translated by Marvin Gonzalez
Our possessions possess us.
Some, through having misunderstood, possess so much that they do not enjoy sufficiently and arrive at that turning point where money passes from the means to the ends. They are rich, they have millions, while their hearts can bear it, they will waste away to gain double: they appraise their lack and its amounts to the infinite, and with that they abolish the barrier that separates need and desire.
Limited necessity defines them.
Infinite desire alienates them.
It happens with money as with analysis. There is a fine line where it gets out of control, where ends and means, replacing each other, reciprocally alter the logic of their function. On occasions, by dint of speech, those who speak become specialists of the couch, as much as those who hear. The word, its practice, its duration and its rate, turned into an end in itself, a reason to live, ends up constituting a perverse investment in the fundamental structure of an existence in which the real, reduced to the unreal nature of the letter that maintains it at a distance, makes itself manifest only to better elude the flow of discourse.
The analyst himself is not protected from the contagion.
Less so because his analysands would not be capable of doing without him, but on the contrary because he is phantasmatically protected from death by their demand. Could he survive without the parapet of souls in pain, who came to him so he could name their desire?
What is truly yours, when it is known in that dialect, he, fixed by definition in the non-doing, takes the place of the dead in which your life slips away. Soft. Truncated. Detained. Some, who remain sitting too long on the edge, take the great risk of staying there. Teachers in activities that incite acts that elude them, neutral spectators whose lives dissolve into the torrent of the discourse of the other without ever being chaffed, no good has come of your office—perhaps it comes out sometimes?—Fiery collisions of its drive, sperm and blood, heart beating, tear, wound.
I was talking about the function of sacredness, of asceticism, renunciation, of withdrawal. He shrugged his shoulders:
—Nothing can be gained with that.
There had to be the exceptional breadth of Lacan to pass from one end to the other, to analyze, fight, doubt, be indignant, live, search, enjoy, suffer. He passed unscathed through the intertwined circles of the three orders determined by the symbolic, real, and imaginary. And in the advent of madness, it forges new ground every time it abolishes the plain word, completely, so everything is opened once more elsewhere, over another thing.
One day I fell sick. I notified him to cancel my appointment for the next day. With dazzling speed that left me dizzy, within minutes he arranged my treatment: in a matter of hours, doors miraculously burst open that would have remained closed and, after having heard just one word from his lips, people that I had never met treated me as if were something infinitely precious to them.
Father. Heavenly father.
I was, perhaps, fifteen months old; I cannot forget it.
That night my parents had left me in the care of a friend. It started to storm. My father returned to pick me up. He got me out of bed. My father carried me over his shoulders as if I were a feather; he protected me from rain and in huge strides safely traversed the deserted streets of the town, faced the night until we arrived at the house. Tiny, shaken, intoxicated by the formidable force of the march through the storm, that night I felt the intensity of utter protection. I speak by analogy, as the experience of radiant energy had by the child that I used to be, curled up against his father, and the man that I was, returned to childhood to experience an identical power light years away.
