THE SYMPTOM 15

translated by Barbara P. Fulks

I. Either Anxiety or the Concept

1. From One Book to the Other

Strangeness

We have dedicated some time to a work devoted to the evaluation of psychotherapies in order to review it, elucidate it, and dissect it, with perhaps what we might call a certain “Lacanian sadism.”¹  Now I will present to you another book, even though you may be familiar with it in other forms.  The content of it has already been covered throughout this course and in numerous courses and articles.²  But something happens when this mass of notes takes the form of a book.  In any case, I can testify that it happens to me in the work itself of giving form to what I’ve gone through and meditated on, just like you.  I’m talking about the new tome, soon to appear, of Jacques Lacan’s Seminar, Anxiety, Book X.
I bring you the reflections of someone who is still, if not exactly in the middle of fording the stream, then between the first and second attempts at crossing.  He who speaks to you is inside, on the job, and not just for today, in a context you know to be very heated this year—a context which is perhaps not indifferent to the choices that I have made to bring this Seminar to publication.  In a context in which the regulation of psychotherapies was the talk of the town, a context which is largely marked by the passion of evaluation, the appearance of such a book could only be inopportune, at the wrong moment, out of tune, an appearance for which one can anticipate dissonance.

In a sense, one could dream of nothing better for this Seminar: that it come to light, that it arrive to the public, at a  moment when one can be assured that its strangeness will be a contrast.

Crossing Over

It would be quite comical—I restrain myself—to construct a parallel between one book and another, the rapport between INSERM (Institut national de la santé et de le recherche médicale) and the Seminar on Anxiety.  One must do it in the genre of deadpan.

What to say, then?  That one book is a product of teamwork which virtually embraces psychopathology, while the other is the work of an isolated researcher—self-proclaimed, moreover.  In the year which followed this Seminar, at the beginning of the subsequent one, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, it is true that this researcher questioned how he was authorized to express himself in such a way without being validated by collaboration, the surveillance of which seems today to be the indispensable instrument of such a work, that is, to be controlled by peers.

One perceives that, concerning psychoanalysis, some prejudices remain about solitary, genial intuition.  Where did he get it?  And why was it left up to him?  He dedicated himself, in a way which seems narrow, to a unique phenomenon drawn from the vast domain which today is called psychopathology.

While the first book that we dissected is supported by an enormous mass of other works, this one is content to refer to a very small number of authors and works, and is nourished by diverse contingencies, by voyages, by encounters, by pictorial expositions which are found along the route.  A very small number of works is mobilized here, contrary to what one can find in certain other seminars of Lacan.  And especially since the first “INSERM-ic” book never loses sight of the treatment of the illness and always tries to ameliorate it, while in the second, Lacan’s, one cannot say that anxiety is considered as an illness, a dysfunction.  He doesn’t appear to have found the indication, in this Seminar, of the anxiety with which he deals, let us call it Lacanian anxiety.  And in the attempt to find it, the author proceeds with an enormous excavation of multiple forms of anxiety and of the occasions of its appearance—not as a question of speaking of its cure, but rather at the most of crossing over it.  Thus when one considers this work in regard to the other, the author, the orator transformed into author, succeeds rather through his indifference to treatment, so occupied is he in showing what his passion is.  What is it?  It does not hide itself: following his discourse, articulating its terms, conjoining them, and giving to each its exact place.

This can serve as a thread to what characterizes this research, and one searches in vain for a clear answer as to what mobilized the works.  Everything on the order of psychotherapy, in a superb, arrogant fashion, is absent from the work.  In this respect, it is especially inopportune that we are required—and by whom?—to respond to the treatment and its efficacy at this moment.

A Conceptual Space

This Seminar should be read assuming that what concerns the direction of the cure, in regard to anxiety and what it brings with it, is left, entrusted, to those who listen.  Each one can take advantage of it, give it a practical translation.  And it is legitimate for a teaching to be deployed in its continuity, with a certain mystery whose elaborations have a context.  Summoning someone who speaks of curing anxiety is not the order of the day in this Seminar.  I have underlined its traits.  I will state here that the doctrine of the cure nevertheless figures in this Seminar, but in a secondary, lateral way, since one finds there careful but limited readings from a certain number of Anglo-American texts concerning counter-transference, of which Lacan announces that the question should be explored under the expertise of the desire of the analyst.  It is thus through this angle I call lateral, given the place it has in this Seminar and the fact that Lacan entrusts its presentation to others, that one finds there, whatever the cost of the remarks made, a preparatory enclave rather than central developments.

You see that, in beginning to compare the two books, which is a parallel farce, one easily slides into a privileging of the point of view of INSERM.  This point of view is not their privilege, it is what happens to us and we have been riveted for some time on this work.  Thus we have suffered the shock, the surprise, the event, and we have done well to emphasize it, to take hold of it.  Now we must, since there will soon be another book on treatments, peel ourselves away from these commandments: “You are there to cure.  You deal with illness, with dysfunctions.  How can you do good any other way?”

This is the evidence of today.  There it is.  But this book is also going to be there, demanding that one give up this demand, this desire for the Other, and that one enter into another dimension.  Is this difficult?  How can I lead you into this dimension?  How to retrieve what is perhaps our Lacanian bubble of discourse, since we have put all our efforts into speaking the language of the Other.  How do we construct the counter-argument?

Many among you here have a rapport with the practice of psychoanalysis: you are in analysis, you have been analyzed.  The dimension we must re-establish is that in which the question of evaluation, of therapy, is not instantaneous at each instant.  Perhaps it is occasionally there, in particular when anxiety resists, but there is always another dimension.

The vociferations of this desire for the Other, the “INSERM-ic” vociferations, are quiet, can no longer be heard.  Perhaps they can make themselves heard if they give themselves over to it, to this work of Lacan.  Will they do it?  I leave you the task of imagining how they will look at this work, how they will trace the trail of the meteorite, an incongruous object of this sort.  Doubtless they would experience a certain disquieting strangeness, that a book with the title of Anxiety could contain this type of purpose: a work in which anxiety, strictly speaking, is not an illness to be treated, but rather is given its conceptual place with reference to Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety.³

From their point of view, it seems to me that the Seminar on Anxiety would be best classified as being on the order of literary creation.  Should we reject this classification?  I’m not so sure.  There is, in the Seminar on Anxiety, an elegy of literary fiction which echoes what Freud expressed in his work, The Uncanny.⁴  Lacan, following in Freud’s footsteps, pays tribute to literary fiction, and he takes it as a guide for giving stability to fugitive experiences, a stability which offers a better articulation.  Literary fiction supplies, says Lacan, “a sort of ideal point.”⁵

Division

Perhaps we could here invert the perspective and ask ourselves how the rapport of INSERM is inscribed in the perspective of the Seminar on Anxiety.  This work shows an effort of quantification, of accounting, of assessing which has its dignity and even its necessity in the way in which it translates what is put into place, what is constructed in the Seminar on Anxiety: the inscription of the subject in the field of the Other as the place of the signifier.  The subject can only inscribe itself there as marked by recurrence, the repetition of the number 1.  This is what expresses the writing of the barred subject.  This passion for quantification, for evaluation, affects what is isolated in the Seminar on Anxiety as the original mark of the trait of subjective identification.  We find there Lacan’s construction of a schema which was never published, an elementary schema of division, which I have, once and for all, had photographed for this Seminar.

It could not be more elementary: a vertical line on which is found inscribed some of the letters which we have learned long ago to work with, and which are there in order to present what Lacan indicated as a division, a division of the Other by the subject.

Why this word “division”?  One understands it retroactively because it is what was isolated by Lacan in order to qualify it.  Division, because Lacan gave a value to the function of the remainder, and it is this notion of remainder which the construction of a division requires.  A division in which one takes as the first result the ciphering of the subject, its grip in the repetition of One, and one isolates, inscribes, in a supplementary fashion, the remainder with the famous small letter a.  This remainder is isolated so that the Other is not simply the One.  If the field of the Other were only made of Ones, it would be reducible, it would only be the ensemble of these Ones.  What directs the reading of the Seminar is not forgetting that the Other is Other because there is a remainder.

Other ≠ One

This elementary construct is already enough to support many objections that we could make in relationship to INSERM.  These objections rest on what we have acquired from this Seminar and what follows it; they rest on the remainder, on the notion of an unquantifiable remainder, a remainder which is not One.  Which means there is something in the Other which is not the signifier.  Lacan inscribes here what might be the response: the barred A as that which constitutes me as unconscious, the Other as what I do not attain, let us say the Other as desire.  I only inscribe this schema as the objection that the function of the remainder makes to the passion for evaluation.  We find, in a moment in the Seminar, another prescription in which petit a is written before barred S,⁶ and this correlates to a theoretical reversal which is susceptible of passing unperceived, since we must say that it rests here on the head of a pin.

This is an excerpt. Please see lacanian ink 26 for full article.

1. The principle of the insufficient ground

Love lets us view imperfections as tolerable, if not adorable. But it’s a choice. We can bristle at quirks, or we can cherish them. A friend who married a hot-shot lawyer remembers, “On the first date, I learned that he could ride out rough hours and stiff client demands. On the second, I learned that what he couldn’t ride was a bicycle. That’s when I decided to give him a chance.”

The lesson of the so-called “endearing foibles,” referred to in this quote from Reader’s Digest is that a choice is an act which “retroactively grounds its own reasons.” Between the causal chain of reasons provided by knowledge (S2 in Lacanian mathemes) and the act of choice, the decision which, by way of its unconditional character, concludes the chain (S1), there is always a gap, a leap which cannot be accounted for by the preceding chain.1 Recall what is perhaps the most sublime moment in a melodrama: a plotter or a well-meaning friend tries to convince the hero to leave (the sexual partner, leader) by way of enumerating the latter’s weak points. Yet, unknowingly, he thereby provides reasons for continued loyalty; his very counterarguments function as arguments: “for that very reason s/he needs me even more.”2 This gap between reasons and their effect is the foundation of transference, the transferential relation epitomized by love. Even our sense of common decency finds it repulsive to list the reasons for which one loves somebody. The moment one can say, “I love this individual for the following reasons…” it is clear that this is not love proper.3 In the case of true love, apropos of some feature which is in itself negative, which offers opposition, one may say “For this very reason I love this person even more!” Le trait unaire, which triggers love, is always such an index of an imperfection.

This circle which determines the subject but only through those reasons which one recognizes retroactively as such, is what Hegel has in mind with the “positing of presuppositions.” The same logic is at work in Kant’s philosophy. The Anglo-Saxon literature on Kant refers to the “Incorporation Thesis:”4 there is always an element of autonomous “spontaneity” pertaining to the subject, making it irreducible to a link in the causal chain. True, one can conceive of the subject as submitted to the chain of causes, which determine conduct in accordance with “pathological” interests; therein consists the wager of utilitarianism. Since the subject’s conduct is wholly determined by seeking the maximum of pleasure and the minimum of pain, it would be possible to govern one, and to predict the steps, by controlling the external conditions which influence decisions. What eludes utilitarianism is the very element of “spontaneity” in German Idealism’s sense—the very opposite of its everyday meaning: surrendering oneself to the immediacy of emotional impulses, for example. According to German Idealism, when one acts “spontaneously” one is not free, but a prisoner of one’s immediate nature, determined by the causal link which chains one to the external world. On the contrary, true spontaneity is characterized by the moment of reflexivity; reasons count only insofar as I “incorporate” them, “accept them as mine.” In other words determination of the subject by the other is always self-determination. Thus decision is simultaneously dependent on and independent from its conditions. In this sense the subject in German Idealism is always one of self-consciousness. Therefore any immediate reference to my nature “What can I do? I was made like this” is false. The relation to my impulses is always mediated; they determine me insofar as I recognize them, and that’s why I am fully responsible for them.5

Another instance of “positing the presuppositions” is the spontaneous ideological narration of experience and activity. Whatever one does, one always situates the action within a symbolic context, charged with conferring meaning. In the former Yugoslavia, a Serbian fighting the Albanian Muslims and the Bosnians conceives of the civil war as the last act in the century’s on-going defense of Christian Europe against Turkish infiltration. Bolsheviks conceived of the October Revolution as the continuation and successful conclusion of previous radical popular uprisings: from Spartacus in ancient Rome to Jacobins during the French Revolution. This narration is assumed tacitly even by some critics who, for example, speak of Stalinist Thermidor. Khmer Rouge in Cambodia or Sendero Luminoso in Peru understand their movement as a return to the glory of an ancient empire. The Hegelian point here is that this narration is a retroactive reconstruction for which one is responsible—never a given fact. One can never refer to it as a founding condition, the context or presupposition of activity. As presupposition it is always already “posited.” Tradition is tradition insofar as it gets constituted as such.
In his critical remarks on German Idealism, Lacan equates self-consciousness with self-transparency, dismissing it as the most blatant case of philosophical illusion, which consists in denying the subject’s constitutive decentrality. However, self-consciousness in German idealism not only has nothing to do with any kind of transparent self-identity of the subject, it is rather another name for what Lacan has in mind when he points out that every desire is the “desire of a desire.” The subject never finds a multitude of desires, only entertains towards them a reflected relationship. By way of actual desiring, one implicitly answers the question—which of your desires do you desire, have you chosen one? Concerning Kant, self-consciousness, thus conceived, is positively founded on the non-transparency of the subject to itself: the Kantian transcendental apperception (the self-consciousness of pure I) is possible insofar as I am unattainable to myself in my noumenal dimension, as “Thing which thinks.”6 There is, of course, a point at which this circular “positing of the presuppositions” reaches a deadlock; the key to this deadlock is provided by the Lacanian logic of non-all—pas-tout.7 Although “nothing is presupposed which was not previously posited,” every “particular” presupposition can be demonstrated to be posited, not natural but naturalized—it would be wrong to draw the seemingly obvious “universal” conclusion that “everything presupposed is posited.” The presupposed X, “nothing in particular,” totally substanceless, nevertheless resists being retroactively “posited.” Lacan calls this X the real, the unattainable, elusive je ne sais quoi.
In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler8 demonstrates how the difference of sex and gender is the difference between a biological fact and a cultural/symbolic formation which, a decade ago, was widely used by feminists in order to show that “anatomy is not destiny.” Woman as a cultural product, already posited, is not determined by her biological status, can never be unambiguously fixed, presupposed as a positive fact. The way one draws the line separating culture from nature is determined by a specific context. This cultural overdetermination of demarcation between gender/sex, however, should not precipitate one into accepting the Foucauldian notion of sex as the effect of “sexuality,” an heterogeneous texture of discursive practices. What gets lost thereby is the deadlock of the real. Thus arises the thin yet crucial line separating Lacan from the deconstructionists, from the opposition between nature/culture, which is culturally overdetermined—there is no particular element one can isolate as “pure nature.” One should not draw the conclusion that everything is culture. Nature as real remains the unfathomable X resisting cultural “gentrification.” Or, in another way: the Lacanian real is the gap separating the Particular from the Universal. It prevents one from accomplishing the gesture of universalization and jumps from the premise that every particular element is P, to the conclusion that all elements are P.
Consequently, there is no logic of prohibition involved in the notion of the real as impossible, non-symbolizable. In Lacan the real is not surreptitiously consecrated, organized as the domain of the inviolable. When Lacan defines the “rock of castration” as real, this in no way implies that castration is excepted from the discursive field as a kind of untouchable sacrifice. Every demarcation between the symbolic and the real, every exclusion of the real as prohibited/inviolable, is a symbolic act par excellence. Such an inversion of impossibility into prohibition/exclusion occults the inherent deadlock of the real. In other words, Lacan’s strategy is to prevent any tabooing of the real. One can “touch the real” only by applying oneself to its symbolization, up to the very failure of this endeavor. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the only proof that there are things beyond phenomena are paralogisms, inconsistencies in which reason gets entangled the moment it extends the application of categories beyond the limits of experience. In the same way in Lacan on touche le réel—one touches the real of jouissance by the impasses of formalization.9 In short the status of the real is thoroughly non-substantial; it is a product of failed attempts to integrate into the symbolic.
The impasse of “presupposing,” of listing the presuppositions, the chain of external causes/conditions of some posited entity, is the reverse of these “troubles with the non-all.” An entity can easily be reduced to the totality of its presuppositions. What is missing from the series of presuppositions, however, is the performative act of formal conversion which retroactively posits these presuppositions, and makes them into what they are: the presuppositions of… (like the above mentioned example of the act which retroactively posits its reasons). This “dotting of the i” is the tautological gesture of the Master Signifier constituting the entity as One. Thus looms asymmetry: the positing of presuppositions chances upon its limit in the “feminine” non-all. What it eludes is the real, whereas the enumeration of the presuppositions of the posited content made into a closed series through the “masculine” performative.
Hegel tries to resolve this impasse of “positing reflection” and “external reflection” in his Logic of Essence—the second part of his Science of Logic. The aim of the following examination is to discover in Hegel’s solution the same pattern of an elementary ideological operation.

2. Ground versus conditions

The fundamental antagonism of Hegel’s Logic of Essence is the antagonism between “ground” and “conditions,” between the inner essence, the “true nature” of a thing, and the external circumstances which render possible the realization of this essence, i.e., the impossibility to reach a common measure between these two dimensions, to coordinate them in a “higher-order synthesis.” Only in the third part of Logic, the “subjective logic” of Notion, this incommensurability appears surpassed. Therein consists the alternative between “positing” and “external” reflection: do people create the world they live in from within themselves, autonomously, or does their activity result from external circumstances? Philosophical common sense would impose here the compromise of a “proper measure.” True, one has the possibility of choice, or one can realize our freely conceived projects. But the framework of tradition, of inherited circumstances delineates our field of choices… or, as Marx put it in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

Men make their own history; but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

However, it is precisely such a “dialectical synthesis” that Hegel declines. There is no way to draw a line separating the two aspects: every inner potential can be translated—its form can be converted—into an external condition, and vice versa. In short what Hegel does here is very precise: undermining the usual notion of the relation between the inner potentials of a thing and the external conditions which render (im)possible the realization of these potentials, “he posits between these two sides the sign of equality.” The consequences of this are far more radical than they may seem; they concern above all the radically anti-evolutionary character of Hegel’s philosophy. To ascertain it, one has only to recall the notional couple “in itself/for itself.” This couple is usually taken as the supreme proof of Hegel’s trust in evolutionary progress—the development from “in-itself” into “for-itself,”—yet it suffices to look closely at it in order to dispel this phantom of Evolution. The “in-itself” in its opposition to “for-itself” means at one and the same time
—what exists only potentially, as an inner possibility, contrary to the actuality wherein a possibility has externalized and realized itself; and
—actuality itself in the sense of external, immediate, “raw” objectivity, which is still opposed to subjective mediation, which is not yet internalized, rendered conscious; in this sense, the “in-itself” is actuality in so far as it has not yet reached its concept.

The simultaneous reading of these two aspects undermines the usual idea of dialectical progress, a gradual realization of the object’s inner potentials as spontaneous self-development. Hegel is quite outspoken and explicit: the inner potentials of the self-development of an object and the pressure exerted on it by an external force “are strictly correlative.” They form two sides of the same conjunction. In other words, the potentiality of the object must in turn be present in its external actuality, under the form of heteronomous coercion. To use Hegel’s example, to say that a pupil at the beginning of his education potentially knows, that in the course of development he will realize creative potentials, equals saying that such inner potentials must be present from the very beginning in external actuality. Likewise, the authority of the Master exerts pressure upon his pupil. Nowadays one can add the sadly famous case of the working-class as revolutionary subject. To affirm that the working class is “in itself” a revolutionary subject, is to assert that this potentiality must already have been actualized in the Party which knows its mission in advance, and therefore exerts pressure upon the working class, guiding it towards realization. In this way, the “leading role” of the Party is legitimized—its right to “educate” the working class in accordance with its potentials, to “convey” it into its historical mission.

One can see, thus, why Hegel is as far as possible from the evolutionist’s notion of the progressive development of “In-itself” into “For-itself.” The category of “in itself” is strictly correlative to “for us”—for some consciousness external to the thing-in-itself. To say that a lump of clay is “in itself” a pot, equals saying that this pot is already present in the mind of the craftsman who will impose the form of pot onto the clay. The current way of saying “under the right conditions the pupil will realize his potentials,” is thus deceptive: when, in excuse of his “failure” to realize his potentials, one insists that “he would have realized them, if only the conditions had been right”—one approaches cynicism akin to Brecht’s famous statement from his Beggar’s Opera “We would be good instead of being so rude, if only the circumstances were not of this kind!”

For Hegel external circumstances are not an impediment to the realization of inner potentials, but on the contrary “the very arena in which the true nature of these inner potentials is to be tested.” Are they true potentials or just vain illusions about what might have happened? Or, to put it in Spinozian terms, “positing reflection,” observes things as they are in their eternal essence, sub specie aeternitatis, whereas “external reflection” observes them sub specie durationis, in their dependence on a series of contingent external circumstances. Here, everything hinges on “how” does Hegel overcome “external reflection.” If his aim were simply to reduce the externality of contingent conditions to the self-mediation of the inner essence-ground—the usual notion of Hegel’s idealism—then Hegel’s philosophy would truly be a mere “dynamized Spinozism.” What does Hegel actually do?

Recall the usual mode of explaining the outbursts of racism which makes use of the categorial couple of ground and conditions/circumstances: one conceives racism—the so-called outbursts of irrational mass sadism—as a latent psychic disposition, a kind of Jungian archetype, which comes forth under certain conditions like social instability and crisis. Within this lense the racist disposition is the “ground,” and current political struggles the “circumstances,” the conditions of its effectuation. However, what counts as ground and what counts as conditions is ultimately contingent and exchangeable. Therefore one can easily accomplish the Marxist reversal of the above mentioned psychologist’s perspective, and conceive the present political struggle as the only true determining ground.

In the present civil war in ex-Yugoslavia, the “ground” of the Serbian aggressivity is not to be sought in any primitive Balkan warrior archetype, but within the struggle for power in post-Communist Serbia (the survival of the old Communist state apparatus)—the status of eventual Serbian bellicose dispositions and other similar archetypes (the “Croatian genocidal character,” the “centennial tradition of ethnic hatreds in Balkan countries”) is precisely that of the conditions/circumstances in which the power struggle realizes itself. The “bellicose dispositions” are precisely latent conditions which are actualized, drawn from their shadowy half-existence, by the recent political struggle as their determining ground. One is thus fully justified in saying that “what is at stake in the Yugoslavian civil war are not archaic ethnic conflicts: these centennial hatreds are inflamed only on account of their function in the recent political struggle.”10

How, then, can one avoid this mess, this exchangeability of ground and circumstances? Consider another example: the renaissance is rediscovery (rebirth) of antiquity which exerted a crucial influence on the XVth century’s break with the mediaeval way of life. The first obvious explanation of that impact is that the newly discovered antique tradition brought about a dissolution of the mediaeval “paradigm”—here, however, a question pops up: why did antiquity begin to exert its influence at this very moment? A possible answer is: due to the dissolution of mediaeval social links, a new zeitgeist emerged which made for the response to antiquity.
Something must have changed so that people became able to perceive antiquity not as the pagan kingdom of sin but as the model to follow.

That is all very well, but one remains locked inside the vicious circle. This new zeitgeist took shape through the discovery of antique texts. In a way everything was already there, in the external circumstances; the new zeitgeist formed through the influence of antiquity enabling renaissance thought to shatter the mediaeval chains. Yet for this to take place, the new zeitgeist should already have been active. The only way out of this impasse is therefore the intervention at a certain point, of a tautological gesture; the new zeitgeist had to constitute itself by literally “presupposing itself in its exteriority.” In other words it was not sufficient for the new zeitgeist to posit retroactively these external conditions (the antique tradition) as “its own.” It had to (presup)pose itself as already present in them. The return to external conditions (to antiquity) had to coincide with the return to the foundation, to the “thing itself,” to the ground. The “renaissance” conceived of itself as the return to the Greek and Roman foundations of Western civilization. There is thus no inner ground where actualization depends on external circumstances. The external relation of presupposing (ground presupposes conditions and vice versa) is surpassed in a pure tautological gesture, by means of which the thing “presupposes itself.” This tautological gesture is “empty” in the sense that it does not contribute anything new; it only retroactively ascertains that
the thing in question “is already present in its conditions.” The totality of these conditions “is” the actuality of the thing. Such an empty gesture provides the most elementary definition of a “symbolic” act.

Thus one arrives at the fundamental paradox of “rediscovering tradition” at work in the constitution of national identity; a nation finds its sense of self-identity through such a tautological gesture, by way of discovering itself as already present in its tradition. Consequently, the mechanism of the “rediscovery of national tradition” cannot be reduced to the “positing of presuppositions,” in the sense of the retroactive positing of conditions as “ours.” Rather, the point is in the very act of returning to its external conditions, “the national thing returns to itself.” The return to conditions is experienced as the “return to one’s true roots.”

3. The tautological “return of the thing to itself”

Although “existing socialism” has already receded into a distance conferring upon it the nostalgic magic of a post-modern lost object, one may still recall a well-known joke on what socialism is. A social system dialectically synthesizes its entire previous history: from the prehistoric classless society it took primitivism, from antiquity slave labor, from medieval feudalism ruthless domination, from capitalism exploitation “and from socialism a name.” The Hegelian tautological gesture of the “return of the thing to itself” includes in the definition of the object its name. That is, after decomposing an object, one looks in vain for some specific feature holding together these parts and makes of them a unique, self-identical thing. As to its properties and ingredients, a thing is wholly “outside itself,” in its external conditions. Every positive feature is already present in the circumstances which are not yet this thing. The supplementary operation which makes from this bundle a unique, self-identical thing is the purely symbolic, tautological gesture of positing these external conditions as the conditions/components of the thing, while simultaneously presupposing the existence of ground which holds together the multitude of conditions.
To throw our Lacanian cards on the table, this tautological “return of the thing to itself” rendering the concrete structure of self-identity Lacan designates as the point de capiton, at which the signifier falls into the signified (as in the above joke on socialism, where the name functions as part of the designated thing). Recall an example from popular culture: the killer shark in Spielberg’s Jaws.11 It is wrong and misleading to search directly for its ideological meaning. Does it symbolize the threat of the Third World to America epitomized by the archetypal small town? Is it the symbol of the exploitative nature of capitalism itself (Fidel Castro’s interpretation)? Does it stand for the untamed nature which threatens to disrupt the routine of our daily lives? In order to avoid this lure, one should shift perspective: the daily life of common man is dominated by an inconsistent multitude of fears (he can become the victim of big business manipulations; Third World immigrants seem to intrude into his small orderly universe; unruly nature can destroy his home…), and the accomplishment of Jaws consists in an act of purely formal conversion, providing a common “container” for these free-floating, inconsistent fears by anchoring them, “reifying” them in the figure of the shark. Consequently, the function of the fascinating presence of the shark is precisely to block any further inquiry into the social meaning (social mediation) of the phenomena which arouse fear in common man. To say that the murderous shark symbolizes the above mentioned series of fears is to say too much and not enough at the same time. It does not symbolize them, since it literally annuls them by occupying the place of the object of fear. It is therefore more than a symbol: the feared “thing itself.” On the other hand, it is also less than a symbol, since it does not point towards the symbolized content, but rather blocks access to it, renders it invisible.
Moreover, the shark is homologous with the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew: “Jew” is the answer, the explanation offered by anti-Semitism, to the multitude of fears experienced by “common man” in an epoch of social dissolution (inflation, unemployment, corruption, moral degradation). Behind all these phenomena there is the invisible hand of the “Jewish plot.” Again, the crucial point, is that the designation “Jew” adds no new content: the entire content is already present in the external conditions (crisis, moral degeneration…). The name “Jew” is only the supplementary feature accomplishing a kind of transubstantiation and changing all these elements into many manifestations of the same “ground,” the “Jewish plot.” Paraphrasing the joke on socialism, one could say that anti-Semitism takes from the economy unemployment and inflation, from politics parliamentary corruption and intrigue, from morality degeneration, from art “incomprehensible” avant-gardism, “and from the Jew its name.” This name enables one to recognize behind the multitude of external conditions the activity of the same ground….
Therein consists another dialectic of contingency and necessity: as to their content, they fully coincide (in both cases, the only positive content is the series of conditions which form part of actual life-experience: economic crisis, political chaos, the dissolution of ethical links…). The passage of contingency into necessity is an act of purely formal conversion, the gesture of adding a “name” which confers upon the contingent series the mark of necessity, thereby transforming it into the expression of some hidden ground, the “Jewish plot.” So the “performativity” at work in this act of formal conversion in no way designates the power of freely “creating” the designated content—words mean what we want them to mean. “Quilting” only structures the found material, externally imposed. The act of naming is “performative” only and precisely insofar as “it is always-already part of the definition of the signified content.”12
Hegel resolves the deadlock of positing and external reflection (the vicious circle of positing the presuppositions and of enumerating the presuppositions of the posited content) by means of the tautological return-upon-itself of the thing, in its very external presuppositions. The same tautological gesture is already at work in Kant’s analytic of pure reason: the synthesis of the multitude of sensations in the representation of the object which belongs to “reality” implies an empty surplus. The positing of an X is the unknown substratum of the perceived phenomenal sensations. Suffice it to quote Findlay’s precise formulation:

…we always refer appearances to a Transcendental Object, an X, of which we, however, know nothing, but which is non-the-less the objective correlate of the synthetic acts inseparable from thinking self-consciousness. The Transcendental Object, thus conceived, can be called a Noumenon or thing of thought (Gedankending). But the reference to such a thing of thought does not, strictly speaking, use the categories, but is something like “an empty synthetic gesture” in which nothing objective is really put before us.13

The transcendental object is thus the very opposite of the Ding-an-sich: that is, empty insofar as it is devoid of any objective content. To obtain its notion, one has to abstract from the sensible object its entire sensible content, all sensations by means of which the subject is affected by Ding. The empty X which remains is “the pure objective correlate/effect of the subject’s autonomous/spontaneous synthetic activity.” To put it in a paradoxical way: the transcendental object is the “in-itself” insofar as it is for the subject, posited by it, pure “positedness” of an indeterminate X. This “empty synthetic gesture” adding nothing positive to the thing, and yet, in its very capacity of an empty gesture, constitutes it, makes it into an object, is the act of symbolization in its most elementary form. Findlay points out that the transcendental object:

is not for Kant different from the object or objects which appear to the senses and which we can judge about and know… but it is the “same” object or objects conceived in respect of certain intrinsically inapparent features, and which is in such respects incapable of being judged about or known.14

This X, this irrepresentable surplus which adds itself to the series of sensible features, is precisely the “thing-of-thought”/Gedankending: it bears witness to the fact that the object’s unity does not reside in it, but is the result of the subject’s synthetic activity—as with Hegel, where the act of formal conversion inverts the chain of conditions into the unconditional Thing, founded in itself.
Let’s briefly return to anti-Semitism, to the “synthetic act of apperception” which, out of the multitude of imagined features of Jews, constructs the anti-Semitic figure of “Jew.” To pass for a true anti-Semite, it is not enough to claim that one opposes Jews because they are exploitative, greedy intriguers, nor is it sufficient for the signifier “Jew” to designate this series of positive features. One must accomplish the crucial step further by saying “they are like that: exploitative, greedy…, because they are Jews.” The “transcendental object” of Jewishness is precisely that elusive X which makes a Jew into a “Jew” and for which one looks in vain among the positive properties. This act of pure formal conversion, the “synthetic act” of uniting the series of positive features in the signifier “Jew” and thereby transforming them into so many manifestations of the “Jewishness” as their hidden ground, “brings about the appearance of an objectal surplus,” of a mysterious X which is “in Jew more than Jew;” in other words: of the transcendental object.15

1. Of course there are good reasons to believe in Jesus Christ, “but these reasons are fully comprehensible only to those who already believe in Him.”
2. The same for Ronald Reagan: the more journalists enumerated his slips of tongue and other faux pas, the more they strengthened his popularity. As to Reagan’s “teflon presidency,” see Joan Copjec, “The unvermögender Other…” in New Formations 14, London: Routledge, 1991. On another level the gap separating S1 from S2, the act of decision from the chain of knowledge, is provided by the institution of jury in justice: the jury accomplishes the act of decision, a verdict of “guilt” or “innocence,” and it’s up to the judge to ground it in knowledge, translate it into punishment. Why can’t the judge himself pass the verdict? For Hegel, jury embodies the principle of free subjectivity: the crucial fact is that it’s composed of a group of peers of the accused selected by lottery—they stand for “anybody.” I can be judged only by my equals, not by a superior agency speaking in the name of some inaccessible Knowledge. Jury implies an aspect of contingency, suspending the principle of sufficient ground. By entrusting the jury with passing the verdict, the moment of uncertainty is preserved. Until the end one cannot be sure what will be; the judgement’s actual pronunciation is always a surprise.

3. The paradox is that there is “nothing” behind the series of positive, observable features: the status of that mysterious je ne sais quoi which makes me fall in love is ultimately that of a pure semblance. One can see how a “sincere” feeling is necessarily based upon illusion—I am “really,” “sincerely,” in love, only insofar as I believe in your secret agalma.
4. As for this “Incorporation Thesis,” cf., Henry E. Allison’s Kant’s Theory of Freedom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.


5. The adverse procedure is also false: the attribution of personal responsibility and guilt which relieves one of probing into the concrete circumstances. The moral-majority practice of the ethical qualification of the higher crime rate among African Americans—criminal dispositions, moral insensitivity…—
precludes the analysis of their social, economic and political conditions.

6. The ultimate proof of how this reflectiveness of desire that constitutes “self-consciousness” has nothing to do with the subject’s self-transparency. The very opposite, it involves the subject’s radical splitting in the paradoxes of love-hate. Hollywood described Erich von Stroheim who, in the 30s and 40s, regularly played sadistic German officers, as “a man you’ll love to hate:” to “love to hate” means that this somebody fits perfectly the scapegoat-role of attracting hatred. At the opposite end, the femme fatale in the noir universe is clearly a woman one “hates to love:” we know she means evil, so it’s against our will that we are forced to love her, and we hate ourselves and her for it. Tautological cases of this reflectivity of love-hate are no less paradoxical. Saying I “hate to hate you,” points towards a splitting: I really love you, but for certain reasons I am forced to hate you, and I hate myself for it.

7. As to this logic of the “non-all,” cf. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre XX: Encore, Paris: Editions du Seuil 1975; two key chapters are translated in Feminine Sexuality, New York: W.W. Norton, 1982.

8. Cf. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, New York: Routledge, 1990.

9. Lacan’s statement that “there is no sexual relation” does not contain a hidden normativity. His point is “it is not possible to formulate any norm which should guide one with a legitimate claim to universal validity:” every attempt to formulate such a norm is a secondary endeavor to mend an “original” impasse. Lacan avoids the trap of the cruel superego: the subject cannot meet its demands, thereby branding its very being with a constitutive guilt. The relation of the subject to the symbolic law is not one that can never be fully satisfied. Like the God of the Old Testament or the Jansenist Dieu obscur, the Other “knows” what it wants from us; it is only we who cannot discern the Other’s inscrutable will. For Lacan however, “the Other of the law does not know what it wants.”

10. This exchangeability involves the ambiguity to the precise causal status of trauma. One is fully justified in isolating the “original trauma” as the ultimate ground triggering the chain-reaction, the final result being the symptom. Conversely, in order for event X to function as “traumatic” the subject’s symbolic universe should have already been structured in a certain way.
11. Cf. Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, New York: Routledge, 1991.
12. Lacan’s Master Signifier is an “empty” signifier without signified rearranging the previously given content. The signifier “Jew” does not add any new signified. To answer the question “Why were Jews picked out to play the scapegoat in anti-Semitism?” one might succumb to the very trap of anti-Semitism, finding some mysterious feature in them. That Jews were chosen for the role of the “Jew” ultimately is contingent, as shown by the well-known anti-anti-Semitic joke “Jews and cyclists are responsible for all our troubles.”
Why cyclists?—WHY JEWS?

13. J.N. Findlay, Kant and the Transcendental Object, Oxford: OUP, 1968, p. 187.

14. J.N. Findlay, op.cit., p. 1.

15. A simple symmetrical inversion brings about an asymmetrical, irreversible, non-specular result. When the statement “the Jew is exploitative, intriguing, dirty, lascivious…” is reversed into “he is exploitative, intriguing, dirty, lascivious… because he is Jewish,” one doesn’t state the same content another way. Something new, the objet a is produced: “in the Jew more than the Jew himself,” on account of which the Jew is what he phenomenally is. This is what the Hegelian “return of the thing to itself in its conditions” amounts to: the thing returns to itself when one recognizes in its conditions
the effects of a transcendent Ground.

by Jacques-Alain Miller

(Originally published in Newsletter of the Freudian Field: Volume 3, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring/Fall 1989)

My first point is entitled: Aetiologia. But first let me dispel any conception that my title, “To Interpret the Cause,” is a Lacanian catch-phrase. When Freud introduces the wolf dream in Chapter IV of his History of an Infantile Neurosis, he stresses this very point; that he was convinced – and he mentions that his patient accepted his conviction – that the cause of the infantile neurosis of the Wolf Man was hidden behind the dream. The text says precisely: “das hinter ihm die Verursachung seiner infantilen Neurose verborgen sei.”1

So, this farfetched interpretation, Freud’s augury about the dream, going from its explicit content to its concealed content, is an interpretation aiming at the cause, the hidden cause. And the very notion of the hidden cause is central to psychoanalytic practice and to psychoanalytic theory. At this preliminary point, which I have made to accustom you to the very idea of the cause, let us not forget that from the outset Freud’s investigation began as a tentative aetiology of the psychoneuroses. Aetiology means a discourse of causes. From the start, Freud was going in search of causes. And you re- member that at the beginning he was looking for actual causes of the psychoneuroses. For instance, he considered the practice of masturbation as a cause for deficiency of sexual potency and for the neuralgias. Then, Freud had to concede that psychoneuroses were present effects of past causes, and not actual causes. Moreover, he conceded that the real past causes were hidden to the consciousness of the patients. And, it is in this past that Freud was obliged to invent the very concept of repression. That is to say, he rein- vented the concept of a hidden cause with deferred effects, Nachträglich, a triggered après-coup, a posteriori, and by a second event. In the famous case of the Wolf Man, this concept of the Nachträglich is present on every page. It is the major text by Freud which presents

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precisely this; that those effects are as a posteriors. In the Wolf Man case, the second event which triggers the effects of the hidden cause is the famous dream itself.

So, I believe that I am on a very solid ground when I propose that psychoanalysis has always been a discourse about the cause. And psychoanalytic practice has always been looking for the cause. Let us take a shortcut now. What is a cause? If we refer to the case of the Wolf Man, there is no ambiguity in Freud’s answer. The cause, broadly spea- king, is the sexual act between the father and the mother as absorbed by the one-and-a- half-year old child. In psychoanalysis, interpretation not only aims at the cause, we may even say, interpretation stumbles on the cause. For instance, the use of the myth of Oedi- pus in psychoanalytic practice, the Freudian Oedipus that is the symbolic frame of inter- pretation insofar as interpretation aims at the cause, conceived here as the sexual rela- tionship, the erotic relationship, which binds together father, mother, child – the family. And, we may even say, that the Freudian cause taken as pre-Oedipal cause is the key to the transference insofar as transference may appear to be a repetition of the fundamental relations of the patient to the parents.
Newsletter of the Freudian Field: Volume 3, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring/Fall 1989
And you know the consequences of this point of view. It paved the way for inter- pretations of transference construed as “paternal” or “maternal” transference. You know that some modern analysts say that Freud analyzed from the position of the father, that he accepted the position of the father in the transference, and they prefer that the maternal position now be more operative in analysis. In any case with this reference to the Oedipal cause, you also have a key to the various theories of transference. Transference and inter- pretation are, as you know, the classical pair of interrelated notions. I am not going to give the would-be classical presentation of this pair of notions, however, because I gave it in some sense four years ago in Amherst, Massachusetts, at the colloquium on trans- ference.2 At that time, I was preoccupied with giving the classical presentation of this pair of notions.

Today I am going to try, if I may say so, to break new ground by following Lacan in understanding what psychoanalysis is about; new ground in understanding, in articulat- ing as they say, the desire of psychoanalysis. And this talk falls in the same sequence as my course in Paris, whose title this year is “Cause and Consent” [1988]. I see Bruce Fink here who attends my course and participates in my weekly seminar. Well, perhaps, he would tell you, in effect, that what I have been saying here is precisely the point I was trying to

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present fifteen days ago in Paris, and which I continue to come back to. And this point is also an effort to give a unified theory of the Freudian field or to see how Lacan has given such a unified theory of the Freudian field. I do not know if I will have time to get that far, but that is my aim.

Causes Versus Law

Now, let us take a second point, which I shall call “Causes Versus Law.” This is still pre- liminary. The first two notions of cause and law are easily confused I would say, one with the other. As a matter of fact, thinking in a scientific framework, we consider that there is a fixed relationship between cause and effect, a stable and fixed relationship. And so we may try. Eventually scientific investigation aims to formulate laws of the relationships between a given cause and a given effect. That is elementary epistemology – which is not our central topic today – so I shall skip a lot of the various concentrations I cover in my course. What is central in the idea of a law, from the scientific point of view, is – I would select two words – first, regularity. When there is a law, we anticipate the regularity of the manifestation of the effect once a cause is present. So, a law allows anticipation of what is going to take place. It allows predictions. When we have laws and no capacity for prediction, we always wonder if we truly have a law, if it is truly a science.

I do not know if it is a bad memory for some of you [reference to a recent stock- market plummet], but there are various phenomena in the economic field which cast a certain doubt on a scientific rationale, for instance, of the economy. Nevertheless, there are always prices in economy; such novelties are not for psychoanalysis. When you can
Newsletter of the Freudian Field: Volume 3, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring/Fall 1989
not even predict, and you have a whole lot of laws, you wonder what field you are in. So, regularity.

And, second, I would say, continuity. As a matter of fact. When a cause is in- scribed in a law such that you may say the same cause produces the same effect, you are faced with a continuous chain because you may ask of the cause itself, what is the cause that causes this cause? That is to say, a cause is at the same time the effect of another cause. So, when you inscribe the cause in laws, you are, as a matter of fact, faced with a chain of necessity, determinism, where you have not – it is very difficult to do – pin- pointed a cause. You have a chain of causes and effects, and when you think about that in a theoretical way, you wonder where this chain of

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cause and effect begins. And you know that those who introduced the scientific discourse in our culture in the seventeenth century were inclined to have, had to have, a theory of God which – we are accustomed to making a separation between science and religion made a link between science and religion. From the start, scientific discourse was grounded precisely on this continuity of causes and effects.

The cause I am talking about, the cause in psychoanalysis – the word cause is in the very title of the École de la cause freudienne – the cause we are speaking of, the Freudian cause, is a cause with another content. It is a cause – not as inscribed in a law of regularity and continuity, but rather a cause which so preoccupied David Hume in the 18th century when he showed that the very term the “cause”, as separate, as primary, was non-conceptual. And, you know that the reasoning of Hume triggered the philosophical effort of Kant himself. I cannot take up again the argument of Hume. And you know, perhaps, that Karl Popper, in our century, has built all his schemology on Hume’s argu- ments about causality I cannot give you a resume of these arguments, but you may un- derstand that, if you have a continuity in this way, you may never be able to pinpoint the cause as separate. So, as a matter of fact, if you think of the relationship between cause and chain, you may understand that cause, the very notion of cause, involves a breaking up of the chain. That is to say, the question of the cause can only appear when there is a breaking up of the chain. So, you may ask, where is the cause at the very moment where there is this lack? I would say, in the concept of causality as distinct from legality, one finds a concept of cause as distinct from law. And it always implies the notion of a missing link. You direct yourself to the idea of cause precisely when there is this missing link. That is to say that discontinuity, and not regularity, is essential to the notion of causality. And, if you think – let me take a shortcut – of the chain as a chain of signifiers, precisely the famous chain of signifiers, well, you may understand that with the concept of cause, the chain of signifiers …. Well, I would put it like that:

S – S’ – S”- S”’- S””
You may understand that cause necessitates the removal of one signifier, as being the

missing link. And this removal of one link is precisely what

S – S’ –

by Josefina Ayerza

They had just made love.  Kichi returns from the bathroom.  Sada takes him in her hand and says,

—As soon as you finish you are ready to start again—

Who is Sada talking to, her look certainly not directed toward Kichi but to “whom” she holds in her hand?  Kichi answers,

—It is as if he was yours—

Kichi’s part-body detaching, Sada finds the image of what she desires in the body of whom she loves.  Yet the part that gets detached is not just any part.  What gets detached, already an image, is the phallus—an image of the penis—still a signifier, a lack.  “The organ actually invested with this signifying function takes on the value of a fetish.”¹  Says Sada,

—Yes, he’s mine… Tell me why that it always becomes so hard so quickly?—

She may want to deprive him of what he has, but what she really wants is that it be her own…again she wants it to be herself…she wants to be the phallus—a feminine one.  But that part also enjoys, much as the subjects resulting from the copulation of the signifiers enjoy.  “A kiss they call it,”²  Says Kichi,

—Because it is really you who desires it—

Who is you?  The desiring you, made out into a craving geisha, may well allude to Lacan’s supposed Other, Sada relating to the signifier of that Other when saying,

—I want it again—

The very dramatic issue in The Realm of the Senses³ is the fact that it is a true story.  Sada is a prostitute and now she works at an inn where Kichi is the owner, the headman and her boss.  They get involved in a love affair and have to run away from Kichi’s wife in order to live their passion.  A breathless passion, at the outmost point of infatuation Sada will strangle Kichi after his own instructions.  —If you start don’t stop in the middle, it hurts too much.  Once dead she will cut out his penis and testicles.  The movie ends with Sada wondering in a park, out of her mind, the parts still bleeding within her hands and fingers.

Lacan comments on the movie, this is 1977.  He walked out dumbfounded.  Pondering over the power of Japanese culture, he points to feminine eroticism pushed to such an extreme:  Woman in her fantasm wants to kill man.  And the case with Sada is that she didn’t get enough by doing so.  She kills Kichi and still wants more.  Now Lacan asks himself, why did she have to cut him up after killing him, how come she didn’t do it before?  Thus he will finally conclude about the incident in the movie that castration is not the fantasm.

What is castration in this context?  Contradictorily, what is the case with criminal fantasy when it comes to immolate woman?  Offense somehow assigned to the signifier, “…a woman can but be excluded by the nature of things, which is the nature of words;”⁴  let’s say that Willem de Kooning paints the ramble of her mutilation and Jacques Lacan will tell the story.

De Kooning’s series of paintings Woman 1, Woman 2… fairly depict the process by which Lacan’s woman is systematically dismembered as she gets deprived of yet another part.  So she reaches the point of annihilation.  Formerly the love object—obscure cause of the desire—a lost object, she’ll walk throughout seminar XX in a not-whole, nonexistent apparel.  Again she will at once be the symptom, and so will the analyst.

But what is it to be the symptom where it partakes of the cause of the desire?  If symptom is the single way each one happens to enjoy his/her unconscious framework, symptom is as well what you structure your life around.

Love and desire foregoing, the emergence of jouissance will spell.  Woman the symptom of man is a hole.  Let woman lend her body for the man to enjoy it, she will all along not be herself, only the very intrinsic attributes—mother, prostitute, wet-mother—she comes to embody.  A social bias to the symptom, the fact won’t prevent it from being distinguished throughout a particular lucubration—not in that it stands for an exception, but in that it comes from anyone.  Say the case is a boy inflamed by the baby sitter who happened to remove her hosiery while he pretended to be asleep; say that it is a president getting the intern to give him a blow job in the White House oval room; say that it is an anonymous King at the sado-masoquist Online Chateaux seducing women into becoming their slaves in writing. The far fetched memory in the fanciness of an outworn significance will return because it bears the mark.

When man enjoys, it’s the jouissance of his organ.  The phallus, an image of the sexual organ, moreover a representation of the certain image, is nevertheless a lack—of the organ itself.  The signifier will bring up the erotic, and in this sense it precedes ejaculation, male’s extrinsic jouissance, of the body… And phallic jouissance will also determine woman, her ex-sistence: the jouissance of the Other is off language, off the symbolic.  But the terms are not equal; man is not the given symptom of woman.  From this perspective the symptom of woman is also woman.  How so?

To answer with Lacan castration cannot be deduced from development alone, since it presupposes the subjectivity of the Other as the place of its law.  Still there are phallic women, and in this sense woman is prone to define herself in terms of man, in parity with the phallus, her place in the Other to remain ambiguous.  “Man here acts as the relay whereby the woman becomes this Other for herself as she is this Other for him.”⁵

…to play the part of the man (faire l’homme), as I have said, being thus hommosexuelle themselves…they love each other as the same (elles se mêment) in the Other.⁶

Woman conflates “man and homosexual: she loves men, she loves like a man, and her desire is structured in fantasy like his.^”7

Should Greta Christina, Queen of Norway befit the personage, she may in turn evince the Spinozian rule in contemporary culture.  An this is Slavoj Zizek’s theory “You can get whatever you want but with the substance removed: coffee without caffeine, cigarettes without nicotine…” for the case, sex without penetration.