Die Spur: Eins
Seminar 5: 23avril1958
Der Signifikant, der Balken und der Phallus
gehen wir von da aus, was eine spur ist. eine spur, das ist ein abdruck, das ist kein signifikant. man fühlt trotzdem, dass es zwischen den beiden ein verhältnis geben kann, und in wahrheit partizipiert das, was man das material des signifikanten nennt, stets ein wenig am schwindenden charakter der spur. dies scheint sogar eine der existenzbedingungen für das signifikante material zu sein. dies ist dennoch kein signifikant. freitags fussabdruck, den robinson bei seinem spaziergang auf der insel entdeckt, ist kein signifikant. umgekehrt, einmal angenommen, robinson streiche, aus welchem grund auch immer, diese spur aus, so wird damit eindeutig die dimension des signifikanten eingeführt. von dem moment an, da man sie ausstreicht, da dies einen sinn aus dem ausstreichen hat, wird das, von dem es spur gibt, offensichtlich als signifikat konstituiert.
der signifikant ist somit eine hohlform, insofern er von einer vergangenen anwesenheit zeugt. umgekehrt gibt es in dem, was signififkant ist, in dem voll entwickelten signifikanten, der das sprechen ist, stets einen übergang, d.h. etwas, das jenseits von jedem der elemente ist, die artikuliert werden und die von ihrer natur her flüchtig, verschwindend sind. dieser übergang vom eienen zum anderen konstituiert das wesentlcihe dessen, was wir die signifikante kette nennen.
dieser übergang als verschwindender ist genau das, was stimme wird – ich sage gar nicht signifikante artikulation, denn es kann sein, dass die artikulation rätselhaft bleibt, doch das, was den übergang unterstützt, ist stimme. es i9st auch auf dieser ebene, dass das emergiert, was dem entsprichjt, was wir zunächst am signifikanten als von einer vergangenene anwesenheit zeugend bezeichnet haben. umgekehrt manifestiert sich in einem übergang, der aktuell ist, etwas, das dies vertieft, was jenseits ist, und daraus eine stimme macht.
was wir da noch wiederfinden, ist dies, dass, wenn es einen text gibt, wenn der signifikant sich unter anderen einschreibt, das, was nach der ausstreichung bleibt, der platz ist, an dem man ausgestrichen hat, und dieser platz unterstützt auch die transmission. die transmission ist dabei etwas wesentliches, da dank ihr das, was im übergang nachfolgt, beständigkeit als stimme annimmt.
was die frage eder emergenz angeht, ist ein wesentlicher punkt, den es zu erfassen gilt, dass der signiffikant als solcher etwas ist, das ausgestrichen werden kann, und das nunmehr seinen platz zurücklässt, das heisst – man kann ihn nichtmehr wiederfinden. diese eigenschaft ist wesentlich, und macht, dass man, wenn man von emergenz sprechen kann, man nicht von entwicklung sprechen kann. in wirklichkeit enthält der signifikant sie in sich selbst. ich meine, dass eine der fundamentalen dimensionen des signifikanten die ist, sich selbst annullieren zu können. es gibt dafür eine möglichkeit, die wir bei gelegenheit als modus des signifikanten selbst qualifizieren können.
sie materialisiert sich durch etwas sehr einfaches, das wir alle kennen und dessen trivialität des gebrauchs wir nicht die originalität verhehlen lassen dürfen – da sist der balken (barre). jede art signifikant ist von ihrer## natur etwas das abgesperrt (barre) sein kann.
seitdem es philosophen gibt, und solche, die denken, spricht man viel von aufhebung* und hat man gelernt, davon eienen mehr oder weniger listigen gebrauch zu machen. das wort heisst im wesentlichen annulierung- ich annuliere z.b. mein abonnenement bei einer zeitschrift oder meine reservierung irgendwo. es meint auch, dank einer sinnambiguität, die es in der deutschen sprache wertvoll macht, zu einer potenz, zu einer höheren situation erheben. scheinbar hält man sich nicht lang genug mit diesem auf, dass im eigentlichen sinn annuliert zu werden, es nur eine einzige art dinge gibt, würde ich im groben sagen, mit der man das machen kann, und das ist ein signifikant. in wahrheit heben wir, wenn wir, wenn wir was auch immer anderes annullieren, sei es imaginär oder real, es eben dadurch in den grad, in die qualifikation eines signifikanten.
es gibt also im signifikanten, in seiner kette und in seiner ahndhabung, seiner manipulation etwas, das stets in der lage ist, es in seiner funktion in der (abstammungs-)linie – der balken ist ein zeichen von bastardschaft – abzusetzen, es als solches aufgrund der im eigentlichen sinne signifikanten funktion dessen, was wir die allgemeine wertschätzung (consideration) nennen werden, abzusetzen.
Die Spur: Fünf
Seminar 14: 16nov1966 + 15feb1967
„there is no universe of discourse“
Today I am going to throw out some points that are rather in the nature of a promise.
„Logic of phantasy“, I entitled, this year, what I count on being able to present to you about what is required at the point that we are at on a certain path. A path which implies, I will recall it forcefully today, this sort of very special return that we have already seen, last year, inscribed in the structure and which is properly speaking fundamental in everything that Freudian thinking uncovers. This return is called repetition. To repeat is not to find the same thing again, as we will articulate later, and contrary to what is believed, it is not necessarily to repeat indefinitely.
We will come back then to themes that I have in a certain fashion already situated for a long time. It is, moreover, because we are at the moment of this return and of its function, that I believed I could no longer put off presenting to you in a unified way what up to now I thought necessary as a minimal indication of this journey, namely, this volume that you already find within hand’s reach. It is because this year it will no doubt be possible for us to study in depth the function of this relation to writing – which after all, in a certain way, I forced myself up to the present if not to avoid, at least to delay – that here again I believed I could take this step.
These few indicative points that I am going today to state before you. I have chosen to be five:
The first consisting in reminding you of the point that we are at about the logical articulation of phantasy, which this year will be, properly speaking, my text.
(2) The second, to the reminder of the relation of this structure of phantasy – which I will have first recalled to you – to the structure of the signifier as such.
The third, to something essential and really fundamental which has to be recalled, about what we can, what we ought, this year, call – if we put in the foreground what I called the logic in question – an essential remark about the Universe of discourse.
The fourth point, some indication relative to its relation to writing as such.
Finally, I will end on the reminder of what Freud indicates to us, in an articulated fashion, about what is involved in the relation of thinking to language and to the unconscious.
S, the logic of phantasy. We will begin from the writing of it that I already constructed, namely, from the formula: S barred diamond small o ($o). I recall what the S barred signifies: the S barred represents, takes the place in this formula of what it returns from goncorning the division of the subject, which is found at the source of the whole Freudian discovery and which consists in the fact that the subject is, in part, barred from what properly constitutes it qua function of the unconscious. This formula establishes something which is a link, a connection between this subject as thus constituted and something else which is called small o. Small o is an object whose status what I am calling, this year, „constructing the logic of phantasy“, will consist in determining – its status, precisely, in a relation which is a logical relation properly speaking.
A strange thing, no doubt, which you will allow me not to go into. I mean what this term phantasy suggests in terms of a relation to phantasia, to the imagination. I mill not give myself the pleasure, even for an instant, of marking its contrast with the term logic with which I intend to structure it. The fact is, no doubt, that phantasy as we claim to instaure its status is not so fundamentally, so radically antinomical as one might first think to this logical characterisation which, properly speaking, disdains it. Moreover, the imaginary feature of what is called the o-object will appear still better to you – in the measure that we will mark what permits it to be characterised as a logical value – to be much less related, it seems to me, at first sight, to the domain of what is properly speaking the imaginary. The imaginary, rather, is attached to it, surrounds it, accumulates in it. The o-object that a different status. Undoubtedly, it is desirable that those who listen to me this year (3) should have had the opportunity last year to get some grasp, some idea of it. Of course, this o-object is not something which is yet, so easily – for all and especially for those for whom it is the center of their experience, the psychoanalysts, even more – has yet, as I might say, sufficient familiarity for it to be. I would say, presented to them without fear or indeed even without anxiety.
„What have you done then,“ one of them sand to me, “ what need did you have to invent this little o-object?“
I think, in truth, that taking things from a broader horizon it was about time. Because, without this o-object – whose incidences, it seems to me, have made themselves widely enough felt for the people of our generation – it seems to me that much of what is done as analyses, of subjectivity as well as of history and of its interpretation, and specifically of what we have lived through as contemporary history, and very specifically of what we have, rather crudely, baptised with a most improper term, under the name of totalitarianism … Anyone, who after having understood it, is able to occupy himself in applying to it the function of the category of the o-object, will perhaps see there being illuminated what it returned from, in that for which we still lack, in a surprising manner, satisfying interpretations.
The barred subject, in its relation to this o-object, is joined in this formula written on the board, by this something which is presented as a lozenge shape, which I earlier called the diamond (le poincon) and, which, in truth, is a sign that was forged expressly to join together in itself what can be isolated from it, depending on whether you separate it with a vertical stroke or with a horizontal stroke.
Separated by a vertical stroke, it represents a double relation which can be read in the first place as greater (>) or lesser ( S1
–
$
S, in so far as it takes the place of the subject, only functions for another signifier.
Urverdrangung, of primal repression, is the following: what a signifier represents for another signifier. It does not bite on anything, it constitutes absolutely nothing, it accommodates itself to an absolute absence of Dasein.
For around sixteen centuries, at least, the Egyptians hieroglyphs remained as solitary as they were uncomprehended in the desert sands. It is clear and it hat always been clear for everyone, that this meant that each of the signifiers cut into stone at least represented a subject for the other signifiers. If it were not so, no one would ever even have taken this to be writing! It is not at all necessary that writing should mean something for anyone at all, for it to be writing, and for it to manifest, as such, that each sign represents a subject for the one that follows it.
If we call that Urverdrangung it means that we are admitting that it appears to us to be in conformity with experience, to think about what happens – namely, that a subject emerges in the state of barred subject – as something which comes from a locus in which it is supposedly inscribed, into another locus in which it in going to be inscribed anew.
Namely, exactly in the same fashion in which I structured, formerly, the function of metaphor in to far as it is the model of what happens as regard the return of the repressed:
S1 –> $
– / –
$ –>- s
In the same way, it is in the measure that with respect to this primary signifier, and we are going to see what it is, the barred subject that it abolishes comes to emerge at a place to which we are going to be able today to give a formula which has not yet been given: the barred subject, as such, is what represents for a signifier – this signifier from it has a arisen – a sense.
(11) By „sense“ I understand exactly what I made you understand at the beginning of one year in the formula: „Colourless green ideas sleep furiously“. Which can be translated into French by the following, which depicts admirably the ordinary order of your cogitations: „Des idees vertement fuligineuses s’assoupissent avec fureur“.
This, precisely, for want of knowing that they are all addressed to this signifier of the lack of the subject that a certain first signifier becomes, once the subject articulates his discourse. Namely – as all psychoanalysts glimpsed clearly enough, even though they were not able to say anything worthwhile about it – namely, the o-object which, at this level, fulfills precisely the function that Frege distinguishes from sign under the name of Bedeutung. The o-object is the first Bedeutung, the first referent, the first reality, the Bedeutung which remains because it is, after all, all that remains of thinking at the end of all the discourses.
Namely, what the port can write without knowing that he is saying when he addresses himself to „his mother Intelligence from whom all sweetness flows“: „what is this neglect that allows her milk to dry up?“
Namely, also, what remains of so many thoughts dispensed in the form of a pseudo-scientific hotchpotch that one can also call by its name, as I have long done, about part of analytic literature, and which is called shit. On the admission, moreover, of the authors! I mean except for a tiny failure of reasoning about the function of the o-object, one of them can very well articulate that there is no other support for the castration complex than what is modestly called „the anal object“.
This is not then a pinpointing coming from a pure and simple judgement, but much more the necessity of an articulation, the simple statement of which ought to give us pause. Since, after all, it is not formulated by the least qualified writers, and since it will e, in fact, this year, our method, in formulating the logic of the phantasy, to show where, in analytic theory, it has tripped up. I have not, after all, named this author whom many of you know. Let it be clearly understood that the flaw in reasoning is still reasoned, namely, examinable (arraisonable), but not necessarily so. And the o-object in question can in a certain article show itself quite nakedly while not being appreciated by him. This is what we will have occasion to show in certain texts, after all, which I do not see why, as a kind of practical work, I should not soon (12) distribute rather generally to you, if I have enough at my disposal, which have been given to my function of metaphor from being admitted, (I mean among those of which I have just given you the least ambiguous example) by confusing it with anything whatsoever that makes of it a sort of proportional relation.
When I wrote that substitution – the fact of grafting a signifier substituted for another signifier into the signifying chain – was the source and origin of all meaning, what I articulated is correctly interpreted in the form in which, today, through the emergence of this barred subject as such, I gave you the formula. Which requires of us the task of giving it its logical status, but to demonstrate to you right away the example of the urgency of such a task, or even of its necessity, note that the confusion was made in this four fold relation:
S1 ———> S
——————————————————————————–
S —->- s
(the S1, the two S’s and the small s of the signified) with this relation of proportion in which one of my interlocutors, M. Perelman, the author of a theory of argumentation, promoting once again an abandoned rhetoric, articulates metaphor, seeing in it the function of analogy, and that it is from the relation of one signifier to another in so far as a third reproduces it by giving rise to an ideal signified that he grounds the function of metaphor. To which I replied, at the appropriate rime. It is only from such a metaphor that there can emerge the formula that was given, namely: S1 over small s of meaning enthroned above a first register of inscription of which the Underdrawn of which the Unterdruckt, of which the other register substantiating the unconscious, is supposed to be constituted by the strange relation of the signifier to another signifier, and we are told that it is from there that language takes its ballast:
S1
——————————————————————————–
s
——————————————————————————–
S
——————————————————————————–
S
I think that you now sense that this formula, described as that of „reduced language“ (du langage reduit), is based on an error which is to introduce into this four-fold relation the structure of proportionality. It is difficult to see, in fact, what can emerge from it, since, in fact, the relation S/S then becomes rather difficult to interpret. But we do not see in this reference to a reducd language any other plan (which is (13) moreover admitted) than to reduce our formula that the unconscious is structured like a language – which, more than ever, is to be taken literally.
And since it is obvious that today I will not finish the five points that I announced to you, I am nonetheless able to punctuate, for you, the key of the whole structure which reduces an enterprise articulated in this way – precisely at the beginning of the little collection i spoke about to you earlier which concerns the turning point in my relations with my audience that was constituted by the Congress of Bonneval – to futility. It is erroneous to structure in this way on a so-called myth of reduced language any deduction of the unconscious, for the following reason: it is of the nature of each and every signifier not to be able in any case to signify itself.
It is too late for me to impose on you, in a hurry the writing of this inaugural point for the whole of set theory, which implies that this theory can only function starting from an axiom described as that of specification. Namely, that the only interest in making a set function is when there exists another set which can be defined by the definition of certain x’s in the first as freely satisfying a certain proposition. „Freely“ means: independently of any quantification: small number or all. The result of this, (I will begin my next lecture with these formulae) the result of this is that by positing any set whatsoever, by defining in it the proposition that I indicated as dpecifging x’s in it, as being simply that x is not a member of itself. – that which, as regards what interests us, namely, for the following, which is necessary once one wishes to introduce the myth of a reduced language that there is a language which is not one, namely, which constitutes, for example the totality of signifiers. What is proper to the totality of signifiers. I will show it to you in detail, involves the following as necessary – if we simply admit that the signifier cannot signify itself – involves the following as reduce language, simply because of the fact that language cannot constitute a chosen set; in other words: that there is no Universe of discourse.
For those who may have had some difficulty in understanding what I have just formulated, I will recall simply the following which I already said at the appropriate time: that the truths that I have just stated are simply those which appeared in a confused fashion at the naive period of the establishment of set theory in the form of what is wrongly called Russell’s paradox – because it is not a paradox, it is an image – the catalogue of all the catalogues which do net contain themselves. What does that mean? Either it contains itself or it contradicts its definition, or it does not contain itself and in that case it foils in its mission. This is not at all a paradox. One has only to declare that in making such a catalogue one cannot take things all the way, and for good reasons…
But, that I earlier gave you the statement of, in the formula that in the Universe of discourse there is nothing that contains everything, this is something which properly speaking encourages us to be particularly prudent here as regards the handling of that is called whole and part, and requires us, at the origin, to distinguish very severely – this will be the object of my next lecture – the One from the totality – which, precisely, I have just refuted, saying that at the level of discourse there is no Universe, which undoubtedly leaves still more in suspense whether we can suppose it to be anywhere else – to distinguish this One from the countable One in so far as, of its nature, it slips away and slides, and can only be the One by repeating itself at least once and closing in on itself, to establish, at the origin, the lack involved the one involved in the establishment of the subject.
Seminar 11: Wednesday, February 15, 1967
„the signifier represents the subject for another signifier“
I have to advance and to demonstrate in its movement what the nature of analytic knowledge is; very exactly how this knowledge comes to pass into the real.
We posit that this – the fact that it passes into the real – happens all the more in accordance with the ever growing pretension of the I affirming itself as fons et origo of being. This is what we have posited. But this does not elucidate anything of course about what I have just called the passage of this knowledge into the real.
I am here alluding to nothing other that the formula that I gave of Verwerfung of rejection, which is that everything that is rejected in the symbolic reappears in the real.
This prevalence of the I, at the nigh point of something which is quite difficult to grasp without giving rise to misunderstandings … (to say „the epoch“, to say even as we have said „the era of science“, always means opening up some bias towards a note that one could pinpoint well enough by the term of „Spenglerism“, for example. The idea of „human phases“ is not here, certainly, something that can satisfy us, and lends itself to many misunderstandings) … Let us start simply from the fact that it is true that discourse has its empire and that I believe I have demonstrated to you that psychoanalysis is only thinkable by putting among its predecessors the discourse of science.
It is a matter of knowing were it is placed in the effects of this discourse. Inside? Outside? It is there, as you know, that we are trying to grasp it as a sort of fringe which trembles, something analogous to these most tangible forms in which the organism reveals itself. I am speaking about what is a fringe.
There is nevertheless a step to be taken before recognising in it the trait of the animated, for thinking, as we understand it, is not animated. It is the effect of the signifier, namely, in the last resort, of the trace.
What is called structure, is that. We follow thinking by its trace (a la trace) and by (2) nothing else. Because the trace has always caused thinking.
The relation of this procedure to psychoanalysis can be sensed immediately provided one can imagine it, or indeed has experience of it.
That Freud, inventing psychoanalysis, is the introduction of a method of detecting a trace of thinking, where thinking itself masks it by recognising itself differently in it – differently to the way that the trace designates it – this is what I have promoted. This is something against which no deployment of Freudianism as an ideology will prevail. A naturalist ideology, for example. That this point of view, which is a point of view of the history of philosophy, is put forward in these times, by people who authorise themselves as having the quality of psychoanalyst, shows what is going to give more precision to the response that the question I first posed requires. Namely, how does it happen that analytic knowledge comes to pass into the real.
The path through which what I am teaching passes into the real is none other, bizarrely, that Verwerfung, than the effective rejection – that we see happening in a certain generation – of the position of the psychoanalyst, in so far as it wants to know nothing about what is nevertheless his one and only knowledge.
What is rejected in the symbolic ought to be focused in the subjective field, somewhere, in order to reappear at a correlative level in the real. Where? Here, no doubt. What does that mean? It is what touches you here, namely, this point which is the one to which witness is borne by what the journalists have already located under the label of „structuralism“ and which is nothing other than your interest; the interest that you take is what is said here, an interest which is real.
Naturally, among you, there are psychoanalysts. There is – it is already here – a generation of psychoanalysts in which there will be incarnated the correct position off the subject, in so far as it is required by the analytic act. When this generation has come to maturity, you will measure the distance travelled – by reading the unthinkable things, printed luckily, so that they will be able to bear witness, for anyone who knows how to read – the prejudices from which it will have been necessary to extract the plan that this realisation of analysis requires.
Among these prejudices and these unthinkable things, there will be … there will also be structuralism, I mean: what is now entitled under this title to a certain value, quoted on the stock market of cogitation.
If those among you who have lived through what characterised the middle of this century, (or let us say its first part), the trials that we have gone through in terms of strange manifestations in civilisation – if you had not been put to sleep, subsequently, (3) by a philosophy which quite simply continued its noisy chatter, I would now be taking less time, to try to mark the necessary traits, for you not to be completely lost, for the phase of this century which is going to follow immediately.
When Freud introduced for the first time – in his Jenseits, Beyond the pleasure principle – the concept of repetition, as a forcing, Zwang – repetition, Wiederholung, this repetition is forced, Wiederholungszwang – when he introduces it in order to give its definitive state to the status of the subject of the unconscious, do we properly measure the import of this conceptual intrusion?
If it is called „beyond the pleasure principle“, it is precisely because it broke with what up to then gave him the module of a psychic function, namely, this homeostasis, which echoes the one that the substance of the organism requires, which reduplicates it and repeats it, and which is the one that, in the nervous system isolated as such, he defines by the law of least tension.
What the Wiederholungszwang introduces is clearly in contradiction with this primitive law, the one stated in the pleasure principle. And it is as such that Freud presents it to us.
Immediately, we who – I suppose – have read this text, can go to its most extreme point, that Freud formulates as what is called the „death drive“ (a translation of Todestrieb). Namely, that he cannot stop extending this Zwang – this constraint of repetition – into a field which not alone envelopes that of living manifestation, but overflows it, by including it in the parenthesis of a return to the inanimate. He solicits us then to make there subsist as living – and we really have to put this term in inverted commas – a tendency that extends its law beyond the duration of the living.
Let us look closely at it, because this is what constitutes the objection and the obstacle before which there rebels – as long, of course, as the thing is not understood – there rebels, first of all, a thinking that is used to giving a certain support to the term tendency. A support, precisely, which is the one that I have just evoked in putting the word „living“ in quotation marks. Life, then, in this thinking, is no longer „the totality of forces which resist death“, to quote Bichat. It is the totality of forces in which there is signified that death will be for life its rail (rail).
In truth, this would not take us very far, if it were not a matter of something other than the being of life, but what we can, in a first approach, call its sense. Namely, something that we can read in signs which come from an apparent vital spontaneity – since the subject does not recognize himself in it – but where it is necessary that there should be a subject – since what is in question could not be a simple effect of the … fall-out, (as one might say), of the vital bubble which bursts, leaving the place in the (4) state in which it was previously – but of something which, everywhere we follow it, is formulated not as this simple return, but as a thinking of return, as repetition thinking.
Everything that Freud grasped on its trace in clinical experience, is – where he is going to seek it, where for him the problem is highlighted, namely, in what he calls „the negative therapeutic reaction“, or again what he tackles at this level as an effect (question mark) of primordial masochism, as that which, in a life, insists on remaining in a certain medium, (let us dot our i’s), let us say of sickness of failure – this is what we ought to grasp as repetition thinking.
Repetition thinking is a different domain to that of memory.
Memory no doubt also evokes the trace, but by what do we recognise the memory trace? It has precisely as an effect non-repetition.
(If we seek to determine in experience, the way in which a micro-organism is endowed with memory, we will see it from the fact that it will not react to a stimulus the second time, the way it did the first time. And after all, this will sometimes make us speak about memory, with prudence, with interest, with indecision, at the level of certain inanimate organisations…)
But repetition is something quite different! If we make of repetition in the directive principle of a field, in so far as it is properly subjective, we cannot fail to formulate what unites in material – in the style of a copula – the identical and the different.
This imposes on us again, to this end, the use of this unary trait, whose elective function we have recognised in connection with identification.
I will recall what is essential to it in simple terms, having been able to experience that such a simple function appears astonishing in the context of philosophers – or supposed ones, as I recently happen to have had experience of – and that people found obscure, even opaque, this very simple remark that the unary trait plays the role of symbolic reference point, precisely by ruling out that it should be either similarity or difference, which are posited at the principle of differentiation.
I already, here, sufficiently underlined that the use of the One – which is this One that I distinguish from the unifying-One, because of being the countable-One – is to be able to function, to designate as so much „One“ such heteroclite objects as a thought, a veil or another object that is here within our reach – and since I enumerated three, to count that, three. Namely, to hold as null even heir most extreme difference of a nature in instauring their differentiation from something else.
Here is what gives us the function of number and everything that is instaured upon the operation of recurrence, whose proof, as you know, is based on this unique (5) module: that everything having been proved to be true … for n … that what … It being proved as true that what is true for n + 1 is so for (, it is enough for us to know what is involved so that n = 1, for the truth of a theorem to be assured. This grounds a being of truth which is entirely slippery. This sort of truth is, as I might say, the shadow of the number, it remains without grasp on any real.
But if we descend, as I might say, into time, which is … what is demanded of you today, in order to take up the identificatory schema of alienation and see how it functions: we will remark that the basic One of the operation of recurrence is not already there, that it is only instaured from repetition itself.
Let us taleo things up again. We do not have to remark here that repetition could not, dynamically, be deduced from the pleasure principle. We are only doing it to make you sense the relief of what is in question. Namely, that the maintenance of the least tension, as pleasure principle, in no way implies repetition. On the contrary, the rediscovery of a pleasure situation in its sameness can only be the source of operations that are always more costly, than simply following the angle of the least tension. By following it like an isothermic line, if I can express myself in this way, it will finish up indeed by leading, from pleasure situation to pleasure situation, to the desired maintenance of the least tension. If it implies some buckling or some return, this can only be along the path, as I might say, of an external structure, which is not at all unthinkable, since I evoked earlier the existence of an isothermic line. It is not at all in this way and from outside that the existence of the Zwang is implicated in the Freudian Wiederholung, in repetition.
A situation which is repeated, as a failure situation, for example, implies co-ordinates not of the greater or lesser tension, but of signifying identity of the plus or minus as sign of what must be repeated. But this sign was not carried as such by the first situation. You should clearly understand that this was not marked by the sign of repetition, otherwise, it would not have been the first! Much more, it must be said that it becomes – that it becomes – the repeated situation and that, by that fact, it is lost as originating situation: that there is something lost by the fact of repetition. And this is not alone perfectly articulated in Freud, but he articulated in Freud, but he articulated it well before having been brought to this statement of the „Beyond of the pleasure principle“.
From the Three essays on sexuality on, we see there arising, arising as impossible, the principle of rediscovery. The simple approach of clinical experience had already suggested to Freud the discovery and the function of the fact that there is, in the metabolism of drives, this function of the lost object as such. It gives the very sense (6) of what emerges under the rubric of Urverdrangung. That is why it has to be clearly recognised that far from there being here, in Freud’s thinking, a jump or rupture, there is rather the preparation – through a meaning that has been glimpsed – the preparation of something which at last finds its final logical structure in the form of a law constitutive – even though again it is not reflexive – constitutive of the subject himself and which is repetition.
The graph – as one might say – of this function, I think that you all have seen passing the shape that I gave as an intuitive, imaginative support of this topology of return, for it to solidarise the part – which is just as important as its direct effect, as this effect that is itself imaged – namely, its retroactive effect, what I called, just now, what happens when by the effect of the repeating, what was to be repeated becomes the repeated.
The line (trait) by which there is sustained what is repeated, qua repeating, must close, must rediscover itself at the origin: the one (this line) which, because of it, henceforth marks the repeated as such.
This, this outline, is nothing other than that of the double loop, or again of what I called, the first time that I introduced it, the „inverted eight“ and that we write like this. Here it returns onto what it repeats and it is this which – in the first, fundamental, initiatory operation as such of repetition -gives this retroactive effect that cannot be detached from it, which forces us to think out the third relation, which – from the One to the Two which constitutes the return – comes back in closing itself towards this One in order to give this non-numeral element that I am calling the additional One (Un-en-plus), and which precisely – since it is not reducible to the series of natural numbers, succeed one another – still deserves this title of the additional One, which I designated as essential for any signifying determination and which is always ready, moreover, not simply to appear, but to be grasped, fleeting, detectable, in lived experience, once the counting (comptant) subject has to count himself among the others.
Let us observe that this is the most radical topological form and that it is necessary to introduce what, in Freud, is put forward in these polymorphous forms that are known under the term of regression – whether they are topical, temporal or formal, this is not a homogenous regression – their common root is to be found in this return, in the return effect of repetition.
Certainly, it is not for nothing that I delayed for so long the examination of these functions of regression. It would be enough to refer to a recent article, published somewhere on a neutral, medical terrain – an article on regression – to see the veritable gap it leaves open, when a thinking, used to not too much kight, tries to connect the (7) theory with what analytic practice suggests to it. The sort of curious promotion that regression receives in certain of these most recent theoretical studies responds, no doubt, to something in the experience of analysis, through which, in effect, there deserves to be questioned the progressive effect that can be involved in regression, which, as everyone knows, is essential for the very process of the treatment as such.
But is is enough to see, to put your finger on, the distance, which in a way leaves veritably open everything that in this connection is re-evoked from Freud’s formulae, and what is deduced from it as regards practical use (you should consult this article which is in the last number of Evolution Psychiatrique) for one to sense the point to which the regression that is involved here is of a nature to suggest to us the question of whether it is anything more than a theoretical regression.
In truth, this indeed is the major mode of this rejection that I am designating as essential to one or other present position of the psychoanalyst.
By taking up such questions anew, at their origin, as if they had not already been settled somewhere, one makes the pleasure last! It is certainly not the business of those for whom I sale responsibility. I will come back to this at the appropriate time, for if, of course, there is in all that to remove every possible reference to something of the order of dishonesty, if from such formulae there is connected and legitimated a finality of the treatment which finds itself covering the crudest illusions of the ego, namely, what is most opposed to analytical renewal.
What is meant by what we have contributed under the term of alienation, when we begin to clarify it by this system of signifying involution (if I can call it that) of repetition?
We have put forward at first that alienation, is the signifier of the Other, is so far as it makes of the Other (with a capital O) a field marked by the same finiteness as the subject himself: the S (O), S, open bracelets: O barred. What finiteness is at stake? The one which defines in the subject the fact of depending on the effects of the signifier.
The Other as such – I am saying, this locus of the Other, in so far as the need for the assuring of a truth evokes it – the Other as such is, as I might say, if you will permit this word that I have improvised: fractured. In the same way as we grasp it in the subject itself – very precisely in the way in which the double topological loop of repetition marks it – the Other also finds itself under the impact of this finiteness.
(8) Thus division is found to be posited at the heart of the conditions of truth. A complication, let us say, brought to any exigency, of the Leibnizian type – of reservation of the aforesaid, I mean, of the truth. The salva veritate, essential to any order of philosophical thinking, is for us – and not simply because of psychoanalysis – manifest at all points of this development which is carried out at the level of mathematical logic – is for us a little bit more complicated. It completely excludes in any case, any form of intuitive absoluteness; the attribution, for example, to the field of the Other, of the dimension – described in as Spinozian a way as you wish – of the Eternal, for example.
This permanent downfall of the Other is ineradicable from the given of subjective experience. It is what puts at the heart of this experience the phenomenon of belief in its ambiguity, constituted by the fact that it is not by accident, by ignorance, that the truth is presented in the dimension of the contestable. A phenomenon, then, which is not to be considered as a happening due to a defect, but as a fact of structure, and that here, for us, is the point of prudence. The point that we are solicited to advance towards with the most discrete steps, I mean in the most discerning way, to designate the substantial point of this structure, in order not to lend to the confusion into which people precipitate themselves, not innocently no doubt, by suggesting here a renewed form of positivism.
We should much more rather find our motels in what remains so misunderstood and nevertheless so alive in the fragmentary things tradition has bequeathed us in terms of exercises of scepticism, in so far as they are not simply these brilliant jugglings between opposed doctrines, but on the contrary veritable spiritual exercises, which corresponded certainly to an ethical praxis, which gives its veritable density to the theory that remains to us under this heading and under this rubric.
Let us say that it is now a question for us of accounting, in terms of our logic, for the necessary emergence of this locus of the Other in so far as it is thus divided. Because, for us, it is here that we are asked to situate not simply this locus of the Other, the perfect correspondent of the fact that the truth is not deceitful, but much more precisely, at the different levels of subjective experience that the clinic imposes on us, how it is possible for there to be inserted into it – into this experience – agencies which cannot be articulated other than as demands of the Other – and this is neurosis …
And here we cannot fail to denounce how excessive is the use of such terms that we have introduced, highlighted, like for example that of demand, when we see it taken up under the pen of some novice or other exercising himself on the plane of analytic theory and marking the degree to which it is essential (the youngster shows his perspicacity here) to put at the centre and at the start of the adventure a demand – he says – a „current requirement“. This is what has always been put forward, by making (9) analysis turn around „frustration and gratification“. The use here of the term of demand, which is borrowed from me, is only there to put us off the track of what is essential in it, which is that the subject comes to analysis not to demand anything whatsoever in terms of a current requirement, but in order to know what he is demanding. Which leads him, very precisely, to this path of demanding that the Other should demand something of him.
The problem of the demand is situated at the level of the Other. The desire of the neurotic turns around the demand of the Other and the logical problem is no know how we can situate this function of the demand of the Other, on this support: that the Other pure and simple, as such, is the O barred.
Many other terms are also to be evoked as having to find their place in the Other. The anxiety of the Other is the true root of the position of the subject as a masochistic position. Let us say again how we ought to conceive of the fact that a point of jouissance is essentially locatable as jouissance of the Other; a point without which it is impossible to understand what is at stake in perversion. A point, nevertheless, which is the only structural referent that can account for what in the tradition is grasped as Selbstbewusstsein. Nothing else in the subject really traverses itself, perforates itself, as I might say, as such – I will thy to sketch out for you, one day, some childish model of it – nothing else, except this point which makes of jouissance, the jouissance of the Other.
We are not going to go into these problems immediately. We have today to trace the consequences to be drawn from the relationship of this graph of repetition, to what we have punctuated as the fundamental choice of alienation.
It is easy to see, from this double loop, that the more it sticks to itself, the more it will tend to be divided. By supposing that here (figure 1) the distance from one edge to the other is reduced, it is easy to see that it will be two rings (rondelles) that will come to be isolated.
What relationship is there between this passage a l’acte of alienation and repetition itself? Well then, very precisely, what can and what ought to be called: the act.
Today, I want to put forward the premises of a logical situation of the act as such.
If this double loop of the drawing of repetition imposes a topology on us, it is because it cannot have its function as edge on just any surface whatsoever. Try to draw it on the surface of a sphere. showed it a long time ago – you can tell me how you get on! – (Figure 2). Bring it back here and try to close it in such a way that it is an edge, namely, that it does not cut itself. This is impossible. These things are not possible – I (11) already pointed out a long time ago – except on a certain type of surface (those which are drawn here, for example) such as the torus that I called on at one time, the cross-cap or the projective plane, or again the third (tierce) Klein bottle which you know, I think, if you still remember, the little drawing in which it can be imaged (it being clearly understood that the Klein bottle has nothing which especially links it to this particular representation.) The important thing is to know what, in each one of these surfaces, results from the cut constituted by the double loop.
On the torus, this cut will give a surface with two edges. On the cross-cap, it will give a cut with a single edge.
The important thing is, what is the structure of the surfaces thus instaured.
The images on the left – and that I introduced the last time so that you could copy the drawing – represent for you what constitutes the most characteristic surface to image for us the function that we give of the double loop. It is (on the top left) the Moebius strip whose edge – namely, everything that is in this drawing (except this, which is a profile which is only inscribed there in a way to give rise in your imagination to the image of the support of the surface itself, namely, that here the surface turns the other side, but this does not form part, of course, of any edge) – there only remains then the double loop, which is the edge – the single edge of the surface in question.
We can take this surface as symbolic of the subject, on condition that you consider, of course, that the edge alone constitutes this surface. This is easy to demonstrate by the fact that if you make a cut through the middle of this surface, this cut itself concentrates in itself the essence of the double loop. Being a cut, which, as I might say, „turns back“ onto itself, it is itself – this single cut – just by itself, the whole Moebius surface. And the proof is that in fact, when you have made this median cut there is no longer any Moebius surface at all! What I might call the „median cut“, removed it from what you think you are seeing, here, in the form of a surface. This is what the figure on the right shows you. It shows you that once it is cut through the middle, this surface, which previously had neither a front nor a back, had only a single face, as it had only a single edge, now has a front and a back, which you see marked here in two different colors. It is enough, of course, for you to imagine that each one of these colours goes to the back of the other, where because of the cut they are continued. In other words, after the cut there is no longer a Moebius surface, but, on (12) the contrary, something which is applicable onto a torus. Which is what the two other figures show you. Namely, that if in a certain way you make this surface – the one obtained after the cut – slide behind (a l’envers) itself, if I can express myself in that way, which is quite well imaged in the present figure – you can by sewing – as I might say – in a different way the edges in question, constitute in this way a new surface which is the surface of the torus, on which there is still marked the same cut, constituted by the fundamental double loop of repetition.
These topological facts are for us extremely favourable to image something, which is what is at stake. Namely, that just as alienation is imaged in two senses by different operations – where one represents the necessary choice between the curtailed I am not thinking of the Es of the logical structure, the other – an element that one cannot choose, of the alternative – which opposes, which connects the kernel of the unconscious, as being this something in which it is not a matter of a thinking that is in any way attributable to the instaured I of subjective unity, and which connects it to an I am not, clearly marked by what I defined in the structure of the dream as the inmixing of subjects,,namely, as the unfixable, indeterminate, character of the subject assuming the thinking of the unconscious – repetition allows us to put in correlation, in correspondence, two modes in which the subject may appear different – may manifest itself, in its temporal conditioning – in a way that corresponds to the two statuses defined as that of the I of alienation and as that which reveals the position of the unconscious in specific conditions, which are none other than those of analysis.
Corresponding to the level of the temporal schema, we have the following: that the passage a l’acte is what is allowed in the operation of alienation; that, corresponding to the other term – a term, in principle, impossible to choose in the alienating alternative – there corresponds acting-out.
What does that mean? The act, I mean the act and not some manifestation of movement. Movement, motor discharge (as it is put at the level of theory) is something that in no way is enough to constitute an act. If you will allow me a crude image, a reflex is not an act.
But after all, this arena of not-an-act (ne pas-acte) must be extended far beyond. What is being solicited in the study of the intelligence of a higher animal, conduite de detour for example – the fact that a monkey sees what he has to do to get at a banana when he is separated from it by a plate of glass – has absolutely nothing to do with an act. And in truth, a very great number of your movements, as you can well imagine – those that you will carry out between now and the end of the day – have nothing to do of course with an act.
(13) But how define what an act is?
It is impossible to define it otherwise than on the foundation of the double loop, in other words, of repetition. And it is precisely in this that the act is foundational for the subject.
The act is, precisely, the equivalent of repetition, by itself. It is this repetition in a single line (trait) that I designated earlier by this cut that it is possible to make in the centre of the Moebius strip. It is in itself the double loop of the signifier.
One could say, but this would be to deceive oneself, that in its case the signifier signifies itself. Because we know that it is impossible. It is nevertheless true that it is as close as possible to this operation.
The subject – let us say, in the act – is equivalent to its signifier. It remains nonetheless divided.
Let us try to clarify this a little and let us put ourselves at the level of this alienation at which the I is founded on an I am not thinking which is all the more favourable for leaving the whole field to the Es of logical structure.
„I am not thinking“ … if I am, all the more in that I am not thinking (I mean: if I am only the I that the logical structure instaures), the medium, the line, where there can be connected these two terms, is the : I act; this I act which is not, as I told you, a motor performance. In order that „I walk“ should become an act, it is necessary for the fact that I am walking to signify that I walk in fact and that I am saying it as such.
There is repetition intrinsic in every act, which is only permitted by the effect of retroaction – which is exercised because of the fact of the signifying incidence which is put at its heart – and the retroaction of this signifying incidence on what is called „the case“ in question, whatever it may be.
Naturally, it is not enough for me to proclaim that I am walking! All the same it is already a beginning of action. It is an operetta action: „Marchons, marchons…“ It is also what is called, in a certain ideology, commitment, which is what gives it its well known comic character.
The important thing to detect about what is involved in an act, is to search where the logical structure gives us – and gives us qua logical structure – the possibility of transforming into an act what, at first approach, could be nothing other than a pure and simple passion. „I fall to the ground“ or „I stumble“, for example. Reflect on this, that the fact of this signifying duplication, namely, that in my „I fall on the ground“ there is the affirmation that I fall on the ground: „I fall to the ground“ becomes, transforms by fall, into something signifying. I fall to the ground and by this I perform the act in which I demonstrate that I am, as they say, utterly crushed (atterre). (14) In the same way, „I stumble“ – even „I stumble“ which bears in itself so manifestly the passivity of missing something – can be, if it is taken up aid reduplicated by the affirmation, „I stumble“, the indication of an act in so far as I myself assume the sense, as such, of this stumbling.
There is nothing here which goes against the inspiration of Freud, if you remember that at a particular page of the Traumdeutung and very precisely on the one where he designates for us the first lineaments of his research on identification, he underlines very clearly himself – legitimating in advance the intrusions that I make of the Cartesian formula into the theory of the unconscious – the remark that Ich has two different senses in the same sentence, when one says „Ich denke was gesundes Kind Ich war“ „I think“ – or: Ich bedenke, as he said exactly: I meditate, I reflegt, I gargle – „at the thought of what a healthy child – Ich bin … Ich war – I was“.
The essentially signifying character as such, is reduplicated by the act. The repetitive and intrinsic insistence of repetition in the act, is what allows us to connect up in an original fashion – and in such a fashion that it can subsequently satisfy in the analysis of all its varieties – the definition of the act.
Here I can only indicate in passing – for we will have to come back to it – that the important thing is not so much in the definition of the act, as in its consequences. I mean, what results from the act in terms of change of surface.
For if I spoke earlier about the incidence of the cut on the topological surface – that I designate as that of the Moebius strip – if after the act, the surface is of a different structure in such a case, if it is of a still different structure in another one or even if in certain cases it may not change, here is something that is going to propose for us models (if you wish) to distinguish what is involved in terms of the incidence of the act, not so much in the determination as in the mutations of the subject.
Now, there is a term which for some time I have left to the testing and the tasting of those who surround me, without ever frankly responding to the objection made to me – and which has been made to me for a long time – that Verleugnung – since this is the term in question – is the term to which there should be referred the effects that I reserve for Verwerfung. I spoke enough about the latter, since today’s discourse, not to have to go back on it. I simply highlight here that what is of the order of Verleugnung is always what is concerned with the ambiguity that results from the effects of the act as such.
I cross the Rubicon. That can be done … all by itself. It is enough to take the train at Cesena in the right direction, once you are on the train, you can do nothing more about it, you cross the Rubicon. But this is not an act. It is not an act either when you cross the Rubicon thinking about Caesar, it is an imitation of Caesar’s act. But you already see that imitation takes on in the dimension of the act, a quite different structure to the one that is usually supposed for it. It is not an act, but it can all the same be one! And there is even no other possible definition for the suggestions, otherwise so excessive, as those entitled the Imitation of Jesus Christ, for example.
Around this act – whether it is imitation or not – whether it is the original act itself, the one that the historians of Caesar tell ugclearly the sense of is indicated by the dream, which precedes this crossing of the Rubicon – which is none other than the sense of incest – it is a matter of knowing, at each of these levels, what is the effect of the act.
It is the labyrinth proper to the recognition of these effects by a subject who cannot recognise it, because he is entirely – as subject – transformed by the act, it is these effects that are designated, wherever the term is correctly employed, by the rubric of Verleugnung.
The act then is the only locus where the signifier has the appearance – the function in any case – of signifying itself. Namely, to function outside its possibilities.
the subject, in the act, is represented as pure division. The division, we will say, is his Reprasentanz. The true sense of the term Reprasentanz is to be taken at this level for it is starting from this representance of the subject as essentially divided, that one can sense how this function of Reprasentanz may effect what is called representation; which makes the Vorstallung depend on an effect of the Reprasentanz.
We are stopped by the time.. There is going to be question for us the next time of how it is possible for there to be presentified the impossible-to-choose element of alienation. The matter is well worth the trouble of being put off for a discourse reserved to it, since it is a matter of nothing other than the status of the Other, where is is evoked for us in the most urgent fashion, so as not to lead to precipitation and error, namely, the analytic situation. But this model that is given to us by the act as division and final support of the subject, a point of truth which – let us say it in parenthesis before separating – is the one which justifies the rise to the summit of philosophy of the function of existence, which undoubtedly is nothing other than the veiled form in which there is presented, for thinking, the original character of the act in the function of the subject.
Why has this act, in its agency, remained veiled, and this for those who knew best how to mark its autonomy – against Aristotle who had not and for good reason the slightest idea of this – I mean, St. Thomas?
(16) It is no doubt because the other possibility of cutting is given us, in the impossible-to-choose part of alienation (put within our reach, nevertheless, from the angle of analysis) – the same cut intervening at the other vertix, the one designated here, which corresponds to the unconscious-I am not conjunction – this is what is called acting-out and its status is what we will try to define the next time.
Die Spur: Sieben
Seminar 18: 12mai1971
lituraterre
I.“here is the well-rendered account of what distinguishes the letter from the very signifier that it carries with it, which is not to make a metaphor of the epistle, since the story consists in what of the message passes in it „hey presto“ like a trick played in a conjuror’s hands, while the letter goes on it’s way (fait peripetie) without it.“
II.“thus, one verifies that the letter always arrives at it’s destination on condition that one considers it as disjunct from its dimension as a message. for the destination in question is nothing other than the jouissance of whoever makes use of it. it is in this that the letter is littoral tracing for the subject the contours of being.“
III.“erasure of no trace whatsoever that is prior, this is what constitutes the land [terre] of the littoral. pure litura (erasure), that is the literal. to produce it [this erasure], is reproducing this half without complement of which the subject subsists.“
Die Spur: Drei
Seminar 9: 22nov1961
you have been able to see, to your satisfaction, that i was able to introduce you the last time to the remarks we are going to make this year by means of a reflection which, in appearance, might have seemed to be a rather philosophical one because it dealt precisely with a philosophical reflection, mthat of descartes, without giving rise on your part, it seems to me, to too many negative reactions. far from it, it seems that i have been trusted as regards the legitimacy of what might follow from it. i am delighted at this felling of confidence which i would like to be able to translate as saying that you at least sensed where i wanted to lead you by that.
nevertheless, so that you may not develop, from the fact that i am going today on the same theme, the feeling that i am delaying, i would like to pose that such indeed is our goal, in this mode that we are tackling, to engage ourselves on this path. let us say it right away, in a formula which all our future developments will subsequently clarify: what i mean is that, for us analysts what we understand by identification – because this is what we encounter in identification, in what is concrete in our experience concerning identification – is a signifier-identification (une identification de signifiant).
reread in the course in linguistics one of the numerous passages where de saussure tries to get closer to, as he continously tries to do by circumscribing it, the function of the signifier, and you will see (i am saying this in parenthesis) that ball his efforts did not avoid leaving the door open to what i would call less differences of interpretation than veritable divergences in the possible exploitation of what he opened up with this distinction which is so essential of signifier and signified. perhaps i couls dtouch on it in passing for you so that you can at least note the existence, the difference there is between one school and another: that of prague, to which jakobson, to whom i so often refer, belongs and that of copenhagen to which hjemslev gave its orientation under a title which i have never yet evoked before you, that of glossematics.
you will see: it is almost bound to happen that i will be led to come back to it because we cannot take a step without trying to deepen this function of the signifier, and consequently its relatioship to the sign.
you ought all the same to know already – i think that even to the extent of reproaching me for it, that i was repeating jakobson – that in fact, the position which i take up here is in advance of, ahead of that of jakobson as regards the primacy which i give to the function of the signifier in every realisation, let us say, of the subject. the passage of de saussure, to which i alluded earlier – i am only privileging it here because of its value as an image – it is the one in which he tries to show what sort of identity that of the signifier is by taking the example of the 10.15 express. the 10.15 express, he says, is something perfectly defined in its identity: it is the 10.15 express despite the fact that obviously the different 10.15 expresses , which succeed one another in an always identical way every day, have absolutely nothing either in their material, indeed even in the composition of the train, but indeed a different real structure and components.
of course, what is true in such an affirmation supposes precisely, in the constitution of a being like the 10.15 express, a fantastic interlinking of signifying organisation entering into the real by the mediation of spoken beings. it remains that this has in a way an exemplary value, in order to well define what i mean when i put forward first what i am going to try to articulate for you: these are the laws of identification qua signifier identification. let us even highlight, as a reminder that to remain with a n opposition which is a sufficient support for you, what is opposed to it, what it is distinguished from, what makes it necessary that we should elaborate its function, is that the identification that it thus distances itself from is that of the imaginary, the one whose extreme form i tried to show you a long time ago in the background of the mirror stage in what i would call the organic effectn of the image of our fellows, the effect of assimilation that we grasp at one or other point of natural history, and the example that i was able to show in vitro in the form of this little animal, which is called the migratory locust, and of whom you know that the evolution, the growth, the apparition of what is called the totaöity of the phaneres , of hte way in which we can see it – depends in its form in some way on an encounter which happens at one or other moment of its development, of the satges, of the phases of the larval transformation or according to whether there have appeared to it a certain number of traits of the image of its fellow, it will evolve or not, in different cases, according to the form which is called solitary or the form which is called gregarious.
we do not know everything, we even know rather little about the stages of this organic circuit which brings with them such effects. what we do know is that it is experimentally certain. let us classify it under the generak rubric of the effects of the image of which we will find all sorts of forms at every different levels of the physical and even the inanimate world, as you know, if we define the image as any physical arrangement which has as a result the constitution between two systems of a bi-univocal concordance, at whatever level it may be.
it is a very conceivable formula, and one which can be applied just as much to the effect that i have just mentioned, for example, as to that of the formation of an image, even a virtual one, in nature through the mediation of a plane surface, whether it be that of a mirror or of the one that i have for a long time evoked, of the surface of the lake which reflects the mountain.
does that mean that, as is the tendency and a tndency which is expanding under the influence of a kind, i would say, of intoxication, whcih recently took hold of scientific thinking from the fact of the irruption of what is only at the bottom the discovery of thze dimension of the signifying chain as such but which, in all sorts of ways, is going to be reduced by this thinking to more simple terms – and very precisely this is what is expressed in what are called information theories – does this mean that it is correct, without any other connotation, for us to resolve to characterize the liasion between two systems, one of which is image with respect to the other, by this idea of information, whcih is very general, implying certain paths taken by this something whcih carries this bi-univocal concordance?
this indeed is where there exists a very great ambiguity, i mean the one which can only end up bx making us forget the proper levels of what information should involve if we want to give it a value other than the vague one which would only end up when all is said and done by giving a sort of re-interpretation, a false consistency to what had up to then been subsumed, and this from antiquity up to our own day, under the notion of the form, something whcih captures, envelops, determines the elements, gives them acertain type of finality which is the one that in the whole ascension from from the elementary towards the complex, from the inanimate towards the animate, is something which has no doubt its enigma and its own value, its order of reality, but which is distinct.
if this is what i intend to articulate here with all the forces of the new things that are brought to us, in the new scientific perspective, by the highlighting, the separating out of what is contributed by the experience of language and what the signifier relationship allows us to introduce as an original dimension that it is a matter of radically distinguishing from the real in the form of the symbolic dimension, it is not, as you see, in this way that i am tackling the problem of what is going to allow us to split this ambiguity.
already all the same i have said enough about it for you to know, for you to have sensed, apprehended, in these elements of signifying information, the originality that is contributed by the trait, let us say, of seriality, that they involve, the trait also of discreteness, i mean of cutting, something which saussure in no better articulated than by saying that what characterizes them with reagrd to one another, is to be what the others are not.
diachrony and synchrony are the terms which i pointed out you should refer, even though all of this is not fully articulated, the distinction having to bedrawn with this de facto diachrony: too often it is simply what is aimed at in the articulation of the laws of the signifier. there is a rightful diachrony through which we rejoin the structure; in the same way for synchrony, one is not saying everything about it, far from it, by implying in it the virtual simultaneity of the code in each supposed subject, because it
Seminar 9: 6dec1961
trace d’un pas und pas-de-trace
let us take up again our idea, namely what i announced to you the last taht i intended to make pivot around the notion of the 1 our problem, that of identification, it being already announced that identification is not just simply to make 1, i think that this will not be difficult to admit.
we are starting, as is normal concerning identification, from the most common mode of access of subjective experience: that expressed by what appears to be the essentially communicable experience, in the formula which, at first sight, does not appear to give rise to objections, that A is A. i said: at first sight because it is clear that, whatever may be the degree of belief involved in this formula, i am not the first to raise objections to it; you have only to open the smallest treatise on logic in order to encounter what difficulties the distinguo of this formula, in appearance the most simple, gives rise to of itself. you coulod even see that the greater part of the difficulties which are to be resolved in many domains – but it is particularly striking that it should be in logic more than elsewhere – come out of all the possible confusions which may arise from this formula which lends itself in an eminent way to confusion. if you have, for example, some difficulties, even some fatigue, in reading a text as exciting as plato’s parmenides, it is in as much as on this point of „A is A“ let us say that you lack a little reflection, and in as much precisely that if i said above that the „A is A“ is a belief which has certainly not always reigned over opur species, in as much as after all, the A indeed began somewhere – i am speaking about A, the letter A – and that it must not have been so easy to gain access to this kernel of apparent certainty that there is in „A is A“, when man did not have the A at his disposition.
i will tell you alittle later the path onto which this reflection may lead us; it would well be all the same to be aware of the new thing that arrives with the A; for the moment let us content ourselves with something that our language here allows us to articulate well: it is that „A is A“ appears to mean something: it makes a „signified“ (cela fait „signifié“).
i pose, very sure that i will not encounter on this point any opposition from anybody, and on this theme in aposition of competence which i put to the test through the testimonies of what can be read about the matter, as well as by challenging one or other mathematician who is sufficiently familiar with his science to know where we are at the present time for example, and then many others in all sorts of domains, that i will encounter no opposition in putting forward under certain conditions of explanation which are precisely those to which i am going to submit myself before you, that „A is A“ signifies nothing. it is precisely this nothing (rien) that is going to be in question, because this nothing has a positive value because it says what that signifies. we have in our experience, indeed in our analytic folklore, something, the image never sufficiently explored, exploited, which is the game of the little child so shrewdly picked out by freud, perceived in such a perspicacious fashion in the ‘fort-da’. let us take up on our own account since, from an object taken up and rejected – thechild in question is his grandson – freud was able to glimpse the inaugural gesture in the game. let us remake this gesture, let us take this little object: a ping-pong ball, i take it, i hide it, i show it to him again; the ping-pong ball is the ping-pong ball, but it is not a signifier, it is na object, it is an appproach to say: this little o is a little o; there is between these two moments, which i indisputably identify in a legitimate fashion, the disaapearance of the ball; without that there is no means for me to show it, there is nothing formed on the plane of the image. therefore, the ball is always there and i can fall into a cataleptic sate looking at it.
what relationship is there between the „is“ which unites the two apparitions of the ball and this intervening disappearance?
on the imaginry plane, you sense that at least the question is posed of the relatioship of this „is“ with what seems indeed to cause it, namely the disappearance, and there you are close to one of the secrets of the identification which is the one to which i tried to get you to refer in the folklore of identification: this spontaneous assumption by the subject oof the identity of two appearances which are nevertheless quite differnet. remember the story of the dead farm owner whom his servant rediscovers in the body of the mouse. the relationship of this „it is him“ with the „it is him again“, this is what for us gives its model and its register to the most simple experience of identification. him, then him again, there here the being-perspective of the question; in „him again“, it is the same being who appears. as regards the other, in short, it is all right like that, it is satisfactory; for my dog whom i took the other day as a term of reference, as i told you, it is all right; this reference to being, is sufficiently, it seems, supported by the sense of smell; in the imaginary field the support of being is easily conceivable: it is a matter of knowing if it is effectively this simple relationship that we are dealing with in our experience of being, it is not at all for nothing that a whole effort of a thopught which is our own contemporary one, is going to formulate something whose centrepiece i never shift without a certain smile, this ‘dasein’, this fundamental mode of our expereince in which there must be designated the centrepiece giving every access to this term of being, as a primary reference.
it is here indeed that something else forces us to question ourselves about the fact that the punctuation in which this presence to the world manifests itself is not simply imaginry, namely that already it is not at all to the other that we refer ourselves here, but to this most intimate part of ourselves which we try to make the anchoring point, the root, the foundation of what we are as subjects. for, if we can articulate, as we have done, on the imaginary plane, that my dog recognises me as the same, we have not on the contrary any indication about the fashion in which she identifies herself; in whatever way we may re-engage her within herself, we know nothing at all, we have no proof, no testimony about the mode under which she approaches this identification. it is indeed here that there appears the function, the value of the signifier same (meme) as such; and it is in the very measure that we are dealing with the subject that we have to question ourselves about the relationship of this identification of the subject with what is a different dimension to everything that is the order of appearance and disappearance; namely the status of the signifier. that our experience shows us that the differnet modes, the differnet angles under which we are led to identify ourselves as subjects, at least for some of us, supposes the signifier to articulate it, even most often under an ambiguous, improper, difficult-to-handle form subject to all sorts of reservations and of distinctions which the „A is A“ is, this is what i want to draw your attention to and first of all without dallying any longer show you that if we have the good fortune to take a further step in this direction, it is by trying to articulate this status of the signifier as such. i am indicating it right away: the signiifer is not at all the sign. it is with giving to this distinction its precise formula that we are going to busy ourselves; i mean that it is to show where this difference lies that we can see arising from the fact already given by our experience that it is from the effect of the signifier that the subject as such emerges. metonymical effect, metaphorical effect, we do not yet know and perhaps there is something already articulatable before these effects which allows us to see dawning, being formed in a relationship, in a link, the dependence of the subject as such with respect to the signifier. this is what we are going to see by putting it to the test. to anticipate it in a short image to which it is only a matter of giving again a sort of value as a support, as an apologue, you should measure the difference between the following which is going at first perhaps to appear to you as a ply on words – but precisely it is one – there is the footprint (la trace d’un pas). already i led you along this trail, strongly tainted with myth, precisely correlative to the time where there begins to be articulated in thinking the function of the subject as such: robinson cruesoe in front of the footprint which shows him that on the island he is not alone. the distance which separates this ‘pas’ from what the ‘pas’ as an instrument of negation has become phonetically, these are two extremes of the chain that here i ask you to hold onto before showing you effectively what constitutes it and that it is between the two extremeties of the chain that the subject can emerge and nowhere else.
by grasping it, we will manage to relativise something in such a way that you can consider this formula „a is a“ itself as a sort of stigma, i mean in its character of belief as the affirmation of what i would call an epoch: epoch, moment, parenthesis, historical term after all whose field we can glimpse – as you will see – as limited.
what i called the other day an indication, which will remain still only an indication of the identity of this false coherence of the „A is A“ with what i called a theological era, will allow me, i believe, to take a step in what is at stake cocerning the problem of identification, in so far as analysis requires that it should be posed, with respect to a certain acesssion to the identical, as the transcendent A [l'Autre?].
this fecundit, this sort of determination which is suspended from this signifid of „A isA“ coulod not repose on its truth, because this affirmation is not true. what it i a question of reaching in what i am striving to formulate before you, is that this fecundity reposes precisely on the objective fact – i employ descartes’ text:“ when one goes a little further, one seesthe distinction arising as regards the ideas between their actual reality and their objective reality“, and naturally professors produce very learned volumes for us such as a scholastco-cartesian index in order to tell us something that seems here for the rest of us, since god knows e are very smart, a little confused, that this legay of scholasticism by means of which it is believed that everything is explained. i mean that one has spared oneself what is really involved, namely: why descartes, the anti-scholastic, was lead for his part to make use again of these old props. it seems that it does not come so easily to the mind of even the better historians that the only interesting thing is what made it necessary for him to wheel them out again. it is quite clear that it is not in order to remake anew the argument of st anselm that he drags all of this out again into the forefront of the stage. the objective fact that „A“ cannot be „A“, this is what i would first of all like to highlight for you; precisely in order to make you understand that it is with something which has a relationship with this objectice fact that we are dealing and this up to the false signified-effect which is only a shadow here and, as a consequence, which leaves us attached to this spontaneity that there is in the „A is A“.
that the signifier has a fecundty because it is never in any case identical to itself, understand clearly here what i mean: it is quite clear that i am not in the process, even though it would be worth the trouble in passing to distinguish it from it, of pointing out to you thatthere is no tautology in thze fact of saying „war is war“. everyone knows that: when one says „war is war“, one is saying something, one does not know exactly what moreover, bu one can seek it, one can find it and one finds it very easily within hand’s reach; thzta means: that which begins at a certain moment: we are in astate of war. this involves conditions of things which are a little bit different, this is what peguy called that „the little pegs no longer fited into the little holes“. it is a peguy-type definition, namely that it is not at all certain: one could even sustain the contrary, namely that it is precisely in order to put thr little pegs back in their real little holes that war begins, or on the contrary it is to make new little holes for the old little pegs, and so on. moreover this has strictly no interest for us, except that this pursuit whatever it may be is accomplished with a remarkable efficacity by means of the most profound imbecility, something which ought equally make us refelct on the function of the subject with respect to the effects of the signifier.
but let us take something simple, and let us finish with it quickly. if i say „my grandfather is my grandfather“ you should all the same fully grasp here that there is no tautology: that my grandfather, the first term is an index usage of the term „my grandfather“, which is not tangibly different from his proper name, for example emile lacan, nor of tzhe „c’ “ either of the „c’est“ when i point him out when he enters a room: „c’est mon grand’père“. this does not mean that his proper name is the same thing as this „c’ „, of „this is my grandfather“. one is stupefied that a logician like russell was able to say that the proper name belongs to the same category, to the sae signifying class as the „this, that or it“, under the pretext that they are susceptible to the same functional usage in certain cases. this is a parenthesis, but like all my prenthesis, a parentheisis designed to be redicovered furher on in connection wih the status of the proper name of which we will not speak today.
in any case, what is in question in „my grandfather is my grandfather“ means that the execrabele petit bourgeois that this gentleman was, this horrible personage thamks to whom i acceded at an early age to this function of cursing god, this personage is exactly the same as the one who is posted on the civil register as beig demonstrated by the bonds of marriage to be the father of my father, in as much as it is precisely the birth of the latter that is at stake in the act in question. you see therefore the degree to which „my grandfather is my grandfather“ is not at all a tautology. this applies to all tautologies and this does not at all give their univocal formula, because here it is a question of a elationship of the real to the symbolic; in other cases therew will be a relationship of the imaginary to the symbolic, and you would have to go through the whole series of permutations in order to see which are valid. i cannot engae myself along this path because if i talk to you about this which is in a way a method of excluding false tautologies which are simply the permanent current usage of the language , it is in order to tell you that this is not what i mean. if i pose that there is no tautology possible, it is not in so far as the first A and the second A mean diffrnet things that i say that there is no tautology, it is in the very status of A that there is no tautology possible, it is not in so far as the first A and the second A mean differnet things that i say that there is inscribed that A cannot be A, and it was onthis that i ended my discourse the last time by designating for you in saussure the point where it is said that A as a signifier cannot in any way be definde except by not being what the other signifiers are.
from this fact, that it cannot be defined except precisely by not being all the other signifiers, on this there depens this dimensin tha it is equally true that it cannot be itself. it is not enough to put it forward in this way in this opaque fashion precisely because it surprises, it upsets, this belief suspended on the fact that this is the real supprot of identity: you must be got to sense it.
what then is a signifier?
if everybody and not alone the logicians speak about A when it is a question of „A is A“, it is not after all by chance. it is because in order to support what one desires, a letter is necessary. youwill grant me this, i think, but moreover i do not hold this leap to be decisive exceot for the fact that my discourse cross-checks with it, demonstrates it in a sufficiently superabudant fashion for you to be convinced of it; and you will be all the more convinced because i am going to try to show you in the letter precisely this essence of th signifier through which it is distinguished from the sign.
i did something for you last saturday in my house in the country where i have hanging on the wall what is called a chines calligraph. if it were not chinese, i would not have hung it on my wall for the reason that it is only in china that the calligraph has taken on a value as an object d’art: it is the same thing as having a painting, it has the same price. there are the same differences and perhaps even more between one writing and another in our culure as in chinese culture, but we do not attach the same price to it. on the other hand, i will have the occasion to show you what can mask from us the value of the letter which, because of the particular status of the chinese character, is particularly well highlighted in this character. what i am going to show you only takes on its full and most exact position from a certain reflection about what the chinese character is: i already all the same made allusion enough on occasions to the chinese character and its status for you to know that to call it ideographic is not at all sufficient. i will show it to you perhaps in greater detail, this moreover is what it has in common with everything that is called ideographic, there is properly speaking nothing which merits this term in the sense in which one imagines it habitually, i would say almost specifically in the sense that de saussure’s little schema, with ‘arbor’ and the tree drawn underneath, still sustains it through a kind of imprudence which is what misunderstandings and confusions attach themselves to.
wht i want to show you here, i made two examples of. i was brought at the same time a new little instrument that certain painters make a lot of, h is a sort of thick brush where the ink comes from inside which allows the trits to be traced out with a worthwhile thickness and consistency. the result is that i copied much more easily than i would normally have done the form that the characters on my calligraph have: in the left hand column here is the calligraphy of this sentence which means „the shadow of my hat dances and trembles on the flowers of hai tang“; on the other side, you see the same sentnece written in the usual characters, those which are the most legitimate, those that the stumbling student makes when he makes his characters correctly: these two series are perfectly identifiable and at he same tome they do not resemble one another at all. notice that it is in the clearest fashion in so far as they do not resemble one another at all tat there are quite obviously from top to bottom on the right and on the left, the same seven characters, even for someone who has no idea not alone about chinenese characters, but no idea up to now that there were things which were called chinese haracters. if someone discovers that for the first time drawn somewhrer in a desert, he will see that on the right and on the the left it is the same chracters that are in question and the same series of characters on the right and on the left.
this to introduce you to what constitutes the essence of the signifier and which it is not for nothing that i will illustrate best in its simplest form which is what we have been designating for some time as the ‘einziger zug’ . the ‘einziger zug’ which is what gives to this function its value, its act and its mainspring, this is what makes it necessary, in order to dissipate the confusion that may remain here, for me to introduce in order to express it in the best and closest possible way this term which is not at all an neologism, which is used in what is called set theory the word unary (unaire) instead of the word single (unique). at the very least it is useful for me to make use of it today in order to make you properly sense this core that is in question in the distinction of the status of the signifier. this unary trait, therefore, whether it is vertical like here – we call that drawing strokes – or whether it is, as the chinese do it, horizontal, it might seem that its exemplary function is linked to the extreme reduction, precisely with regard to it, of all the opportunities for qualitative difference. I mean that from the moment when i must simply make a trait, there are not, it seems, many varieties nor many variations. this is what gives it its privileged value for us, disabuse yourselves: just as it was not a matter here of discerning what i called the perfectly graspable character of the status of the signifier whatever it may be, A, or another, in the fact that something in its structure might eliminate these differences. i call them qualitative because it is this term that the logicians use when it is a question of defining identity by the elimination of qualitative differences by reducing them as one might say to a simplified schema: this is supposed to be the mainspring of this recognition characteristic of our apprehension of what is the support of the signifier, the letter.
that is not it at all, this is not what is in question. Because if i make a line of strokes, it is quite clear that, however well i may apply myself, there will not be a single one like any another and i would say more: they are all the more convincing as a line of strokes in that precisely i have not applied myself so much to make them rigorously alike.
Since i have been trying to formulate for you what i am in the process of formulation at the moment, i have questioned myself with the means at my disposal, namely those which are given to everyone, about something which after all is not immediately obvious: at that moment does one see appearing a line of strokes? I was in a really extraordinary place whose emptiness perhaps after all through my remarks i am going to draw people to animate, i mean that some of you are going to rush over there, i mean the museum of ’saint-germain’. it is fascinating, it is exciting and it will be all the more so if you try all the same to find someone who was already there before you, because there is no catalogue, no plan and it is completely impossible to know where and who and what, and to find out where one is in this series of rooms. there is a room which is called ‘la salle piette’, from the name of the justice of the peace, who was a genius and who made some fantastic discoveries about pre-history, i mean from some tiny objects, in general of a very small size, which are the most fascinating things that that you could see. and to hold in one’s hand the little head of a woman which is certainly about 30,000 years old has all the same its value, besides the fact that this head is full of questions. but you can see in a glass case – it is very easy to see, because thanks to the testamentary dispositions of this remarkable man they are absolutely obliged to leave everything in the greatest possible disorder with completely out-of-date showcards on the objects, they have succeeded all the same in putting on a piece of plastic something which allows to be distinguished the value of certain of these objects. how can i tell the emotion that i felt when bending over one of these glass cases i saw on a thin rib-bone, obviously the rib of a mammal – i do not really know better than it being a type of cervide deer – a series of little strokes: first two, then a little interval and afterwards five, and then it recommences. there, i said to myself addressing myself by my secret or my public name, this is why in short jacques lacan your daughter is not mute, this is why your daughter is your daughter, because if we were mute she would not be your daughter. obviously, there is some advantage in this, even living in a world very like that of a universal asylum of madmen, a no less certain consequence of the existence of signifiers, as you are going to see.
these strokes which only appear much later, several thousand years after men knew how to make objects of a realistic exactitude, when at the aurignacian epoch bisons were made, which are beyond anything from the point of view of the art of the painter that we have yet been able to achieve! But what is more, at the same epoch people made in bone on a very small scale, a reproduction of something that it might not seem one should have taken so much trouble over because it is a reproduction of something else in bone but which is much bigger: a horse’s skull. why redo in bone on a small scale, when really one imagines that at that epoch they had other things to be doing, this matchless reproduction? I mean that, in „le cuvier“ which i have at my country house, i have extremely remarkable engravings of fossilized skeletons which are made by consummate artists: these are no better than this small reduction of a horse’s skull sculptured in bone which is of such an anatomical exactitude that not only it is convincing: it is rigorous.
well then, it is only much later that we find the trace of something which belongs unambiguously to the signifier.
and this signifier is all alone, because i do not intend giving, for want of information, a special meaning to this little increased gap that there is some place in this line of strokes; it is possible, but i can say nothing about it. What i mean, on the contrary, is that here we see arising something which i am not saying is the first appearance, but in any case a certain appearance of something which you see is altogether distinguished from what can be designated as a qualitative difference: each one of these traits is not at all identical to its neighbour, but it is not because they are different that they function as different, but because the signifying difference is distinct from anything that refers to qualitative difference, as i have just shown you with the little things that i have just circulated before you.
qualitative difference can even on occasion underline the signifying sameness. this sameness is constituted precisely by the fact that the signifier as such serves to connote difference in the pure state, and the proof is that at its first appearance, the 1 manifestly designates multiplicity as such. In other words, i am a hunter because now we have been carried to the level of magdalenian 4. god knows that catching an animal was not any more simple at that epoch, than it is in our day for those who are called bushmen, and it was quite an adventure! it seems indeed that after having wounded the beast it was necessary to track it for a long time in order to see it succumb to what was the effect of the poison.
i kill one of them, it is an adventure, i kill another of them, it is a second adventure which i can distinguish by certain traqits## from the first, but which resembles it essentially by being marked with the same general line. at the fourth, there may be some confusion: what distinguishes it from the second, for example. at the twentieth, how will i know where i am, or will i even know that i have had twenty of them?
the marquis de sade at the ‘rue paradis’ in marseille, locked up with his little valet, proceeded in the same way for the ejaculations (coups), even though varied in different ways, that he got off in the company of his partner, even with some confederates who themselves were varied in different ways. this exemplary man, whose relationships to desire must surely have been marked by some unusual ardour, whatever one might think, marked on the head of his bed, it is said, by little traits each one of the ejaculations – to give them thier name – that he managed to achieve in this sort of singular probationary retreat. undoubtedly one must oneself be well engaged in the adventure of desire, at least according to everything that ordinary things teach us about the most ordinary experience of people, in order to have such a need to locate oneself in the sequence of one’s sexual accomplishments: it is nevertheless not unthinkable that at certain favourable epochs of life, something can become hazy about the exact point that one is at in terms of decimal enumeration.
what is in question in the notch, in the notched trait, is something of which we cannot help seeing that there arises something new with respect to what one could call the immanence of any essential action whatsoever. This being whom we can imagine to be still lacking this method of location, what will he do, after a time which is rather short and limited by intuition, in order not to sense himself simply solidary with a present which is always easily renewable where nothing allows him any any longer to discern what exists as difference in the real. It is not at all sufficient to say:“ but all the same such and such a person is not me“. It is not simply because laplanche has hair like that and that,i have hair like nthis and that, his eyes are a certain way and that he has not got quite the same smile as me, that he is different.
You will say: „laplanche is laplance and lacan is lacan“. But it is precisely there that the whole question lies, since precisely in analysis the question is posed whether laplanche is not the thought of lacan and if lacan is not the being of laplanche or inversely. The question is not sufficiently resolved in the real. It is the signifier which settles it, it is it that introduces difference as such into the real, and precisely in the measure in that what is involved are not at all qualitative differences.
But then if the signifier, in its function of difference, is something which presents itself thus in the mode of the paradox of being precisely different because of this difference which would be based or not on smilarity, of being something other which is distinct and as regards which – i repeat – we can very well suppose, because we have them within our reach, that there are beings who are alive and tolerate very well completely ignoring this sort of difference which certainly, for example, is not at all accessible to my dog, and i will not show you immediately – because i will show it to you in greater detaqil and in amore articulated fashion – that it is indeed for that reason that apparently the only thing that she does not know, is that she herself is. And that she herself is, we ought to search for the mode under which this is appended to this sort of distinction which is particularly manifest in the unary trait in so far as what distinguishes it is not at all an identity of resemblance, it is something else.
What is this other thing?
It is this: it is that thze signifier is not at all the sign. A sign, we are told, is to represent something for someone: the someone is there as a support for the sign. The first definition that one can give of someone is: someone who is accessible to a sign. It is the most elemntary form, if one can give of a someone is: someone who is accessible to a in that way of subjectivity; there is something different: the sign, which represents this something for someone. A signifier is distinguished from a sign first of all in this which is what i tried to get you to sense: the fact is that signifiers only manifest at first the presence of difference as such and nothing else. The first thing therefore that it implies is that the relationship of the sign to the thing should be effaced:
sign
———-
someone
something S these ones of the magdalenian bone, it would be a very clever man who could tell you what they were the sign of. Mand we, thank god, are advanced enough since magdalenian 4 for you to perceive the following – which for you has the same sort no doubt of naive obviousness, allow me to tell you that „A is A“, namely that, as you were taught in school, you cannot add up oranges and apples, pears with carrots and so on, is a complete error; this only begins to be true when one starts from a definition of addition which supposes, i assure you, a number of axioms which would be enough to cover this whole section of the blackboard.
At the level at which things are taken in our day in mathematical reflection, specifically to call it by its name in set theory, it is not possible in the most fundamental operations, such as, for example, a union or an intersection, there would be no question of posing such an exorbitant conditions for the validity of operations. You canvery well add up what you want at the level of a certain register for the simple reason that what is involved in aset, is, as was well expressed by one of the theoreticians speculating on one of these so-called paradoxes: it is not a matter of objects, or of things, it is a question of 1 very exactly in what one calls the element of sets. This is not sufficiently remarked on in the text to which i allude for a celebrated reason: it is because precisely this reflection on what a 1 is is not well elaborated even by those who in the most modern mathematical theory nevertheless make of it the clearest, the most manifest usage.
This 1 as such, in so far as it marks pure difference, it is to it that we are going to refer to put to the test, at our next meeting the relatioship of the subject to the signifier. It will first of all be necessary for us to show in what sense the step taken is that of the effaced thing: the different „effacons“ if you will allow me to use this formula, in which the signifier comes to birth, will give us precisely the major modes of the manifestation of the subject. Already, to indicate to you, to remind you of the formulae under which i noted for you for example the function of metonymy, the big S function in so far as it is in a chain which is continued by S’, S“, S“’, etc… this is what ought to give us the effect that:
f S S’ S“ S“’ …..etc
f (S, S’ , S“…) = S( – ) s
i called that of the peu-de-sens, in so far as the minus sign designates, connotes a certain mode of appearance of the signified as it results from the putting into function of S,the signifier, in the chain.
S( – ) s
we will put it to the test of a substitution for these S and S’ of 1 in so far as precisely this precisely this operation is quite legitimate, and you know it better than anybody, you for whom repetition is the basis of your experience: what constitutes the core of repetition, of the automatism of repetition for your experience is not that it is laways the same thing which is interesting, it is why there is repeated something of which precisely the subject from this point of view of his biologicla comfort has not – as you know – really any strict need as regards the repetitions that we have to deal with, namely the stickiest, the most annoying, the most symptomogenic repetitions. This is where your attention should be directed in order to uncover in it as such the incidence of the function of the signifier.
How can it happen, this typical relationship to the subject constituted by the existence of the signifier as such, the only possible support of what is for us originally the experience of repetition?
Will i stop there or will i already indicate to you how the formula of the sign must be modified in order to grasp, to understand waht is in question in the advent of the signifier. The signifier, as opposed to the sign, is not what represents something for someone, it is what represents precisely the subject for another signifier; my dog is on the lookout for signs and then she speaks, in the way you know, why is her speech not a language; because precisely i am for her something which can give her signs, but who cannot give her any signifier.
The distinction between speech (la parole), as it can exist at the preverbal level and language consists precisely in this emergence of the function of the signifier.
