Jacques Lacan Lectures and Conferences

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Jacques Lacan “The Reality Principle”, “Principe de réalité,” L’Évolution Psychiatrique, 1936. “Psychoanalysis in Report with Reality”, “La psychanalyse dans ses rapports avec la réalité,” L’Institut Français de Milan, 1967. “Excursus”, Excursus. Conférence à Milan, 1973. “The Third”, “Troisieme”, 7th Congress of the Freudian school of Paris in Rome. Conference published in l’École freudienne, 1975, n° 16. “Religions and the Real”, “Des Religions et du Reel”, L’École Freudienne, 1976.

Jacques Lacan (1936[2023]). “The Reality Principle”. Trans Tolga Yalur from French “Principe de réalité,” L’Évolution Psychiatrique, 1936. A great number of psychic phenomena are held in the conceptions of this school just to mean nothing. This would exclude them from the frameworks of authentic psychology, which knows that a certain intentionality is phenomenologically inherent in its object. For the associationist school, this is tantamount to holding them insignificant to reject them either to the void of misrecognition, or to the vanity of the "epiphenomenon.”

This conception distinguishes two orders in psychic phenomena: first, the order in the operations of rational cognizance, and then all the others, feelings, beliefs, delusions, assents, intuitions, dreams. The former necessitated the associationist analysis of the psyche; whereas the latter must be explained by some determinism, foreign to their "appearance," say "organic" in that it reduces all others either to the support of a physical object or to the rapport of a biological end. Hence, the psychic phenomena are not recognized as having their own reality: those who do not belong to the true reality only have an illusory reality. This true reality is constituted by the system of references that applies to the already established science: tangible mechanisms for the physical sciences, to which utilitarian motivations for the natural sciences are added. The role of psychology is only to reduce the psychic phenomena to this system and to verify it by determining the phenomena themselves that constitute the cognizance. As it is a function of this verity, associative psychology is not a science. Verity of the Psychology and Psychology of the Verity We do not play at the paradox of denying that science does not have to know the verity here. But verity is a value that responds to the uncertainty through which the lived experience of man is phenomenologically marked and the search for verity historically animates under the spiritual rubric, the impulses of the mystic and the rules of the moralist, the paths of the ascetic as well as the discoveries of the mystagogue. By forcing the pre-eminence of verity on the whole of the culture,

this research has created an ethical stance that remains a condition of being for science. In its specific value, however, verity stands alien to the order of science: science can honor itself with its alliances with verity; it can propose its phenomenon and its value; it can in no way identify for its own end. If there appears some artifice, the question would be posed as what does remain of the most absolute of the lived criteria of verity, in the sense of the modern physical and mathematical relativism: where is the absolute, the test of mystical cognizance, the evident, the foundation of philosophical speculation, the noncontradiction itself, the more modest requirement of empiricalrationalist construction? More within reach of human judgment, the scientist wonders if the rainbow is true. What only matters to him is that this phenomenon is communicable in some language (condition of the mental order), registrable in some form (condition of the experimental order) and that he succeeds in inserting it into the chain of symbolic identifications where his science brings together the diversity of its proper object (condition of the rational order). The physico-mathematical theory at the end of the nineteenth century resorted to relatively intuitive foundations. Ruled out since then to hypostasize its prodigious fecundity and thus to recognize the omnipotence implied in the idea of verity. The practical successes of this science conferred blinding prestige which is not unrelated to the phenomenon of evidence. Thus, science was posited to serve as the ultimate object of the passion for verity, awakening to the vulgarity of this suspense before the arrival of the new idol called scientism. The "clerical" house of

this eternal enlightenment wounds the reality it is given to grasp. By being interested only in the act of knowledge as a scientist, the associationist psychologist engages with this wound. To speculate, it has no less cruel consequences for the living and for humans. It is a perspective that forces the doctor toward this amazing contempt for psychic reality, whose scandal, perpetuated today by the maintenance of an entire school formation, is represented as much in the partiality of observation as in the bastardization of conceptions such as that of pithiatism. However, this perspective of the doctor, the practitioner of intimate life par excellence, appears as a systematic negation that also had to come from the practitioner himself. Not merely the critical negation that flourished around the same time in speculating the “immediate data of consciousness,” but a fruitful negation that asserted itself on an incoming positivity. No doubt, Freud took this new step. Because, as he bears witness in his autobiography, he was determined by his worry to cure, where, against those who like to relegate it to the secondary rank of an “art,” it should be recognized as the very intelligence of human reality, insofar as it applies to transform this reality. Revolution of the Freudian Method For Freud, the first sign of this attitude of submission to reality was to recognize that since a great number of psychic phenomena apparently links to a function of social relations, there is no space to exclude the way which therefore opens the most common access: namely the very subject’s witnessing of these phenomena. On what the doctor of the time bases the ostracism of principle

whose witnessing of the patient is struck for him, if not on the annoyance of recognizing his own prejudices as vulgar. It is indeed the common attitude to a whole culture that has guided the abstraction, which is analyzed highly as a learned: for the patient as for the doctor, psychology is the domain of the “imaginary” in the sense of the illusory, therefore has a real meaning. As a result, the symptom can only be psychological “of appearance,” and will be distinguished from the ordinary register of psychic life by some discordant trace where its “serious” character is well demonstrated. Freud comprehends that this very choice renders the patient's briefing worthless. To recognize a reality specific to psychic reactions should start by no longer choosing one. To measure their efficiency, their succession must be respected. Surely, there is no question of restituting the chain for the recitation, but the very moment of the brief can constitute a significant fragment for the textual integrity and free it from the chains of the recitation. What can be called the analytical experience is thus constituted. Its first condition is formulated in a law of non-omission, which instigates at the level of everyday interest, reserved for all that “comprehends itself,” but it is incomplete without law of non-systematization. Posing incoherence as a condition of experience, this nonsystematization grants a presumption of meaning to a whole waste of mental life, namely not only to representations of which the psychology of the school only sees nonsense: dream scenario, presentiments, fantasies of daydreaming, confused or lucid

delusions, but also to those phenomena where, to be totally negative, there is virtually no civil status: slips of the tongue and backfires of action. Let me note that these two laws, or better rules of experience, the first of which was isolated by Pichon, appear as one in Freud’s formulation, according to the then-dominant concept, the law of free association. Phenomenological Description of the Psychoanalytic Experience This experience is itself the constituent of the therapeutic technique. If the doctor has some theoretical sense, he can describe what the experience brings to the observation in the research. He will then have more than one occasion to marvel, if this is the form of astonishment which responds to the appearance of a rapport so easy that it seems that he avoids the thought. Language is the first given of this experience. A language, that is to say, a sign that marks how complex the question is, especially when the psychologist links it to the subject of cognizance, that is, to the subject’s thought. What is the relation of this to language? Is it only a language, but secret, or is it only the expression of a net, unformulated thought? Where to find the common measure of the two terms of this question, that is, the unity of which language is the sign? Is it rooted in the word: the noun, the verb, or the adverb? In the density of its history? Why not in the mechanisms that form it phonetically? How to choose in this maze where philosophers and linguists, psychophysicists and physiologists lead us? How to choose a reference, which seems more mythical. The psychoanalyst, however, needs not to detach the experience of language from the situation of the speaker. For this, he touches

on the simple fact that language, before meaning something, means for someone. By the mere fact that the psychoanalyst is present and listening to the analysand who speaks and addresses him and, since the analysand means nothing, there remains what the analysand wants to mean for the psychoanalyst. What the analysand says may "have no sense", what he tells the analyst may have. It is in the movement of responding that the psychoanalyst cognizes it in auditing. In suspending this movement, the psychoanalyst comprehends the meaning of the discourse. He then recognizes an intention, among those that represent a certain tension of social relations: demand intention, punitive intention, propitiatory intention, demonstrative intention, solid aggressive intention. This intention being recognized transmits language according to two modes whose analyses are rich in teaching: intention is represented but incomplete for the subject, in what the speech reports from experience, and so long as the subject assumes the ethical anonymity of the expression: it is the form of symbolism, which is conceived but denied by the subject, in what the discourse affirms of experience if the subject systematizes its conception: it is the form of denial. Henceforth, the intention turns out to be unconscious as expressed, conscious as repressed. Language, in its function of social expression, reveals both the significant unity in intention, and the constitutive ambiguity as subjective expression. These rapports, given by experience to phenomenological depth, are rich in directive for any theory of "consciousness", especially morbid. Their incomplete recognition makes most of these theories obsolete. Let me continue the decomposition of the experience to see if the

auditor enters the condition of the speaker. The analysand asks the analyst to play this role, implicitly at first, explicitly later. Silently, however, and stealing even the reactions of the analyst’s visage, little marks in his person, the psychoanalyst patiently refuses. Isn't there a threshold where this attitude must pause the monologue? If the subject pursues it, it is by virtue of the law of experience. But is it always addressed to the auditor now tor or to some other, imaginary but more real: to the ghost of memory, to the witness of solitude, to the statue of duty, to the messenger of destiny? In reacting even to the refusal of the analyst, the analysand will betray the image he/she substitutes for him. By means of implorations, imprecations, insinuations, provocations, ruses and tricks, by means of the fluctuations of the intention with which the analysand aims at the analyst and which the analyst notes down, motionless but not impassive, the analysand communicates to the analyst drawing this image. However, as these intentions become more represented in the discourse, they are intertwined with evidence whose subject laces them: the analysand puts into meaningful language what his/her pain is and how to go beyond. He/ she speaks to the analyst of all his/her doings, who figures out in these a core for the causes of pain for the analysand to criticize himself or herself. Indeed, the analyst proceeds for the subject to become aware of the unity of the image that refracts in him /her in disparate influences, depending on whether the analysand plays with it or not, incorporates it or becomes aware of it. No need to describe how the analyst proceeds in his intervention but works on both registers of intellectual elucidation through interpretation, and

affective maneuver through transference. Fixing the time, however, is a matter of the technique that describes it in the function of the analysand’s reactions; adjusting the speed is a matter of tact, through which the analyst is informed about the rhythm of these reactions. As the analysand traces the experience and the lived process where the image is reconstituted, the demeanor ceases to mimic the analyst’s suggestions, the memories resume their real density, and the analyst sees the end of his power, made henceforth useless by the end of the symptoms and the completion of the character. Discussion of the Objective Value of the Experience The phenomenological description can be given as what happens in the series of experiences that form a psychoanalysis. The work of an illusionist is to have the fruit of solving an illusion. Psychoanalytic therapy, on the contrary, must be defined essentially as a double movement by which the image, at first diffuse and shattered, is regressively assimilated to the real, to be gradually disassimilated from the real, restored in its own reality. In so doing, psychoanalytic therapy witnesses the influence of this reality. A work of illusion is otherwise a simple technique of experience that is the least favorable to scientific observation because it is based on the conditions most contrary to objectivity. Such an experience is a constant interaction between the observer and the object: it is indeed in the very movement that the analysand communicates to, while keeping in mind that the analyst as the observer is informed of the object. This interaction is primordial; inversely, the assimilation of the image by the analysand or vice

versa. Assimilation subverts the function of the image in the subject’s consciousness. However, the subject identifies with the image only in the very process of this subversive assimilation, which has a constitutive character. The absence of fixed reference in the observed system, the usage of the subjective movement, which everywhere else is eliminated as the source of error, challenge the sound method for the observation. Moreover, the visible challenge is put there to good use. In the very observation may the analyst hide what he engages with: the intuitions of his discoveries elsewhere have the name of delirium, and the human being suffers from experiences proceeding his insight. No doubt, the ways in which verity is discovered are inscrutable, and there have been mathematicians even who confess to having seen it in a dream or crashing it in some trivial collision. But it is honest to expose the discovery as having proceeded from an approach of confirming to the idea of discovery itself. One can treat what these objections betray with affective resistance, without conceiving oneself as exempt from responding to their ideological scope. Without straying into the epistemological terrain, you will first posit that physical science is not without betrayal. It is so purified that it appears in its modern progress of every intuitive category, and all the more strikingly, of the structure of the intelligence that built it. Meyerson was able to demonstrate that, in all the processes, physical science is subjected to the form of mental identification. A form so constitutive of human cognizance that human beings discover it

by reflecting on the common sense, – the phenomenon of light, to provide the standard reference and the atom of action, reveals the obscurest rapport to human sensorium. The points through which physics is attached to human beings are ideal. They show the most disturbing similitude with pivots assigned to human cognizance. As I mentioned before, this is an ideologically reflexive tradition without recourse to experience. No matter what, the anthropomorphism that has scaled down physics, in the notion of force for example, is not noetic but psychological, essentially the projection of human sensorium. To transport the same need in an anthropology waking life, to impose it even in its most distant ends, is to ignore its object and authentically manifest an anthropocentrism of another order, that of cognizance. The rapports described in the mental identification and the use of manmade instruments or tools of language can be opposed to those which constitute, in the narrow sense, cognizance. To evoke their similitude with more immediate, more global, and more adapted forms which characterize the psychic rapports of nonhuman animals with the natural environment and by which they are distinguished from the same human rapports. The idea of a world united with the human being through a harmonious rapport suggests a basis in the anthropomorphism of the myth of nature. As the effort animating this idea is accomplished, the reality of this basis is revealed in this everlarger subversion of nature that is the hominization of the planet: human "nature" is the human relation to human being.

The Object of Psychology is Described Essentially in Relativist Terms It is in this specific reality of inter-human rapports that a psychology can describe its scientific object and method of investigation. The concepts that engage with this object and method are not subjective, but relativist. To be anthropomorphic in their foundation, these concepts, if their similitude to animal psychology demonstrates to be valid, can turn into widespread forms of psychology. Moreover, the objective value of research is demonstrated as the reality of motion, its progress. What best confirms the excellence of Freud’s description of the phenomenon, with a solidity that distinguishes him from all other psychologists, is the extraordinary advance that has brought him "at the forefront" of all others in psychological reality. Even more interesting was what Freud did with the term imago. He has fully freed it from the confused state of common intuition, it is to use masterfully its concrete scope, preserving all its informative function in intuition and memory. He demonstrated this function by discovering in the experience of the identification process: very different from that of imitation distinguished by its form of partial and uncertain approximation. Identification opposes it not only as the global assimilation of a structure, but as the virtual assimilation meant by this structure. Fundamental psychic relations about this structure have been revealed through experience and described with the term complex: it must be seen as the most concrete and fruitful concept that has

been brought into the study of human behavior, in opposition to the concept of instinct, which had hitherto proved inadequate in this field as inadequate as it is sterile. If the doctrine has indeed referred to the complex for the instinct, it seems that the psychoanalytic theory is more enlightened by the former, than it relies on the latter. Through the complex, images are instituted in the psyche that inform the largest units of behavior: images with which the subject identifies for pleasure, playing the drama of their conflicts. Such a comedy, situated by the genius of the species under the sign of laughter and tears, is commedia del arte in that individual improvises it and makes it mediocre or highly expressive, according to his gifts surely, but also to a paradoxical law which seems to show the psychic fecundity of any vital insufficiency. It is in this comedy where we can recognize the very characters that have typified folklore, tales, theater for children or adults: the ogress, the whipper, the harpagon, the noble father, whom the complexes express under more learned names. We have evaluated the phenomenological advances of Freudianism. The critique of its metapsychology, however, begins very precisely with the notion of libido. Freudian psychology, pushing its induction with a dare to recklessness, claims to go back from the interhuman relation to the biological function that would be its substrate: and it designates this function in sexual desire. However, two uses of the concept of libido should be distinguished since they are constantly confused in the doctrine:

as an energetic concept, regulating the equivalence of phenomena, as a substantialist hypothesis, referring to the matter. Freud’s hypothesis is substantialist, not materialist, because applying to the idea of matter is only a naïve and outdated form of authentic materialism. Anyway, it is in the metabolism of sexual function that Freud points to as the base of infinitely varied "sublimations" that manifest behavior. As an energetic concept, on the other hand, the libido is only the symbolic notation of the equivalence between the dynamisms that images invest in behavior. It is the very condition of symbolic identification and the essential entity of the rational order, without which no science can be constituted. By this notation, the dynamisms of the images, without being able to have a rapport to a unit of measurement, but already provided with a positive or negative sign, can be expressed by the balance they make. The notion of libido in this use is no longer metapsychological: it is the instrument of the progress of psychology towards a positive knowledge. The combination, for example, of this notion of libidinal investment with a concretely defined structure as that of the superego, represents, both on the ideal definition of moral consciousness and on the functional abstraction of the so-called reactions of opposition or imitation, a progress that can only be compared to that brought in physical science by the use of the rapport: weight on volume, when it has been substituted for the qualitative categories of heavy and light. Two questions can be posed here: through images, objects of interest, how is reality constituted, where is human cognizance

universally agreed? Through the subject’s typical identifications, how is the I constituted, where to self-recognize? Freud responds by passing more on the metapsychological terrain. He posits a “principle of reality” whose criticism in his doctrine constitutes the end of this work. To go on with the Freudian discipline, what the research contributes to psychological science on the reality of the image and the forms of cognizance should be researched.

Jacques Lacan (1967[2023]). “Psychoanalysis in Report with Reality” trans. Tolga Yalur from French “La psychanalyse dans ses rapports avec la réalité,” L’Institut Français de Milan, 1967. Amazing as it may seem, I would say that psychoanalysis is a domain unconcealed through a process for experience. That’s the reality. Reality is posed there as absolutely unequivocal, as unique with regard to the way in which other discourses entangle it. For the real only floats from other discourses. Let's not dwell on the pass-through of the word: the real. For the psychoanalyst, it shows that other discourses are part of reality. Who writes these lines can well point out the impact of impoverishment where he is influenced by place. The psychoanalyst’s “amazing as it may seem” is oratorical and does not say what amazes him there. He accepts simply the “realistic”. In the medieval sense? He gets

to go after it with a question mark. This is already the mark that he has said too much. Philosophical discourse can no longer free itself from the infection of this mark. The idealism inscribed in the material of his question is to make its entry there. You have to get things differently. What makes a psychoanalysis freudian, that is the question. Answering the question leads to where the coherence of a process whose characteristic is named as free association imposes presuppositions on which the intervention, and specifically the psychoanalyst's intervention, is powerless. A very remarkable point, it explains that whatever aim of depth, initiation, or style that a boasting dissident is prides himself on, it remains futile compared to what the process implies. I do not want to afflict anyone. But this is why psychoanalysis remains freudian “as a whole”. Because this process is in the axis of psychoanalysis, it is from the united origin of the freudian intervention. The psychoanalyst has no sort of idea of what shows the power of the including process. Let me say what the axis of the process is not. Is the mystical assumption of a sense beyond reality, of being that manifests itself in figures compatible with the freudian theory and with psychoanalytic practice? For sure, anyone who would take psychoanalysis for a path like this would be at the wrong door. If he/she eventually lends itself to the control of an “inner experience,” he/she will be at the starting price to change status. The help of any hallucinogen soma will be repugnant when he/she objects narcosis.

This deed excludes the worlds which are open to a transformation of consciousness, an asceticism of cognizance, and a communicative effusion. Neither on the side of nature, of its splendor or its wickedness, nor on the side of destiny, does psychoanalysis make interpretation a hermeneutic, a cognizance, in any way, illuminating or transforming. No finger can point out itself as a being there, divine, or not. No signature of things, no providence of events. This is well stressed in the technique since it imposes no orientation of the mind, no opening of the intelligence, no ending to the communication. Instead, the technique plays on non-preparation. A quasibureaucratic regularity is all that is required. The secularization of the prior pact as complete as possible installs a practice without the idea of elevation. Even preparing what will be said in the session is an inconvenience that will manifest resistance, even defense. These two words are not synonymous, although they are used wrongly and incorrectly by psychoanalysts. Moreover, it matters little to them whether they are taken outside in the diffuse sense of well or badly oriented opposition, of being salubrious or not. They even prefer that. What is expected of the session is precisely what the psychoanalyst refuses to expect, for fear of pointing finger on it too long: surprise. And this excludes any process of concentration, underlying the idea of association. The presupposition is that what dominates is a matter of fact. Surprise is something whose original incidence was marked as trauma. It has not varied from the fact that the stupidity it implies but has been transferred to the

psychoanalyst. Informing what remains in the idea of a situation, whose so-called deforming effects are totaled, would be the same thing. The idea of norm never appears as a construct. It is not the “material,” to say significantly. Special relativity first. The “material” remains the type of its own metabolism. It implies a reality as material that is not interpretable by the title constituted for another reality that would be transcendental: this term is the chief of the heart and the mind, which cannot be called into question: she is Anankaiē, Freud tells us. This is why the interpretation that runs the psychoanalytical transformation wears well on what this reality trims by inscribing itself in the signifier. Freud doesn’t make use of the term Realität (Reality) for nothing. It is a question of psychic reality. Realität, not Wirklichkeit (Actuality), is what the modern psychoanalyst does in virtue of appearances. The whole is in the gap through which the psychic is not the rule to function on reality, including the reality of which it is a part. It is not made in accordance with a tough reality to which there is no connection except knocking into: a reality for which the solid is the best metaphor in the sense of the impenetrable, and not of the geometry. (Because there is no presence of the polyhedron, the Platonic symbol of the elements: at least apparently in that reality). In Freud’s view, any Weltanschauung has to be obsolete and insignificant. He says that it is nothing more than a substitute for the expressions that reveal an unrivaled catechism which wards off the uncanny. Note that this is not posed as complacency, but an affirmation of the inaptitude of cognizance in tying itself to

nothing other than an ambivalent incurability. Freud designed diagrams for consciousness for the “centers" around which the psychic reality is organized. They are not a function of synthesis, but rather of interposition in a more direct circuit: the primary process is of obstruction. It functions only as all or nothing. As well deceived in its grip, the primary “regresses”. It is there to sign of the psychism. The secondary process is described as passing, as being in no way connected to the primary, as far as trial and error is reserved for it. This difference is not difficult. It points to the true abstract because it only crudely states what experience produces. In any case, Freud rejects any recourse to any theory of form, or even to any phenomenology to imagine non- thetic consciousness. Pleasure The retour of the response stimulus to the articulation, considered equivalent to the sensors, is only a fiction of the experience where the reaction of the organism is maintained in the state of inactivity, into the idea that it has felt something. There is nothing to indicate that such a forcing gives any functioning specific to biology. The idea of the tension-discharge duo is more tractable. But the weak description of tension in no way implies that the sensation is ruled by any function of homeostasis. Freud sees this pretty well by excluding its operation in a system detached from the tensional circuit. In brief, the more one enters into the implication of Freudian schemes, the more it is to see that pleasure has changed in value there.

The principle of wellbeing for the ancients, who became embarrassed after realizing harmful pleasures, was what only an ungraspable shadow could pass: Unless the organism is prey to the shadow, challenged from its cognizance through which the function of instinct has been imagined. Such is the structure of what is in question: the unconscious. Nothing apprehensible in the functions of the organism (no location of apparatus in particular) currently responds to the physiology of this structure: out of the sleeptime. That says a lot. These times have a mythical permanence outside of their real instance. Why not grasp the idea that the gap between the pleasure principle and the reality principle makes room for the reality of the unconscious in a ternary, as closing a triangle? Let me remark the affinity of the signifier to this place of void. Although it is not there, this place of the Other is indeed what causes desire. In Freud, desire never occurs except in the name of Wunsch. Wunsch, souhait, the wish. There is just one expressed wish. Desire is only present under the demand. It is not surprising that acting in conformity with desire is there only to be meaningful, revealing its capability at supporting the unconscious in the place of the void. The ambiguous saying of being only material in the saying, gives the sublime of the unconscious in essence. Humours make humans laugh in the misunderstanding. Laughter erupts from the path spared, Freud says, by having pushed the door beyond which there is nothing more to find.

Desire is revealed as defect because the demand happens to consummate the loss of the object. Is this not enough to explain that its drama is staged merely on what Freud calls the Other scene, where the Logos, fallen from being the phallus, reveals itself as the tool to enter difference? In this single drama, the world reveals itself to the speaking. Body The human being devitalizes his/her body so much that the world has long seemed to him/her to be its image. In return for which the body is a particle. Science has put an end to this dream, the world is not a whole body. The notion of the universe vanishes with this human body which, from being adorned with metal, goes up to the space after Newton discovered the gravitational field on paper. This was where the real was constituted out of the impossible because what it trailed was inconceivable: Newton's contemporaries marked the knock. It is enough to recognize the sensible of a beyond the principle of reality in the knowledge of science, so that beyond the pleasure principle may be illuminated in the psychoanalytical experience by relativity. The real of the Freudian gap prevents knowledge just as pleasure defends access to the jouissance. Let me remind that this gap between the pleasure and the reality principles is disjunctive, which is covered in the presence of the body. Very greatly misunderstood as being, Descartes reduced this body to the expanse. The inherent excess of psychoanalysis is required for it to become apparent to the common glance where its fragmentation is disconnected from its jouissance. Third “beyond”

in report to jouissance and knowledge, the body makes place for the Other through signifier. But what remains after this? Being without essence, cause for desire: insensitive piece derived from it as voice and look, devourable flesh or else its excrement. The duality grasped by the two principles divides the human being as a subject only for a third repetition, where each different essence seizes its loss in the gap of the two others: jouissance, knowledge and verity. Heretofore, it is jouissance that verity discovers in resisting knowledge. Psychoanalysis uncovers this as symptom, a verity that is valorized in the description of the reason. The psychoanalysts know that the verity is that satisfaction which does not obviate the pleasure of being exiled to the desert of the jouissance. Disbeing (désêtre) Without doubt, the masochist knows reminding this jouissance, but it is to demonstrate what is for the entire body. It is obviously this desert. Reality, therefore, is commanded by the fantasy as the subject realizes himself/ herself there in this very split. The reality of the subject of this alienating split, forebode by social critique, plays between the subject of knowledge, the false subject of the “I think,” and this corporate residue where I have adequately incarnated the objet a. Between the two, you have to choose: the choice of thought as it excludes the "I am" from jouissance, where "I am" is "I do not think". The reality is the verity of the alienated subject, his/her rejection into disbeing (désêtre), the renounced “I am”. What the

analyst's "I do not think" expresses is the necessity that throws him out into disbeing. For elsewhere it can only be “I am not”. The analysand manages to realize “I think” as alienating, to discover the fantasy as dynamo of the psychic reality, that of the split subject. For this, he/she can only give the function of objet a. The psychoanalyst must therefore know that, far from being the measure of reality, he only spawns his verity for the subject as the support of disbeing, thanks to which the subject subsists in an alienated reality. The psychoanalyst is himself in an untenable position here: a conditioned alien from an “I am”, that is, "I do not think”. What reinforces this is that, unlike everyone, he knows it. It is this knowledge that cannot be carried, that no knowledge can be carried by a single subject. Hence, his association with those who only share this knowledge with him and cannot exchange it. The psychoanalyst is the scholar of this knowledge that he cannot maintain. It is another matter than the mystagogy of nonknowledge. Since the analyst does not refuse the pleasure principle, nor that of reality, he is simply equal to the one he leads there, and he cannot, must not in any way lead the analysand to cross them. He teaches the analysand nothing about it, only sees if he happens to transgress one or the other, with an eventual masochism whose jouissance is prevented. Hence the ignorance on which he builds a sort of absolute knowledge is rather the zero point of knowledge. This knowledge is in no way exercised. Otherwise, in putting it into action, the

psychoanalyst would be attacking the narcissism on which all forms depend in the collective reality. Instead, the psychoanalyst redoubles his divergence from the reality.

Jacques Lacan (1973[2023]). “Excursus”. Trans. Tolga Yalur from French Excursus. Conférence à Milan, 1973. I have been posed a written question in terms of the affect in the psychoanalytical discourse: “It seems to me to grab, as far as one can, the unconscious as a place of feeling [jouissance, anxiety] somehow unnameable. There is a tendency to the limit where all the report and explication disappears.” At the beginning of 20th century, words were thought to be nothing but words, and that all that could be registered in psychotherapy was an ineffable I do not know. Happenings in psychotherapeutic report absolutely had to come out of a thaumaturgy. The unusuality of the discursive action was thought to happen by means of something that had never been described. The fact that affect is not intellectual, the description is not well understood. It is a question of shock, modification of the type of the so-called feeling, that is to say something that leads to an expansion of pupils. These indeed happen in feeling.

Freud, in Die Verdrängung, distinguished the repression from the content of the ideal, which is not sustainable from anything other than a meaningful support. Freud remarked that to know what is repressed was a question of the order of the signifier. A word is there, pushed back from the very material of the sentence. The happening of this word is not unthinkable, which makes an entirely different sense. The Uncanny Affect Freud discusses the question of affect, doesn’t he? What would be repressed if not the affect? He discusses it in strikingly toward to my interpretation. The way he ends up is quite the opposite. The words he uses cover the keywords that are associated to an affect that is quite different. The text is about what could be referenced as the psychic life in neuroses. In this, words apparently comprise a cognizance of the world. The appearances would not need the sort of the affect as I describe. The very characteristic affect is one that Freud himself highlighted in what he described as the Unheimlich, which means the feeling of otherness. The feeling of otherness distinguishes itself from appearances. From a first aspect, these appearances are the most common, the most ordinary, the most familiar. The affect is the signaled feeling, so sudden that these appearances are not that familiar at all. The familiar things turn into something other that is undoubtedly an affect, but which is in no way repressed. Unheimlich resurges from a text. The psychoanalyst occasionally gets this coup of evocation by the divine, intuition, habit, and eventual knowhow. The unfamiliar otherness in the end gets really

familiar. The psychoanalyst’s interpretation of dreams is no exception to this. In a golden stage of the analytical discourse, the introduction of a word alters the whole meaning of the sentence. It solves the question in the dream. Affect is somehow excursive, but not repressed at all. Despite everything, that’s what Freud simply stresses: if there is something that is not repressed, that remains excursive, it is precisely the affect. Conversely, the psychoanalyst’s discovery of the expressible that is not always expressed, and hence, not always within the psychoanalyst’s reach at the level of signification of the thing, with a significant support, could be said to be affect. The nuance is meaningful, and I want to underline the accentuation of what it is. Freud is rigid about the fact that the irruption of the unheimlich is closely connected to the verbal support. Imagined from the outside, the characteristic of repression is always an affect. The affect is there in all neuroses. The repression might be easier in a number of cases where rewording might alter the meaning of a sentence in order to represent a wish. Wish fulfillment is not consistent since the subject is unconscious about and made to realize his/her wish. I mean something that is quite expressed. The world connects the wish to the desire. Making a wish does not mean knowing what desire it fulfills. Interpreting a wish is obviously at the level of desire that it is always already conditioned and situated. But the easy restoration of the demand in desire restitutes the affect. Affect replaces the

feeling in place. Hence, what is repressed is not the affect, but something in the order of the signifier. The signifier is not simply a name, but a verb could be crucial as well. An example in Freud is Ein Kind wird geschlagen (A Child is Being Beaten). With great precision, he refers to the erotic prevalence revealed in the subject. Being beaten might lead to an erotic fantasm for the child. Freud did not notice before that desire was connected to erotic arousal supported by an imagined scene. He advanced a number of variations of this in terms of oedipal threshold for the child. The écrit-vain In Freud, the real desire of the subject, which is both concealed and revealed by the signifier, gets close to what I describe as jouissance. I’d prefer avoiding the Freudian slip in my use of the term jouissance. One that gets closest to the jouissance of sexual act does not mean that there would be a report inscribed in bodies. In other words, there is no sexual report but only the word for it. There is even a neat question of impossibility of saying it. That’s maintained in the myth of Eros as a uniting body. It is quite wrong to use the frustrating term “sexual intercourse” under the myth of eros that would be characterized by the universal appetite of fusion into one. If there is something that is not one, it is most obviously the sexual intercourse. Invincibly, the partners remain two. There is the word for the sexual report. And what language situates and introduces into the world is writing. Language is all the accumulation, the sum of concentrated jouissance. Let me a

play on the French word the écrivain: the écrit-vain [writing-invain] in two words. What the writer experiences leaves him/her in vain as the time passes. The third is what makes sense in as much as the third is what makes the partners who remain two a couple. That third is the Other. I pose the question for this: are objet a, and what I designate as big A (Big Other), conceived as such for the signifier, the loci of the Other where a whole traditional thought is situated and conditioned? What the analysis reveals is the exit from the myth of being as in the Cartesian thought. Something is irreducible in thought from the moment the psychoanalyst sees that being is something that slips away. In Freudian thought, it obvious that there is no trace of being’s association with the unconscious. When he wanted to substantialize being, Freud conceived what slips away as the It. What's striking is that the It is not kinetic. Confusing the It with the unconscious is quite impossible. Whatever a number of imaginative minds may have done with it, the It is non-being. The It is not the same with the unconscious. Eventually, the It is the unthinkable, which Freud put to the limit. Feeling is something that translates into a shock followed by waves, something that strikes unusual, and then for a while it vibrates. It is worthy of noting that there are two categories of feeling: jouissance on the one hand, and then anxiety. No one has ever put jouissance under the category of feeling? No one has ever even dared for this theoretical shift.

Freud isn't talking about feeling but tension. The pleasure principle is assumed to be supported by tension, because of the fact that a tension is too high, and it leads to a reaction of evasion, of flight either forward or backward, which does not matter. This tension is something considered more fundamental than the temporary irruption that is characterized by the term feeling. Let me give a vocabulary that depends upon the expression of events. Feeling is distinguished from and intervenes into a number of terms such as preclusion and shame, which have their meaning and value. It is a confusing notion to conceive jouissance. Jouissance is very specifically linked to the body. Being speaks bodily, and because of this there can be, strictly speaking, the misuse of this possibility of jouissance. Misuse means nothing but specifically jouissance. It is the other side of the utendum, which is made to serve, and of the fruendum, of what one enjoys. Let there be the speaking being. Because humans have no witnessing elsewhere, but to the cognizance: it does not seem that wild animals are so cruel as the cat who is incontestably dependent upon the human being. But how to know that the cat undoubtedly enjoys the mouse with which it indulges in a number of play of paws, in Sade's formula, the part of the body that’s next to the object of jouissance. Where it is longer known where the subject is and whether the subject is the active or the passive in jouissance, the sadistic jouissance that manifests itself for the closest substitute to what would suppose that sexual jouissance is unitive. It is quite evident that sadistic jouissance is not unitive, but it

would lead a little distant. In Sade’s fantasm, the subject’s jouissance is built upon the verge of God, whom the subject detests but submits serving (1). It is therefore far from being aggressive. It looks like there’s a little dose of masochism included in sadistic jouissance, while the masochist subject gets jouissance from being tortured and submitted to the virtues of a supreme being, such has God. Sadism is a supplement. It aims at desire, and it has nothing to do with love. Love, on the other hand, aims at being. As Freud said, accentuated, marked love is narcissistic because there are no other supports to give to the end of being. What is the most unfortunate in the speaking being is that it is anthropomorphic. Anthropomorphism, when the eye of the other is concerned, assumes that the other has the same entropy that shifts to the distant where there is no longer the speaking being. At that point, love is of small individual affairs. Especially for love between man and woman, nobody really knows why one partner makes more noise. But it makes noise because of the vain writings. It is just as dramatic between men, or between women. Here is a question of being, which is no longer of jouissance but a completely different matter. Love Philosophers could not get out of the age of love, at least by the motive of the ruling goodness, where the extension of self-love motivates the homage to the ruler of the universe. Very difficult to support because of an insufficient identification of, strictly speaking, what the Other is. Well, the philosophers remained at a derisory dialogue with the divine supremacy, the thread of which

is quite perceptible. My thoughts would lead a little bit far. There were nevertheless a number of sensible people in the aftermath, who realized that the supremacy of the God's love must have been to tell him: “If it is your wish, damn me,” which contradicts the quest for the ultimate good, but means questioning the ideal of salvation in the name of love for the Other. This moment is the entrance into the realm of love. The moment when love turns into an absolute senselessness is what is really interesting: to realize that when you have entered a finesse, when you reach the end, that’s finished. The end is interesting because there is a pay for the real in it. Extraordinary as it may seem, in the realm of love, though not only limited to this realm, but everyone also contradicts each other in whatever they say. Henceforth, one could easily recognize that no one can say anything without contradiction. When Freud discovered the unconscious, he meant “the unconscious does not cognize the principle of contradiction.” In the name of the principle of contradiction, all psychoanalysts are free to say the least sensible thing about anything since the reality is the unconscious. They shall say, the unconscious cognizes nothing about the logic, why? Because Freud said it does not cognize the principle of contradiction. Logicians, however, know that no one cares about the principle of contradiction. They even try to build a logic where there is no need for the use the principle of contradiction. But without the

principle of contradiction, there is no way to say anything. This does not mean, however, that the unconscious is not logical. It is woven by language, in as much as it is structured as language. The best thing to do is to keep away from building a logic. You know, Aristotle’s logic is just a fine one, quite an initiating and even great, and it could be perfected and made more serious. All in one, finally. There is nevertheless a renaissance of logic that has showed its worth. It is very interesting, precisely to make it possible to identify the contours of the finesse in an expressible way. Notice the things that have the closest connection with the finesse of love in set theory, for instance. Objet a There are a number of functions that occur because humans inhabit language, such as poetry and insult, as said by Homer. Language is evolved for the human being to live in it. As the time went by, humans advanced language but that was not an excuse to deny where to start: anxiety. The Saints noticed that anxiety was fear without object. Not a beast but meant that there is no recognized object. The very notion of object implies recognition, which is essentially conventional, the same object for everyone. If not, there’s anxiety. Not all objects are as easy to grasp as this chair or this table where I am now. The moment of recognition turns some into objects. I have been towards describing the object small for lack of revealing.

It is absolutely essential to conceive what I describe as the partial object-cause. Objet a is something that slips away but that the psychoanalysis has ended up grabbing. This quite radical report concerns the breast, as well as the excrement, and then two other objects that are quite capital: the look and the voice. Cause is something in common in the jouissance of these objects, though limited. Freud described this incredibly. The distinction of the source, the Quelle, and the thrust, the Drang, from the aim and the object are not to be confused. The Ziel and the Objekt are different. This deserves what mathematical logic lets approach, namely as a topology, something whose schematic, support, contour is nowhere perceptible, but only logically constructible. The function of the first urgency to evoke that plays here is the object small a. Because this objet a. The small a is the initial of the French word other (autre). It is not the other sex, but the other of desire that makes the cause of desire. The objet a leads to exactly what Freud objects: narcissistic love in the form of objectal love. Except that it is not the partner, the sexual other. Then what is that? It is fantasm. It might be enough saying that the idea of the cause of desire is closer to the belief in the aim. When a human being descends into the bottom of the world from the high spheres of the souls, they are all objet a, conditioned in advance by the desire of their parents. What is serious here? When a little a enters into the reality, it plays with the whole apparatus of mastery to be an adequate self. This is basically the principle of reality that makes the fantasm of the anthropomorphism of this reality.

Everything that for each subject constitutes the reality that no one can ignore. The reality of this and that, and God knows why, all this is fantasm. Is there a cause for human acts other than fantasm? Access to the real is not convenient because of fantasm. However, in the corners where it is least expected, in the logics where humans mess around so well, it happens to be revealed after a closer and serious work. Thanks to mathematics, there are finesses. That which is not possible is where a psychoanalyst could get a little idea of what would be a real that would not be fantastic. This idea gives a very great scope to the tool of language. Language has borders. One can even give it something that goes beyond meaning, and that’s the meaning of jouissance. The formal power of jouissance is writing, which is not quite the same as that of the Gestaltheorie. Here one ends up at paradoxes. The little idea could turn into an object with a report to the real. That’s reserved for the experience of the specialists, however. Mathematicians, for example, where do they get their jouissance from? A logical-mathematical formalization. That makes sense for me. Just because I am one of those dangerous specialists, I cannot say very well what that is. If you are not a specialist, there is absolutely no way to support the analytical discourse. Because otherwise it would be absolutely intolerable and abject. Because of that, psychoanalytic practice is little serious. Objet a is not there nor anywhere. In not believing in it, the psychoanalyst can reveal its unheimlich affects. I do not make

theory, nor do I have a conception of human being. What I express is what works in my discourses. To function well as a psychoanalyst would necessitate to be at the limits, from where perhaps a new sun could ascend, a little bit entangled by desire: the great invention of the capitalist discourse. It has managed to industrialize objects of desire. There couldn't be anything more functional to keep people quiet. And besides, there is the logical outcome. The capitalist discourse is much more powerful than it is thought to be. It may mess everything up to a spot where it would not be worse, when humans cannot see where all this discourse would lead otherwise. (1) For Lacan’s view of the God as it is inscribed in the symbolic register in Latin, see R.S.I. (1974). “The symbolic as introduced by Latin language is to put in their place as the verity assumed by the Real. God's verity, it is certain that God ek-sists. There is enough trouble to spell the word. God exists, but only, in the sense that I inscribe through the term ek-sistence, to write it differently than usual. God may be sist, but where? All that can be said is that what ek-sists gives no testimony to it. There is something amazing that makes Latin suspected of being the most stupid language, which is precisely the one that forges this term intelligere, “to read between the lines,” namely elsewhere than the way in which the Symbolic is written.”

Jacques Lacan. (1975[2023]).“The Third”. Trans. Tolga Yalur from French “Troisieme”, 7th Congress of the Freudian school of Paris in Rome. Conference published in l’École freudienne, 1975, n° 16. The third always returns as the first, said Gérard de Nerval. So is the title of my speech: the Rome disc-ours. There, shall I object the “disc”? Why not, whatever it means. Nevertheless, the “disc” needs to be heard. Whether I inject onomatopoeia in the unconscious language, lalangue, this is not because there is no onomatopoeia in the phonematic of lalangue. In French, the word is calibrated. Thanks to the French language, it could be heard as if I say “disc-ourdrome”. I temper that with noticing that “ourdrome” is a purr that other lalangues of would confirm. This fate is eventually a play of matrix. I give you a trick. This “ourdrome” is of the measure of the voice under the rubric of the objects I have. There is a void of any substance in the noise that needs significance. Metonymy reveals itself in the voice there. I would then say that the voice is free. Free from being any other substance. No matter what, I intend to remark something else in my third. The onomatopoeia is personal, as if a touch of drink. The purr that, without doubt, the cat enjoys. No one is born with the rules of the play, but it follows life. “I think therefore enjoy” (je pense donc je souis). Omit the “therefore” in “I think therefore I am,” and you will hear that “I ham”. Omitting the “therefore” should mean foreclosure whereas

omitting the “I ham” reappears in the real. Descartes never heard about his “I ham”, for he enjoyed life. Poor Descartes, he did not know! It goes without saying. That’s a symptom. What did he think of before concluding that he is? Doubtlessly, the music of being? If he realized that his knowledge went much farther than what he thought at the school of Jesuits where he used to go, he would have seen that there is water in the gas. Because he speaks the unconscious, lalangue. The custom in Descartes’ time was the discourse of the master, the speech of the noble. That's why he did not speculate on “I think I ham”. It's better than poor Plato, he did not come out of the opacity of the conjunction of what Parmenides said νοέιν (noeïn) and ἔναι (eïnaï) for the brilliant hysteria of Socrates. Me, I struggle with Sophism during pseudoholidays. What does “I ham” even mean? Exactly my subject, the “I” of the psychoanalysis. So, the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, that's number one. The Symbolic, the Imaginary, the Real Thought consists of words that introduce some representations to the body. You have imagination there. Randomly, one verity, one more verity. The sense is lodged in there where it means twice. Idealism, which everyone has repudiated as the imputation, is backward. I would need to point out the philosophical use of my terms. That is to say, the filthy use, even when the words have to connote filth, but not here. The reader might imagine that thought is in the brain.

I have no reason to dissuade the reader. Consider your forehead, and think with your feet. The Borromean knot, however, is not a reason to think with your feet, with its three circles of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real. The knot is there not for your feet, but for what is caught in the trap of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real. That’s the subject’s function of desire. After the repudiation of the “I ham”, I have fun telling you that this knot, it must be. I taught the four discourses in “The other side of psychoanalysis,” where the fact remains that to be, you must pretend. That's it! It is all the more nuanced that it is not enough to have the idea of pretension. What I describe as “objet a” that causes human desire resembles to logic, functional in reality for the object without an idea. The object without an idea is a hole in the theory. Plato showed my reservations about resemblance in his cave essentialism. As Marx would have said, Plato does the semblance, but he does not know it. That’s leading in every discourse. Semblance is leading in every discourse. The analytical discourse is no exception to this. But keep in mind that you cannot be in being and the being at the same time. The symbolic, the imaginary and the real are what actually function in the psychoanalytic discourse. These terms emerge only for and through this discourse. That's not to say they do not shed light on other discourses, but it doesn't invalidate them either. In the end of the master's discourse, for example, things go everywhere. Well, that's not the same as the real at all, because the real is that which does not go, which does not cease to repeat

itself. Let me say that the real is what always returns to the same place: the place of semblance. It is difficult to institute the real only from the imagination, as the notion of place seems to imply. Mathematical topology supports it. That's what I'm trying to do. Describing the real is impossible because of a logical modality that I pointed out. Suppose indeed that there is nothing impossible in the real. How far did it take to realize this? For centuries, scientists thought everything was possible. God had done his best things to be possible. What is combined behind all this is not imaginable. The world is imaginary since being reduced to the function of representation. And the real is not the world. There is no hope of reaching the real through representation. Not to mention the quantum theory and entangled particles. The real is not universal, and each particle of the real is identical to itself, but not “all”. There are no “all particles,” there are only sets to be determined in each particle. There's no need to add: that's all. There is nothing in the world more than objet a, look or voice that split the subject and summons being to the subject, the subject’s body. To resemble, one has to be a talented pretender. That’s difficult especially for women than men, contrary to common sense. That the woman is the man’s object of desire does not mean at all that she has a taste to be so. If it happens, that’s because of pretension. Is psychoanalysis a symptom? When I ask a question, I have the answer. In the end, it would be better if it is the correct answer. Symptom is the thing from the real. Meaning that the symptom presents itself as a small fish

whose voracious beak only closes to make sense under the tooth. Then, one of two things: either the symptom makes it grow and multiply (“Marry and multiply” said the God, which is something strong: he, the God knows what a multiplication is. Not this abundance of the little fish) – or else, it fades away. How to fade away the real of the symptom? That is the question. The sense of the symptom is not its multiplication or extinction, but the real since it resides on the cross to prevent things from working in the sense that they account for themselves significantly. Significantly for the master, which does not mean that the slave suffers in any way. Far from it; the slave is who enjoys, contrary to what Hegel says. That is a Nachtrag more sublime than my case, because it proves that the slave was happy to convert to being a Christian at the time of paganism. Obvious but curious. This is really the total benefit! Being happy to the core! It will never be revealed. The slave shows this bewilderment without losing the rope. The sense of the symptom depends on the future of the real, the outcome of the psychoanalysis. If the analysis succeeds in the request of getting rid of both the real and the symptom, everything returns, namely, a return of the true religion for example, which as you know does not seem to wither away. The true religion is not crazy. All hopes are good to the true religion. They saint the religion. (1) The cure of the psychoanalysis is to fade the symptom away as being forgotten. It must not be wowed, however, since it is the destiny of verity posited in principle. The verity is forgotten. All

of it depends on whether the real insists. For that, psychoanalysis must fail, and the real remains a symptom, growing and multiplying. The psychoanalyst does not die, letter follows! But beware. Maybe that's my message in reverse form. Maybe I'm rushing too. This is the function of haste that I have highlighted for you. What I mean may be misunderstood in the sense of whether psychoanalysis is a social symptom. There is only one social symptom: each individual is really a worker, that is to say no discourse has the means to make social link, in other words semblance. This is what Marx argued incredibly. What he has issued implies that there is nothing to change. That's why everything continues exactly as before. From a social viewpoint, the consistency of psychoanalysis is different from other discourses. There is a link to two discourses where the consistency is revealed in the place of lack in the sexual report. This is not enough to make psychoanalysis a social symptom since sexual intercourse is missing in all societies, which is linked to the verity that structures every discourse. No real society is structured through psychoanalytical discourse. The Freudian School, described by my teaching, is not a society but something like what made the Stoics for example. Stoics had a presentiment of lacanianism in inventing the distinction between signans and signatum. There is no problem of thought here. A psychoanalyst knows that thought is aberrant by nature, which does not prevent him from

being responsible for the discourse. The spice of all this is the real on which the analyst depends for years. The advent of the real is not tied to the analyst, whose mission is to counter the real. Nevertheless, the real could well take the bite in the teeth, especially since it has the support of scientific discourse. Lalangue The typical symptom of any event of the real is when biologists, the scientists, impose on themselves the embargo of a laboratory treatment of bacteria on the pretext that if the scientist makes bacteria too hard and too strong, they could well slip under the doorstep and wipe out the entire sexual experience. That’s very spicy. The access to responsibility is tremendously comical. All life is eventually reduced to a sexually transmitted infection. The life really is an infection in all likelihood, that is the height of the thinking being! Biologists’ trouble is that they just cannot realize that at the moment of life, death is situated to that which marks a sign in lalangue. The first always returns to the third so that it does not cease to be written. In the first, “Function and field of the psychoanalysis,” I said what needed to be said. Interpretation, I said, is not the interpretation of sense, but a play on equivocation. That's why I underlined the signifier in language. I have designated it for the instance of the letter to make me heard with your stoicism. The output is lalangue to be interpreted, which does not prevent the unconscious from being structured as a language that linguists believe to be animated. They describe it in terms of grammatology and form.

Lalangue is what permits the vow (wish) as well as the want to want, the non-denying and the name naming. It is not because the unconscious is structured as a language that lalangue does not have to play against its jouissance, since it has made itself of this very jouissance. The subject is not wrongly supposed to know that the analyst is in the transfer. The analyst knows that the unconscious consists of being a knowledge articulated by lalangue. The body that speaks there is knotted only by the real it enjoys. The body is to be understood as raveled out of this real which, to exist there as a way of making its jouissance, remains no less opaque. It is the less remarked void of lalangue civilized by the jouissance if I dare saying. I mean that jouissance advances lalangue to the very first, bodily enjoyable objet a without an idea, as I said before. Object without an idea up to I unpack it into bodily identifiable, diagnosable parts. Only through psychoanalysis this object is the questionable kernel of jouissance, thanks to three constitutive consistencies of the knot (Figure 1). The link that makes a jouissance and surplusjouissance is interesting. I made an outline of it. The most amazing thing is that the objet a unlinks this bodily jouissance from the phallic jouissance (Figure 2). That phallic jouissance becomes anomaly to the bodily jouissance is something that has already been noticed in thirty-six languages through the finger-biting kundalini stories from India. Some designate by kundalini to do climbing their marrow, which they think rises in the brain, while others explain in a way that concerns the edge of the body.

Jouissance In the real, bodies are organized to maintain themselves in their form. There is no evidence, however, that animals think beyond a few forms to which they are sensitive. Hence, humans cannot imagine that all animals perceive the world all the same. If I may say so, while there is evidence that even if the bodily unity forces humans to perceive the body as a world, it is obviously not the world as such. It is de-world. Freud notes that the human experience nevertheless continues with the discontent in the civilization. The body contributes to this discontent by an animating fashion. Animating the animals that humans fear. Humans are anxious of the human body. I gave a lecture on this anxiety located in the human body. It is the fear of the feeling of lack in reducing oneself to one’s body. Anxiety is not the fear of anything that the body can motivate itself. It is instead the fear of the fear. Here is the image of the triple of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real. There is something about the symbolic. The play of words, the equivocation that includes the abolition of sense, everything that concerns jouissance can also be narrowed down. Because it does not go without noticing the different fields of the symptom but appears in the plate of the Borromean knot (Fig. 3). The symptom is the eruption of this anomaly. The phallic jouissance settles in there as the fundamental lack that I describe as non- sexual intercourse. In interpreting the symptom, the analytical intervention leaves space for something that can refrain from the field of the symptom. Inscribed in the symbolic as long as lalangue supports, this something, namely Freud's

Urverdrängt (“primal repression”), will remain irreducible to interpretation. In what way did I write the word “life” at the level of the circle of the real? It is unquestionably the life, this vague term which consists in enunciating the jouissance of life. There is nothing but the jouissance of life. Laws of science say that there is nothing more real, more impossible than to imagine how this artificial construction could have made its departure through D.N.A where there is the first image of the Borromean knot for the psychoanalysts to realize that there is something in the real that is structured from a knot. That would not be surprising to discover the similar knot in living beings but would be a pushback from Urverdrängt. Well, let's not start dreaming too much, there is enough to do with human traces. The representation, up to and including Freud's preconscious, is unlinked from Lacan's 'jouissance' of the Other (JA), the man’s jouissance of the supposed woman, and vice versa for the woman without being supposed since the woman does not exist. For a woman, however, the jouissance of the man who is everything, the Other, even all the phallic jouissance, the meta-sexual Other does not and could not exist but through the word. A word of love in particular is the most sensitive thing for real. This jouissance of the Other occurs in language, the symbolic. Phallic jouissance is therefore out-of-body as much as the jouissance of the Other is out-of-language. Because only from the moment when one conceives what is most alive or dead in language, one has the access to the real. Freud instigated Eros, but despite everything, he did not dare to

equate it to the idea of life. He nevertheless distinguished life from body and life as carried by the body in the germen. Despite Freud’s use, life has nothing to do with something that passes for being its antinomy, namely death. Whatever one thinks of it, death is only imaginary. If there was no body, if there was no corpse, what would make the connection between life and death? It is even the principal work of psychoanalysis is to conceive how to tie the idea of the cluster of corpses. There are also sculptures, which is the enraged side of these so-called human beings who make their own sculptures. That is to say, there are objects that have absolutely nothing to do with the body, but which nevertheless look like it. Unlike to the myth of Eros evoked by Freud, this jouissance of the Other is not possible at all. The myth concerns being one, but under no condition do two bodies make one. All they say “Keep an eye on my shoes!”, but one never tries hard to fit into someone else’s shoes. No kind of reduction to one here. That’s the most formidable trick. There is doubtlessly a lot of confusion on the subject of language. Language is not that universal panacea, not because the unconscious is structured as a language, nor the unconscious does not depend narrowly on lalangue. Only when one dissolves from language can one discover an identity principle for oneself. That does not happen at the level of the Other but the logic. In reducing any sense, one can end up with the sublime mathematical formula of the identity of oneself: x=x. The only one way to fill the jouissance of the Other is where the field where science is born: from the moment when Galileo made

small reports from letter to letter with a bar in between, where he described speed as a report of space and time. At that moment, the intuitive notion, which is somehow entangled in effort, helped discover gravitation. There’s been advance since then, but the science ultimately gives tools to fill in the lack in the human report of cognizance. You are not selected to travel to the moon, but you watch it. Science begins where there is more significant data about life. (1) For Lacan’s interpretation of religion in terms of the Borromean Knot, see Lacan, Jacques (1975). “Des religions et du réel Des religions et du réel,” L'École freudienne de Paris, 1975. “There seems to be no limit to what a religious group can bring together. Religious communities never see a limitation to the number of their members. It is not without reason, for sure. The anonymity that presides over a small religious community, for instance, should already make it understood that everyone in this small group bears their name in a coalition with their limited number of members. Of course, no one has the same object as whoever dominates the religious community. What interests the psychoanalytic practice is not what interests a religious community. Saying “religious” is a mode of speaking. I do not put all religions into the same bag. I refer to the Christian religion, which did not come out of nothing but the Jewish religion. The Christian religion shows this fact in a unique way. The connections across the Jewish community and the Christian community are marked by the survival that designates the way in which the Jewish continues to be shown by the Christian. There could be a lot more ways but to put simply, it’s a mode of

connotation. The base of the religious community is the myth that is far from being simple. The design of God is even so complex that the Christian community was forced to articulate him as Trinity. As I said elsewhere before, it was not only the Christian community that realized that there is no tenable God, if not threefold. Obviously, a lot has been said and written about this trinity. What is curious is that no justification has ever been given for it. Right or wrong, I believe to have the privilege of giving a form to what might be called the real of this trinity through my triple Borromean knot. There is one Borromean knot example right next to the trinitas statement at the municipal library of Chartres, in an exhibition of miniatures, where you can see the three lines that I symbolize this knot with. The knot serves as a symbol of the Gaelism or Britanism in the process of awakening or the Celtic symbolization of triskel. This triskel is just as much a Borromean knot as the complete form, would be added the written indication of trinitas. What are the analysts doing with all of this? The psychoanalytic report is limited. I would not describe the religion of any Supreme Being as analysis. A lot of people have not been able to detach from that. I’m not even sure of being caught red-handed with deism. You might see it right away if I speak of the religion of desire. A swirling Borromean knot suggests this triple hole. Since desire seems to be linked to a notion of hole where a lot of things swirl in a way as to be engulfed in it. But joining the notion of the whirlwind to the hole is obviously to make a conjunction in

multiples. As for the symbolic is concerned, there is something sensible that leaves a hole. In report to the imaginary, that is to say, to the corporeal, it is not only probable but manifest. This is what surged first. Not only does this leave a hole, but the analysis thinks in these terms everything that relates to the body. In what way is the incidence of language, that is, the symbolic, required to think what, around the body, has been thought of in the analysis as connected to various holes? That’s the whole question. No need here to underline that the function of the orifices in the body is there to designate that the term hole is not a simple equivocation of a transport from the symbolic the imaginary. As for the Real, I remark it as a circular universe for it to encompass in comparison to the body. The notion of the universe introduces the One in the Real. However, in articulating something that dares to suggest that it’s not sure if the real makes a whole, I am not sure that the real makes the world. It is hard to see what sort of physics could be found from there. The notion of law in physics relies on the idea that energy is constant is the basic principle. Without the idea of a whole, how would science support itself? After all, it is interesting that there is no longer have a graspable idea of the limits of the universe. Nothing obliges the analysts to make the Real something which is an entire universe, something that is closed. The idea is that this universe is simply a coherent and consistent thread that holds. That’s not enough to hypothesize to make the universe cyclical though. With two cycles and a straight line at infinity, which is already a lot of progress for the real, tie a Borromean knot.”

Jacques Lacan (1976[2023]). “Religions and the Real”. Trans. Tolga Yalur from French “Des Religions et du Reel”, L’École Freudienne, 1976. There seems to be no limit to what a religious group can bring together. Religious communities never see a limitation to the number of their members. It is not without reason, for sure. The anonymity that presides over a small religious community, for instance, should already make it understood that everyone in this small group bears their name in a coalition with their limited number of members. Of course, we do not have the same object as whoever dominates the religious community. What interests us in our psychoanalytic practice is not what interests a religious community. Saying “religious” is a mode of speaking. I do not put all religions into the same bag. I refer to the Christian religion, which did not come out of nothing but the Jewish religion. The Christian religion shows this fact in a unique way. The connections across the Jewish community and the Christian community are marked by the survival that designates the way in which the Jewish continues to be shown by the Christian. There could be a lot more ways but to put simply, it’s a mode of connotation. The Real is not everything

The base of the religious community is the myth that is far from being simple. The design of God is even so complex that the Christian community was forced to articulate him as Trinity. As I said elsewhere before, it was not only the Christian community that realized that there is no tenable God, if not threefold. Obviously, a lot has been said and written about this trinity. What is curious is that no justification has ever been given for it. Right or wrong, I believe to have the privilege of giving a form to what might be called the real of this trinity through my triple Borromean knot. There is one Borromean knot example right next to the trinitas statement at the municipal library of Chartres, in an exhibition of miniatures, where you can see the three lines that I symbolize this knot with. The knot serves as a symbol of the Gaelism or Britanism in the process of awakening or the Celtic symbolization of triskel. This triskel is just as much a Borromean knot as the complete form, would be added the written indication of trinitas. What are we doing with all of this? Our report is limited. I would not describe the religion of any Supreme Being as analysis. Most of us have not been able to detach ourselves from that. I’m not even sure of being caught red-handed with deism. You might see it right away if I speak of the religion of desire. A swirling Borromean knot suggests this triple hole. Since desire seems to be linked to a notion of hole where a lot of things swirl in a way as to be engulfed in it. But joining the notion of the

whirlwind to the hole is obviously to make a conjunction in multiples. As for the symbolic is concerned, there is something sensible that leaves a hole. In report to the imaginary, that is to say, to the corporeal, it is not only probable but manifest. This is what surged first. Not only does this leave a hole, but the analysis thinks in these terms everything that relates to the body. In what way is the incidence of language, that is, the symbolic, required to think what, around the body, has been thought of in the analysis as connected to various holes? That’s the whole question. No need here to underline that the function of the orifices in the body is there to designate that the term hole is not a simple equivocation of a transport from the symbolic the imaginary. As for the Real, I remark it as a circular universe for it to encompass in comparison to the body. The notion of the universe introduces the One in the Real. However, in articulating something that dares to suggest that it’s not sure if the real makes a whole, I am not sure that the real makes the world. Obviously, it is hard to see what sort of physics we could have found from there. The notion of law in physics relies on the idea that energy is constant is the basic principle. Without the idea of a whole, how would science support itself? After all, it is interesting that we no longer have a graspable idea of the limits of the universe. Nothing obliges us, the analysts, to make the Real something which is an entire universe, something that is closed. The idea is that this universe is simply a coherent and consistent thread that

holds. That’s not enough to hypothesize to make the universe cyclical though. With two cycles and a straight line at infinity, which is already a lot of progress for the real, we tie a Borromean knot which holds. The fact that the real is not everything reassures the interest of physicists who think that we can conceive the real without a constancy, named energy. Here is the idea that constancy is not consistency, though reducing constancy to consistency might be reasonable for physicists. Fiat hole In the end, I do not wish to engage you in future physics here. We should to realize that in all essential historical experience, there are names. There are names in human memory. It is a totally nodal fact that names have been given to objects. The remark even lingers in Freud, very well done to hold us back. When I wrote “The Freudian Thing”, there were lots of soundbites: “Why does he call it that? The Thing is disgusting, when all we are trying to do is to oppose reification.” I have never felt that way. It was because there was a difference of opinion on whether or not to reify, what it was in practice. It was to reify in the right way. I named something specifically the Freudian Thing to indicate that in the Thing that he conceptualized, there is something from Freud himself. That’s the unconscious. The term freudian does not at all have the function of a predicate here because he stated that the unconscious is a thing. As I suggested earlier, talking about the unconscious as something that did not exist before Freud isn’t such a bad way of expression. After all, a thing does not ex-sist,

does not start to play, until the moment when someone names it. We can afford to smear all kinds of objects with names, which has always been done, even wrongly and through. From our experience, I try to reduce this nameable, naming only through Freud’s Urverdräng (non- recognized), which boils down to naming the hole. It’s starting from the idea of the hole. That is to say, not Fiat lux (Let there be light), but Fiat hole (Let there be hole). Freud, in advancing the idea of the unconscious, did not do more on the Thing. He stressed very early on that there is something that creates a hole around which the unconscious is distributed. The unconscious has the specialty of only being inspired by this hole so well that we are not in the habit of retaining even a little bit of it. It throws the whole camp into this hole. I diagnosed that this hole cannot be conceived without the knot. The knot is not simply something in the real. Wherever it holds, this knot also creates a knot in the mind. It is the first time that we see something that joins the mind and the real to such an extent. It is impossible not to put the knot in the mind. At the same time, one cannot help realizing that the mind is very misfit. This knot thinks so difficultly that what we get from it is a presentiment of what the hole in question might ultimately be. Of course, all this is a haste. I mentioned the term dialectics ending up with the whirlwind. It is indeed the case to realize that whoever speaks of dialectics always evokes a substance. The dialectic forms an antinomy. It is essentially predicative and there is no predicate that is not supported by a substance. It is very

difficult to speak non- substantially, especially since we each imagine ourselves to be a substance. It is obviously very difficult to get that out of your head, although each of you is no more than a small, complex and whirling hole. However, it is really hard to think of yourself, as thinking being, as a substance. Then it becomes really hopeless to think of how obviously powerless your thinking is. However, if there is something undecidable, it is a mathematical undecidable which can only be sustained through tying the knot. If I may say, there is no non-knot because it is briefly the only possible definition of the real. What we deploy in the analysis is to tie the knots so as not to slip there indefinitely. What is analysis, after all? It differs from that we have allowed ourselves a sort of irruption of the private into the public. The private evokes the wall protecting the small business of each one. Everyone’s little business has a precisely characteristic core, which is made up of sexual matters. That’s the core of the private. Humor says that the public in which we bring out the private has for etymologists a quite obvious link with pubis. What the public is emerges from what the shameful is. How do we distinguish the private from what we are ashamed of? The misbehavior in all that happens in analysis disappears thanks to castration, whose description is well made to evoke the dimension since Freud. Surplus Jouissance The whole question is therefore this: to

extract jouissance from castration, is that what surplus jouissance is? In one way or another, this is all that is allowed for the moment to any person, if the word person designates person. No doubt that it designates a thinking substance, but, even when our concerns are not substantial at all, what we strive for is to bring this notion of thinking substance into a real. Itdoesn’t go by itself because there are a lot of things that we are cluttered with. We are cluttered with the idea of life. Freud instigated Eros, but despite everything, he did not dare to identify it with the idea of life. He nevertheless distinguished life from body and life as carried by the body in the germen. Despite Freud’s use, life has nothing to do with something that passes for being its antinomy, namely death. Whatever one thinks of it, death is only imaginary. If there was no body, if there was no corpse, what would make the connection between life and death? We understand how to tie the idea of the cluster of corpses. It is even our principal work. There are also sculptures, which is the enraged side of these so-called human beings who make their own sculptures. That is to say, there are objects that have absolutely nothing to do with the body, but which nevertheless look like it. Bless the religions which have forbidden this obscenity. Plus, it’s awful to see! What is more awful to see than a human being, I ask! A human being, a human form. In the end, you really need the so-called Catholic religion to discover its taste. Obviously, this religion has something to gain in the thing. We can see the mechanism very well, which plays on the beautiful.