remains tied to the chain as we propose, we are then faced with the necessity of evaluating the imaginary agency of the ego and of analyzing its relation to intuition in greater detail.7 In short, the point would be to keep the following question alive: "Who is the subject?" If we go back to our terminology about castration, if instead of subject we say the child, if we replace chain by the law of the father, if instead of speaking simply of jouissance, we speak of jouissance of the mother, and if finally we ask who is this child of psychoanalysis, who is this magnificent child which psychoanalysis speaks about so much when putting forth its hypotheses, we would have to answer that this child, this subject then, is that which speaks and thinks with the father's words drawn to the mother's jouissance. It is the child who does not know what he/she is saying. The marvelous child of psychoanalysis, we ourselves as speaking beings, we are but creatures of wind, messengers fading between the jouissance which calls forth the words and the name of the father that orders them. The Concept of Unconscious Knowledge In order to clarify the concept of knowledge in psychoanalysis, let me recall that the point where the subject is represented is not just any signifier. In our presentation, it serves two purposes: It is the signifier which the Other lacks, and which lacks in the chain;  

It is the signifier which, while representing the subject, surrounds the gap of non-knowledge. page_144 Page 145

Drawing made according to suggestions by François Tingry. Riemann surface for the analytic function sin arc. Among the different Riemann surfaces, this onebecause of its infinite number of layersbest represents our thesis of a layered subject of the unconscious. One might note a contradiction here: "You claim that there is non-knowledge, therefore that a signifier is lacking, and yet you then say that the signifier surrounds the gap of non-knowledge." These are two different things: on the one hand it is a gap, and on the other hand, it is crib by a signifier. So the subject is represented by a signifier which is lacking in the chain, and moreover, this signifier surrounds the point of non-knowledge. As subject, I realize myself where I do not know.   page_145 Page 146 This query is not simply speculative, for this gap of non-knowledge will be that which can never be known with certainty, either by the subject or by knowledge itself (I have not yet defined knowledge). This gap is sex. Sex in psychoanalysis does not designate genital sex. Sex is defined in psychoanalytic theory as ''there is no sexual relation," that is to say, there is no signifier which can signify sex. On the contrary, the subject can be signified. Sex is what is not known. And it is at the very point where the subject comes up against sex and does not know that it constitutes itself. At this juncture, one could asks "You mentioned earlier that the subject was Zero, the lack which supports the chain, that the signifying succession hinged upon a Zero subject, marked by a signifier, or, in the case of the numerical chain, by a number. And now you are introducing another term, sex, which you also describe as a gap. We would then need to know what relationship exists between the subject as lack and sex as unknown." Of course there are several ways to deal with this "snag" that we will run into again along our way, that of the relation between different lacks. One possible approach is to situate sex as that which draws one half of the subject apart from the other, which is to say that the divided subject is split by the sexual gap. Another approach is to say that sexidentified with the cause of desireis different from the Zero subject. In my opinion, it goes without saying that sex is to be defined by that point where, in the chain, there is no signifier, as the gap left by the signifier fallen out of the chain, where the subject institutes itself.

But I would like to make an aside at this point. In the same way that I said earlier that the subject constitutes itself in the field of the Other, one should keep in mind that the subject constitutes itself in the field of the Other where a signifier is lacking, that is, where the subject comes up again against sex. This seems like the right place to introduce the question of knowledge. But in order to do so, we must first consider the notion of forgetting. This will be our hypothesis: the notion of knowledge arises as the reverse of non-knowledge. Note that this mechanism of inversion, at the origin of the term knowledge, is represented by Lacan by the Kleinian bottle. One form of "non-knowledge" is indeed forgetting. What is forgetting? A gap, but not the gap of a memory. It does not consist in forgetting a scene, a meaning, an image; forgetting does not mean not being able to recall a memory. According to Freud, the forgotten is the lack of a signifier; in other words, some minimal elements have vanished, for example, the phonemes.   page_146 Page 147 With the notion of forgetting, I will be able to go back more precisely over an idea which I just mentioned. Forgetting, as a lack of signifier, is itself significant. One could even talk of a positive lack, surrounded or marked by a signifier. We should nevertheless be careful: it can either be said that this lack of signifier is a gap marked by a signifierand as such it becomes a signifying gapor that there is a lack of signifier because signifiers will come in the place of the gap, claiming to substitute for the vanished signifier. Let us recall here another definition of the signifier: the signifier is that which can be erased. A signifier is that which vanishes, which can be deleted or replaced. There is here, it seems to me, a connection to be made with the notion of trace, of erasure, with which I am sure some of you are familiar. Let us turn to the allegory of the trace and its erasure. The trace left by Friday's foot is erased; one can say that this trace, once erased, becomes significant. But let us be careful: it does not become significant because it is erased, but because I place a mark on the place where it was erased, or because I leave my own trace in the erasure. In fact, three moments have to be distinguished: the trace, the erasure of the trace, and the marking of the erasure. It is at this last level that the signifier arises, and that the subject emerges. The subject is contemporaneous with this double erasure. In the case of forgetting, it is important to see that there is an erasure of signifier, but that this erasure, this lack, this fleeing signifier will be replaced. Another will come in its place. What happens to this fleeing signifier? Where does it sink to? It does not disappear, it condenses with the signifier which is its substitute; this is the mechanism of metaphor: substitution and condensation. The gap of forgetting, thus, is one: the One of the gap, the One of the fault, the One of the break, the One where the subject will come; this is where we constitute ourselves. One should add that this condensation, or erasure of one signifier over another which vanishes, produces another signifier, which I had elsewhere called the metaphorical signifier, that is to say, the additional signifier [le signifiant en plus], the plus-One. This is why what occurs is not just substitution, but substitution and condensation. This One of the gap, this One of the fault, as One, is linked to all other signifiers, which is to say, to paraphrase the famous statement: "The signifier represents the subject for the other signifiers," that this One of the fault is addressed to, or refers to, another signifier To "another," in the singular, or "others," in the plural? In this regard, Lacan's tests are ambiguous. I propose to consider the other signifier as the stand-in for the whole chain, or else to put it in the first rank of the   page_147 Page 148 series. Unlike the S1, the One of the gap, S2 designates all other signifiers. The aim of my presentation is to claim that the One of forgetting is also forgotten. Forgetting is one, the One of the gap, the One of the fault. Why think of it as One? Because it is linked to the others, what will be forgotten and what has been forgotten: the One of forgetting will in turn disappear under other Ones, other signifiers to come. This is why forgetting is not a lapse of memory. rather, it is (Freudian) memory as gap. Let us be clear: the chain turns into the gap as if all the signifiers were a single gap. But where is this chain? Where do we get this idea that all the other signifiers form a chain? Why do we suppose that these other signifiers are arranged in a knowing manner? I said earlier

that the signifier is not to be known, but the signifiers taken together are a knowledge, they form a knowledge, they know. What do they know? In the same way that Jones inspired Lacan's term of "aphanisis," Newton, and his wellknown question, inspired the notion of unconscious knowledge: how can it be that a body, the mass of a body, is linked to another body, to another mass, in such a way that neither is destroyed or moves away, that they maintain a relation and the correct distance? We can ask the same question about signifiers: how can they know at which distance to remain from each other? How do they know to make a chain? How can they maintain an order? In order to signify, a signifier must know how to refer to another. Signify what? The subject. But how do they know how to refer to one another? A signifier is that which represents the subject for other signifiers. The key of the statement, with respect to knowledge, is to be found in the term for, where knowledge begins and resides. In short, how do the signifiers know how to maintain this for? Finally, this Newtonian questionhow is the law of gravity possible opens the door to God. To which God? That of Newton! Which is not the same as that of Descartes. Newton's god is a divine architect, not the guardian of eternal truths. Which is to say that the machine made by this Newtonian God might not function very well. He may not always know. This must be emphasized, for the knowledge I spoke of earlier, this signifying knowledge, is not in fact a perfect knowledge; the signifiers are ordered in relation to a point where they no longer know. I did state: knowledge is ordered around non-knowledge. In other words, the signifier is ordered in a knowing way, but in relation to a stumbling block, exemplified by Chance, the Real etc., as if signifying knowledge consisted in knowing how . . . to fail. Newton's God is interesting in this respect because it has room for an   page_148 Page 149 order which does not always function. In my opinion, the concept of the unconscious as knowledge depends in great part on this Newtonian interrogation, as well as on his conception of God. Let us add, in concluding, that if we suppose the subject I was speaking about above to be dissolved in the chain, aphanized, if we make it live as knowledge, if we erect it, we will obtain the subject-supposed-to-know. The subjectsupposed-to-know the knowledge is of the subject, and the subject of knowledge. Whereas this subject of knowledge is a vanished subject, the subject-supposed-to-know is a subject which is beneath knowledge, in knowledge. What seems essential to me is that this way of conceiving the relation between subject and knowledge raises the problem of the application of this conceptthe subject-supposed-to-knowto the analyst, not in terms of having or not having knowledge, but rather in terms of being or nor being knowledge. In a word, to characterize the psychoanalyst as subject-supposed-toknow does not mean that we attribute to him/her some additional knowledge, but means that he/she is unconscious knowledge.   page_149 Page 151

Notes Translators' Introduction 1. Dr. Nasio's most recent book is entitled Le Livre de la douleur et de l'amour (Paris: Éditions Payot and Rivages, 1996). Previous books include L'inconscient à venir (Paris: Bourgois, 1980), Les Yeux de Laure: Le concept d'objet a dans la théorie de Jacques Lacan (Paris: Aubier, 1987), Enseignement de 7 concepts cruciaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Rivages, 1988). L'Hystérie ou l'enfant magnifique de la psychanalyse (Paris: Rivages, 1990). The present book, Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan, appeared in 1992. One of his seminarsdelivered at Lacan's invitation in 1979appears at the end of this volume. In fact, all these lessons were drawn from seminar presentations or interviews. We have therefore attempted to be faithful to Nasio's oral style. 2. Juan-David Nasio, Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan, translated by David Pettigrew and François Raffoul (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998). Hereafter cited as FL, followed by the page number. We would like to

acknowledge a number of people who have contributed to this translation project. We are especially grateful to Dr. Anthony V. Pinciaro, Vice President for Academic Affairs, and Dr. J. Philip Smith, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Southern Connecticut State University, for their generous support. We also would like to thank Bruce Fink for his help in the translation of key terms. 3. We have followed standard practice in leaving the term untranslated. Nasio's text itself provides a thorough analysis of the various senses of the term, and its meaning will emerge from these discussions. Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan 1. The passage to which Nasio refers is as follows: "A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign." Charles S. Peirce, "'Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs," in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by Justus Buchler (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), 99. Trans.   page_151 Page 152 2. This aphorism would remain incomplete if we did not include a third term: the subject. A signifier represents the subject for other signifiers. We shall simply add that this subject is not to be confused with the individual, but rather should be identified with the abstract idea of the subject of the analytic experience. The Lacanian concept of subject of the unconscious is treated in the last chapter of this volume. 3. TN. On this question, we refer the reader to Dr. Nasio's recent text entitled, Le Livre de la Douleur et de l'Amour (Paris: Éditions Payot and Rivages, 1996). Trans. 4. The concepts of "castration" and "phallus" were treated in my book, Enseignement de 7 concepts cruciaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Rivages, 1988). 5. Jacques Lacan, Television, translated by Denis Hollier, Rosalind Kraus, and Annette Michelson (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1990), 18. Translation modified. Hereafter cited as T. 6. Lacan, Le Séminaire, vol. 20, Encore (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 95. 7. Georg Cantor, "Fondements d'une théorie générale des ensembles," in Cahiers pour l'analyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 3552. 8. J.-D. Nasio, La douleur en psychanalyse (unpublished seminar), 1984, and L'hallucination et la douleur inconsciente (unpublished seminar), 1985. 9. A clinical illustration of this point can be found in the "Fifth Lesson," to which the reader can refer at any time. 10. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis), vol. 23, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 198. Hereafter cited as SE, followed by the volume and page numbers. 11. Scilicet 6-7, Paris: Seuil (1976): 25. 12. The difference between the saying and what is said, is treated extensively by Lacan in a text that I recommend strongly: "L'Étourdit," published in Scilicet 4, Paris: Seuil (1973): 5-52. 13. We can point out that the notion of ex-sistence is also used by Lacan to designate the excentric place where he situates the subject of the unconscious. We are using the same term ex-sistence in a similar sense when we designate the place of the One, because the One is the signifier which, precisely, represents the subject. We have emphasized another sense of the term ex-sistence when we state that the One causes the whole to ex-sist.   page_152 Page 153

14. We have developed the relation between the Lacanian theory of the signifier and Peano's axiomatics in Les Yeux de Laure: Le concept d'objet a dans la théorie de Jacques Lacan (Paris: Aubier, 1987). 15. Concerning Frege, the reader can refer to chapter 6 at the end of this book. 16. With respect to Lacan's sexuation diagram and his description of the meaning of these quantifiers, see chapter 7, and in particular page 74 of Le Séminaire, vol. 20, Encore. Trans. 17. A clinical example of the hold of jouissance on the signifier S1 is developed in the "Fifth Lesson." See p. 123. 18. I refer the reader to my article devoted to the cure, "La guérison: un point de vue lacanien," in Esquisses Psychanalytique, vol. 15 (1991). 19. One finds an admirable description of this art in the already classical work of the great French musicologist Maurice Emmanuel, La danse grecque antique (Paris: Hachette, 1896). 20. Les yeux de Laure: Le concept d'objet a dans la théorie de Jacques Lacan. 21. The reader will refer to the thesis, according to which there is no hole without the energy that animates and causes the edges to palpitate, with Lacan's elaboration of Stockes Theorem (cf. Ecrits [Paris: Seuil, 1966], 847n. Hereafter cited as E). On Stockes Theorem, the reader may consult the excellent work of E. M. Purcell: Berkeley: Cours de physique (Paris: Armand Colin, 1982), 2:66. 22. The simulacra or corporal semblances which cover and give form to the in-itself of object a bring to mind the simulacra described by Lucretius. "The pictures of things and thin shapes are emitted from things off their surface, to which an image serves as a kind of film, name it if you like a rind, because such image bears an appearance and form like to the thing whatever it is from whose body it is shed wanders forth." Lucretius, On the nature of things, bk. 4, in The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers: The complete extant writings of Epicurus, Epictetus, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius, translated by H. A. J. Munro, edited by Whitney J. Oates (New York: Random House, 1940), 137-38. 23. We note here how this symbolic condition for the production of object a, represented by the orificial opening, relates to the notion of the "singular lip" proposed by René Thom in his work Stabilité, structurelle et morphogénèse. The drawing in figure 4, which represents the opening ("singular lip"), has been borrowed from "René Thom expliqué par lui-même," in Pistes, no. 1 (1989): 48. 24. Freud, SE, vol. 23, Findings, Ideas, Problems, 299, translation modified.   page_153 Page 154 25. To show the ruses of the Ego aimed at seducing the Id, Freud curiously uses the example of the behavior of a psychoanalyst in practice. He recounts an astonishing parallel between the analyst and the Ego, each in relation to the Id, the first in order to insure the transference, and the second in order to insure the mediation between the external world and the Id. This is what he wrote: "In point in fact it behaves like the physician during an analytic treatment: it offers itself, with the attention it pays to the real world, as a libidinal object to the id, and aims at attaching the id's libido to itself. It is not only a helper to the id; it is also a submissive slave who courts the master's love. . . . It only too often yields to the temptation to become sycophantic, opportunist and lying, like a politician who sees the truth but wants to keep his place in popular favor." SE, vol. 19, The Ego and the Id, 46 26. I refer the reader who would like to pursue this question to my "Penser l'objet a avec le cross-cap," in Les Yeux de Laure: Le concept d'objet a dans la théorie de Jacques Lacan, 193-216. 27. "Radiophonie," in Scilicet 2/3, Paris: Seuil (1970): 65. 28. Freud, SE, vol. 11, The Psychoanalytic View of Psychogenic Disturbance of Vision, 218. 29. Freud, SE, vol. 6, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 257. 30. At this time, I would like to inform the reader that after this painful episode, which had disturbed the analysis during

several months, the cure of this patient was continued and completed. She went on to enjoy life. When working on these pages, I called the young woman to request her authorization to report on our experience in this book. Emotionally, she gave me her full agreement. With her emotion, I also became emotional, an emotion that everyone would feel when approaching so close to the limits of life. Appendix Dr. Nasio's "The Concept of the Subject of the Unconscious," is translated by Boris Belay from his original text, Cinq Leçons sur la theorie de Jacques Lacan (Paris: Rivages, 1992), 223-52, with the permission of Mme. Marie-Martine Serrano Lavau. 1. This presentation was first given at Dr. Lacan's invitation at his seminar of May 15, 1979. This essay was first published in Cinq Lemons sur la théorie de Jacques Lacan (Paris: Editions Rivages, 1992). 2. Let me only mention here that Skepticism plays on two points of Page 155 interest for psychoanalysis, one ethical and the other related to the notion of incomprehensible representation. The two are linked, for ethics is conceived by the Skeptics as based on this kind of representation. The skeptics are usually thought to be nihilists who do not want to know anything. In fact, one should distinguish between two schools, the Academicians and the Pyrrhonean school. The latter is of interest to us, in that it advocates the method of suspending judgment as the only possible way to correspond to the incomprehensible representation. Besides the fact that this led them to reject any dogma or worldview, it is their relation to truth which we should note. For Pyrrhonean skeptics, truth is neither to be known nor rejected, but only suspended, and its effects dealt with. This echoes the Lacanian reference to truth as causeI may return to this later. One of these effects is precisely silence; for Skeptics as well as for us, there are two kinds: not speaking as reserve before what one does not understand, and silence sileo, as an effect of truth. 3. Luigi Pirandello, Collected Plays, (New York: Riverrun Press, 1988), 2:26-27. 4. Riemann surfaces, or structure of complex analytic variety, are one of the common sources which the theory of algebraic functions and topology share. One of the properties, which might interest us particularly with respect to the handling of topological objects introduced by Lacan, is how Riemann surfaces can be oriented. Inversely, any closed surface that can be oriented is homomorphic to Riemann surfaces, as is the case with the sphere, the torus, and the punctured torus (with p holes). In reference to this last remark, one can turn rather straightforwardly to the second chapter of Introduction to Riemann surfaces (Reading: G. Springer, 1951). 5. It is interesting to note that this discovery of Riemann's depends on his theory of multiplicity, which was greatly influenced by Herbart's philosophy. See Bertrand Russell, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (New York: Dover, 1956). 6. This work could begin with the following question: what is the relationship between Kant's schema and Freud's notion of fantasy? 7. At the moment of his discover); Riemann made an essentially intuitive move, operating in an essentially imaginary space, rather than an algebraic one.   page_154 Page 157

Index A analyst, the, 3, 8, 15; as cause of the symptom, 18;

as part of the symptom, 17; and repetition, 63 analytic position, the, 8, 62, 127, 138 aphanisis, 140 B body, the, 2, 7, 105-106, 115-131; affected by speech and sex, 8; in the cure, 122; and jouissance, 115, 120; as locus of jouissance, 7; and object a 117; organic, 120; as partial, 117, 121; in psychoanalysis, 105, 119; as sexual, 117; as signifying, 119; as speaking, 117, 118 body-image, 119 body-jouissanee, 9, 120 C Cantor, Georg, 37, 59, 60; and set theory, 37 castration, 31, 140; as proliferation of successive signifiers, 141 D demand, 85, 93; of the child, 93 desire, 34, 93; incestuous, 94; as intolerable, 90; as never realized, 27; object of, 88, 90, 94;

and psychical tension, 26 E ex-sistence, 55 F fantasy, 97-113, 117; clinical scope of, 99; formal elements of, 102; formative mechanism of, 99; and hallucination, 105; and jouissance, 41, 104; and logic, 100; and object a, 97 Frege, Gottlieb, 59, 139 Freud, Sigmund, 25, 45, 70, 73, 97, 122; notion of energy, 42; and the unconscious, 47; and infantile sexuality, 82 H Heidegger, Martin, 2, 55, 57 I Imaginary, the, 121-124 J jouissance, 1, 16, 24, 38, 119-120, 122; as absolute, 28; as an activation of the unconscious, 32; and the analytic cure, 41; and the analyst, 97; and energy, 32, 42; of the Other, 4, 27, 35; as partial, 7; and perversion, 41;

and pleasure, 26, 38; and psychical tension, 38; and repetition compulsion, 40; subject of, 6, 40; and suicide, 110; toxic, 122 K Klein, Melanie, 91 L Lacan, Jacques, 4, 24, 26, 31, and lalangue, 49; and object a, 76, 82; and the problem of time and space, 66; and repetition compulsion, 52; and topology, 104 lalangue, 49, 50  

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