This is the last of three lectures which I have been invited to deliver. In my first lecture here I introduced the work and style of Jacques Lacan, and although time constraints did not allow me to go beyond half of what I had planned to tell you, I think I was able to give an idea of the theoretical principles whose uninterrupted development started more than thirty years ago.

In my second lecture I attempted to use the example of the piropo or flirtatious message, which I improvised, as a paradigm, in order to transmit some truths which are fundamental and yet unrecognized about language; in particular, about the function of language in sexual separation, the fading of the reference, the equivocation of language (langue), the misunderstanding of communication.

I am going to dedicate this third lecture to the question of science, and more precisely to respond, as far as I am able, to Professor Cardenas, to whose invitation I owe my presence here (I have already thanked him, and I now thank him again), and whose reaction, after my last exposition, was to say that, in the way in which I presented it, the Lacanian theory appeared to conclude in the impossibility of knowledge. Fair enough. After all, the impossibility of knowledge does not scare me, since knowledge is not science. The difference between knowledge and science appears to me to be fundamental in Lacan’s epistemology. and acceptable well beyond the strict field of psychoanalysis.

For greater convenience, I shall divide this lecture into ten points which I shall cover successively. This means that this lecture will have a style and a tone different to the previous one.

I. One can postulate that throughout the history of thought the theory of knowledge has always upheld the ideal, which has been formulated in various ways, of the union of subject and object. More precisely, the classical theory of knowledge assumes a co-naturality of subject and object, a pro-established harmony between, the subject who knows and the object known. The theory of knowledge has always commented on the miracle of the adequation of knowledge, reserving a place for the-thing-in-itself which, in Kant’s terms, would be unknowable.

From its beginnings, science has been distinguished from knowledge, if only because the former constructs its object. This principle, let it be understood, is not specifically Lacanian. It is also the principle of Bachelard, for example, for whom the object and the scientific instrument are an incarnated theory - that is his expression. I point out that the same thing happens with the Freudian unconscious: in so far as this is apprehended in the novel device of Freud’s practice, it also realizes a theory.

Which theory? This is the whole question. This is a first and brief point which is open to discussion, and I should say that it is not specifically Lacanian.

II. The second point is more precise. It is pertinent to notice that all knowledge is fundamentally illusory and mythical, in so far as what it does is to comment on the “sexual proportion,” a term with which David Mauri has very appropriately translated the French expression rapport sexuel used by Lacan. All theory of knowledge has sexual connotations. You can take as an example Aristotle’s complementarity between form and matter. You can also think of that very elaborate form of knowledge, ancient Chinese astrology, which is a whole discourse about the male and the female and which organizes not only the gods but also the entire society. These are examples that Lacan considers in his seminar The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. Similarly, one can recall the theory of phlogiston, so compelling and present during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before the emergence of scientific chemistry. I would say since I cannot expose all the historical examples, that knowledge, in so far as it is distinguished from science, sings indefinitely the imaginary wedding of the male and the female principles. I believe it would not be an abusive generalization to state that all the “primitive forms” of knowledge are erotic. In the last analysis, they even get mixed up with the sexual techniques’. That is why Lacan’s thesis that The woman does not exist - which, in the way I presented it, appeared to be somehow abrupt, astonishing - is certainly a fundamental thesis for epistemology as well. Since the object, which in the theory of knowledge is meant to be complementary to the subject, represents also a way of taming the woman. Science - and by science I mean what was born as mathematical physics in the seventeenth century, and also mathematics proper, born well before that time. the gap between the birth of mathematics and the birth of mathematical physics being a big problem of the history of sciences - science, then, in this strict sense, assumes on the contrary that there is no co-naturality between subject and object, that there is no aesthesia of the opposite sex, that there is no natural sexual tropism. This is, furthermore, demonstrated by that structure which is fundamental to psychoanalysis and which introduced Freud to his practice, that is to say, hysteria. It is certainly one of the most surprising theses of Lacan’s epistemology - which I may not have enough time to develop here - that the structure of scientific discourse is not without relation with the structure of the discourse of hysteria. In this respect, Lacan’s proposition that there is no sexual rapport (or ratio) may be considered as a sort of secret condition for the emergence of the discourse of science. In a certain way, the men who developed the discourse of science in the seventeenth century must have posed the proposition that there is no sexual rapport. Those who are familiar with the texts from the Renaissance, for example, and the texts which have been preserved from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced by astrologists and philosophers, know about that evident and sudden break in style and in the very approach to problems. One could say, in this sense, that the scientific approach assumes a de-sexualization of the view of the world, and to use a philosophical expression, a de-sexualization of being in the world. Psychoanalysis is not at all a pan-sexualism. Pan-sexualism is, for example, the theory of Schopenhauer, which places life at its start; or, more precisely, which places at its start the sexual instinct, which would animate the entire nature as well as all human creations. Freud, awkwardly perhaps, but in a very significant manner, introduced the paradoxical term of death instinct, and he discovered, through the angle of hysteria, that the other sex is the Other sex, written with the big 0 of exteriority. I restrict myself to mere allusions to the works of epistemologists. Those who know such works will be able to judge the pertinency of this summary.

III. One can ask what it is that generates the pan-sexualist illusion. It seems to me that this illusion, which falls precisely with the emergence of the discourse of science, but not before, is, in this connection, something recent. What gives birth to the pan-sexualist illusion is that all signification, being imaginary, is fundamentally sexual. All which is said and which makes sense always reveals that, in the end, it aims at a unique signification that occupies the place of reference - reference which does not exist in natural language, in the maternal tongue, in vulgar language; and this signification, which occupies the place of the reference which is lacking, is fundamentally phallic. This is what confers interest and value on that very ancient exercise of discourse called comedy, which has always consisted in making one laugh while revealing the imaginary object which all discourses surround and at which they aim, namely, the phallus. There is a paper by Lacan in this respect which he delivered in Germany in the 1950s, entitled Die Bedeutung des Phallus (The signification of the phallus). Indeed, it is necessary to understand that the phallus is the fundamental Bedeutung or signification. This idea may appear to be somehow excessive; but not if one considers that for instance Frege, who is at the origins of mathematical logic, proposed the theory that all that is said can be classified in two ways: first the expressions which have the true as reference and then those expressions which have the false as reference. He imagined that language has everyday objects as reference. Now then, the simplification of the formulation provided by Lacan states that the sole reference is the signification of the phallus. And there is a discourse for this malediction, which could well be called a benediction. In any case, there is a law of diction, according to which the phallus is always there; it always reveals itself in a pertinent way in the lapsus or in the joke. One could say: “Look for the phallus, it is never very distant. “ There is, however, a discourse which escapes this law of diction, and that is the discourse of science. But this is precisely, and I stress this point, because this discourse constitutes itself only from the moment of the extinction of signification, from the construction of systematic networks of elements which are in themselves. This is the thesis which can be discussed, and which does not require a detailed knowledge of the Lacanian phraseology: science supposes the extinction of signification. It is a mistake to believe that measurement is constitutive of science. Mathematization does not mean measurement. Evidence of this is to be found for instance in topology. Topology is a geometry without measurement where there is no question of distances, where only the schematic network of the signifier supports the objects. These objects do not have any consistency; they do not possess any substance other than the network of signifiers itself. Evidently, at the beginnings of topology objects were represented; for example, that singular object called the Moebius strip was represented. It is possible to construct this object before one’s eyes: one takes a ribbon, and instead of joining its ends to form a cylinder, one joins its ends after making a twist through 180 degrees. This object is obviously curious: if one slides a finger on its edge, the finger appears on the other side of the ribbon, without having passed through any frontier. In the case of a cylinder, the finger remains always on the same side; there are two sides: a back and a front. With the Moebius strip one can, without interruption, move from the back to the front. It is a very singular object which had to wait until 1860 to be discovered by the mathematician Moebius. This is rather extraordinary, one wonders why this simple, small operation could not be performed before that date. This is the first topological object which Lacan has utilized to explain that one should not be contented with the thought-that things always have a front and a back, that the unconscious is at the bottom and language is at the surface. There is, on the contrary, a relation of Moebius strip which makes it possible that correlation and continuity between the right side out and the reverse become conceivable in a scientific manner. In this respect, Lacan has taken advantage of these topological objects derived from scientific discourse in order to structure the analytic experience. One should not believe that because in the analytic experience one is faced with phenomena which appear to be paradoxical from the point of view of common sense it is impossible to analyze them scientifically. That what is in the exterior is at the same time in the interior is not simply a witticism. For example, there is an object called a Klein bottle, which was invented by the mathematician Felix Klein soon after the invention of Moebius’ strip. The Klein bottle materializes, mathematically, a relationship between inside and outside which places the outside, if I may use the expression, inside the outside. I would need more time to give you a’ summary of the works by Lacan which located the main terms of the analytic discourse in topological figures. I should say that this is only the ABC of topology, since these objects can be designed. You can have a Moebius strip in front of your eyes. You can have a Klein bottle in front of your eyes, in three dimensions, only in an approximate form; but it can still be drawn. Then, with algebraic topology, the objects can no longer be drawn: what is called an object is a pure creation of mathematical discourse.

Therefore, we should not take as a criterion of science what experimental science has believed it can define as scientific in its own case. I must tell you that all that we accept as scientific disciplines in the schools of humanities, that is sociology, psychology, medicine, is very often a joke in the eyes of a mathematician or a physicist I say this only to make it clear that the concept of science is more complex than simply trying to be objective. As Hamlet has it:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

The fate of science is tied to formalization, not to measurement. It is tied to the number in so far as the number represents in an enigmatic way the presence of the signifier in the real. I shall return to this point later. Lacan represents an attempt to formalize the structure which supports the phenomenology of the analytic experience. It is evident that this is a complex structure, since the phenomena which occur in the analytic experience induce, in a first approach, the feeling that they cannot be structured. Yet metaphor can be structured; metonymy can be structured; equivocation can be structured; the function of the Other in the determination of sense can be structured. This is, in a sense, an amazing feat. The feat consists in grasping, with the discourse of science, a Held that science was prepared to leave to obscurantism, that is to say, to leave as the refuge of fantasies of sexual knowledge.

This is why I was able to say, in my first lecture, that Lacan’s teaching was a critical and epistemological teaching, opposed to all obscurantist discourses which have found refuge, in the era of science, in the psychotherapeutic game.

IV. Once again, I am going to formulate a thesis which in my opinion has consistency outside the Lacanian phraseology, and which I submit for the consideration of teachers and students who are not specialists in Lacan.

Science assumes the disjunction of the symbolic and the imaginary, of the signifier and the image. Lacan has often commented on the works of Alexandre Koyré, one of the greatest French epistemologists, on Galileo, Kepler and Newton. Professor Cadenas told me that science is something which gives birth, for instance, to the equation of gravitation. This is also the example that Lacan uses as a model. But the emergence of the key equations of gravitation theory required - Lacan, on the basis of Koyré’s studies, points this out - the disappearance of all the imaginary values attributed to the movements of the stars. It required, according to Lacan’s expression, the extermination of all imaginary symbolism from heaven. What was. at bottom, the "epistemological obstacle" - to use Bachelard’s now famous expression - which opposed a barrier to the formulation of the equations of Newton’s theory? Let us consider Kepler’s example. Kepler could still think that. given the eminent dignity of the stars and their superior value, the orbits of planets should have a perfect form. Given that requirement of perfection, the movement of planets could not possibly be elliptical, but circular. This imaginary theory assumed that the circle, is more perfect than the ellipse; hence the requirement, I would say, of an aesthetic and imaginary character, that the movement of the planets be circular. Newton’s equation could only be formulated from the moment when there was a renunciation of the attribution of any imaginary signification to heaven; from the moment when thinking of the dignity of the planets ceased; when there was a renunciation of the requirement of perfection and one could be contented with those small symbols which can be written on a sheet of paper and which are valid for the entire creation.

In this sense, scientific theory has demanded. an adherence to the signifier in so far as this is separated from all imaginary signification is amusing that this did not prevent Newton from scrutinizing The Book of Daniel and The Apocalypse of John, in an attempt to decipher in the sacred text the future of creation and God’s plan. As with many other attempts at that moment of birth of scientific discourse. Newton could on the one hand exterminate the celestial signification, and on the other he looked for it, as a cabalist, by scrutinizing the biblical text. This is something which is not very well known. It is not to be found in Koyré. but in Lacan, who read Newton’s text on The Book of Daniel. Lacan has a copy of the edition of that time. It happened, then, as if signification, which had been excluded from heaven, found refuge in the sacred text. Newton is not, in this connection, the man one usually thinks he is. Someone wrote a beautiful article on Newton. He was a rather extraordinary scholar, and not simply an economist: Lord Keynes, John Maynard Keynes, who was very interested in Newton. Soon after the war he wrote an article in which he called Newton the last of the astrologists. That was the paradox which existed at the origins of the discourse of science: simultaneously with his construction of mathematical physics, Newton was passionately fond of astrology. A thesis published by MIT in 1975 or 1976 has revealed a number of papers by Newton concerning his research on physics. This presents to us Newton the individual as crossed by the epistemological cut. This is a remark aimed at avoiding any confusion between the individual and the subject of science, in so far as the latter is tied up with the discourse of science.

V. You must know Pascal’s sentence, which irritated Paul Valéry so much: "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." Valéry was bothered by this sentence; he considered it to be a beautiful verse, but he thought it was rather melodramatic. Pascal was also one of those traversed by the epistemological cut. I would say something different to what Valéry said. Pascal’s sentence on the silence of the infinite spaces reveals a very modern affect, since heavens, the creation, were not at all mute before the advent of science. On the contrary, (he spaces, heavens, the creation, the earth I sung the glory of God and the grandeur of His plan. It is precisely the discourse of science, since the emergence of mathematical physics, that makes the world become silent. Lacan sums up this proposition, which I believe is unquestionable, by saying that science assumes that there exists in the world the signifier which means nothing - and for nobody. That the signifier can be found in the world, a signifier which is organized and which responds to laws, but which is not linked with a subject who would express himself through it—this is an entirely modem and scientific idea. The signifier may exist independently of a subject who expresses himself through its mediation. This is a signifier separated from its signification; a signifier without intention. The mathematization of physics answers to this requirement. But the Freudian invention of the unconscious also responds to it: the signifier exists independently of the consciousness that the subject might have of it or its expression. It is rather the subject who is the effect of the functioning of signifying laws. This is why Lacan says, and history seems to confirm it, that psychoanalysis was not possible before the advent of the discourse of science.

The scientific context where the Freudian discovery was born was very significant. Freud was the disciple of Brücke and Helmholtz, German scientists who did not want to know anything but the discourse of science. Freud himself remained faithful to that inspiration for the rest of his days. In this sense, psychoanalysis can be considered as the manifestation of the positive spirit of science in a domain which has been specially resistant to the conceptual grasp of science. In a way, this has always been known. One cannot confuse Freud and Jung. If Jung broke with Freud - and, incidentally. it cost him three years of serious depression, apart from all the vicissitudes of history - it was because he returned, with his book The Transformation of Libido, to what in ancient times was called the soul of the world. This is an old theory which has continued to be present in the history of thought, and which treats nature in its entirety as a being. It is a fundamental intuition which German romanticism, for example, developed fully: it found a new youth with the Naturphilosophie and even in our days something of the same order has made Teilhard de Chardin fashionable. There have always been, and specially in the era of science, people who search for what they call a complement of soul in these forms of knowledge (savoirs) which are not scientific and yet are knowledge, that is to say, are organized. The soul of the world: this is precisely what the discourse of science has put aside; this is a movement which in history is incarnated by Descartes. Through this movement the scientific spirit separated from the spirit, which should be called obscurantist, of the Renaissance. The omega of Father Teilhard de Chardin was the grand signified which was supposed to arrange the whole of human history. Furthermore, you must know as I do the part of the theology which still remains in Marxism-Leninism. The separation between Bossuet and Marx has not been completely achieved.

VI. With the discourse of science, God ceases to speak. He is silent, even hidden, as Goldmann said when discussing Racine’s tragedies in The Hidden God. He is silent and hidden and he calculates, as somebody who is also at the emergence of the discourse of science, Leibniz puts it. Koyré and Kojève have analyzed the relation between science and Judaeo-Christian monotheism. Their thesis is that the discourse of science was only possible in a religious context, where something totally new and singular was postulated: the creation of the world ex nihilo by a divine grand Other. The creation ex nihilo constructed by the discourse of religion permitted to trust the natural experience, since through the natural experience one can find the traces of a logical creation. This is why science is not. perhaps, as atheist as is generally believed. On the other hand, in the discourse of science, the signifier means nothing within nature; on the other hand, the signifier is there, in nature, in order to organize according to laws. This is why science is always linked with the idea that there is already knowledge (un savoir) in the real: an articulated network of signifiers which function in the real independently of the knowledge that we may have of it. Once again, the history of science teaches us something, this time in connection with Newton. Cartesians were scandalised by Newton. They considered that Newton represented a return to obscurantism, since - and this is something that Lacan as epistemologist has underlined - they wondered how was it possible that the planets knew Newton’s laws of gravitation. How could the planets obey those laws? This constituted a return to the hidden qualities which Descartes has dismissed. In this respect, Newton says that he did not forge hypotheses that would have only fictional existence. With his small signifying articulation, he verifies that they function in the real. Many things are verified like that, which after all there is no need to comprehend, and which evidently place God in the horizon of science. One can verify, for example, that certain plants arrange their leaves according to the series of Fibonacci, which is a regular order of numbers in a series discovered in the thirteenth century. Do plants know mathematics? All that mathematical physics teaches us is the verification that there is a knowledge (savoir) which functions in the real. In this sense, science assumes God in two forms. In the first place, it assumes God as Descartes recognised him, as the guarantor of truth, that is to say, as an element which does not deceive. There is a very precise demonstration by Descartes in this respect. As God is perfect, it would constitute an infraction to his perfection that he lied; therefore, and although this is a limit to his power. God cannot lie. Not being able to lie does not constitute an impotence, but, on the contrary, an excellence of power. This conviction about an element which does not deceive is completely decisive in science. Avicenna said something similar: "God is shrewd, but He is honest."

The idea of God’s honesty is not simply a joke of Avicenna’s, and although it is believed that one does not believe in God, perhaps the belief in God nevertheless persists. This is, besides, what Lacan said one day in his seminar, where there were approximately four times the number of people present here: that he was certain that there was not one person in the audience who in fact did not believe in God. In God as the element which does not deceive. In the beginning, that had the appearance of an act of faith, and the philosophical elaboration of divine perfection was an essential component of the discourse of science. One should not think that philosophy consists simply of stories floating in the air. Philosophy has had a decisive importance in the clarification of the discourse of science. This concerns the first aspect of God which I have evoked: God as the guarantor of truth; God who does not deceive.

There is a second aspect, which refers to God as supposed subject of knowing. This is something against which there is no possible defence. When there is a signifying intention which assumes a concrete form and develops, one cannot defend oneself against the idea that that signifying intention has always been there. This is why we frequently have difficulties in apprehending past epochs or different principles of thought, since the categories within which we are captured often appear to us to be so valid that we believe that they have always existed. But, for example, there is nothing to prove that Plato had at all the sense of I (le sentiment du moi) that we have since the emergence of the discourse of science. There is nothing to confirm the view that the idea that we may have of sexual enjoyment (jouissance) is the same that the Epicureans and the Stoics had. The same thing happens with scientific inventions. I shall consider an example which is more simple: that of Cantor, who invented the uncountable infinite. He developed this invention in mathematics, not through experimentation or measurement. He invented it, undoubtedly, in a subjective experience for which he paid, one could say, with his reason. It is known that Cantor had a number of admissions to psychiatric clinics. What was the source of Cantor’s references when he invented the uncountable infinite? This is not to be found in a manual of mathematics, but it is mentioned in the works of Bourbaki on the history of mathematics. Those references are contained in the works and letters of Cantor. Cantor looked for references in theology. There is, as well as his mathematics, a theology of Cantor. For him the uncountable infinite and set theory were means of approaching God. He thought that at the moment of his invention of the uncountable infinite he was God’s administrative employee.

Cantor’s abuses are of little interest to us. There is. however, a natural movement which consists in projecting a signifying invention onto a supposed subject of knowing. It has obviously become more and more true, and a real thing for us. Cantor’s uncountable infinite is more true now than at the moment when Cantor invented it. Now it has been grasped, absorbed and developed by the discourse of mathematics. Developments like this have always required, obviously, the consensus of the community of mathematicians. It is apparent that in their case the function of transmission is essential. It is regrettable that instead of conceiving of itself according to the model of the community of scientists, the community of psychoanalysts conceive of itself as an ecclesiastical community. This has been to a great extent responsible for the delay in the diffusion of the positive spirit of science in psychoanalysis, such as Lacan has developed it after Freud.

It is worthwhile to consider Cantor’s scientific invention again. You may know the way in which Cantor demonstrates the existence of the uncountable infinite. He starts off by building a chart which, by hypothesis, would comprise all numbers between 0 and 1. Then, following what is known as Cantor’s diagonal method, he changes the symbol which appears in the place corresponding to each number of the diagonal in his chart. He reverses each of the symbols of the diagonal chain. He thus demonstrates that, each of the lines being infinite, the diagonal number cannot appear in the list, and that, in the mathematical sense, there exists an infinite as uncountable, as not being in the list of numbers. This is the paradigm of the mathematical real: the real constructed on the basis of a purely signifying experience. It is a real which emerges from the impossible, determined by a network of signifiers; it arises as a form of impasse in formalization; it is a sort of residue of the signifying operation. I hope that through this example, which obviously assumes some knowledge of mathematics, you grasp the sense of Lacan’s apparently paradoxical proposition: "The real is the impossible."

When I say that this example requires some knowledge of mathematics, I mean that in fact it can be explained on the blackboard in half an hour, even to people who know nothing of mathematics. I have not talked about this example to make you think that it is something very complex: it is, indeed the ABC of the signifier.

VII. Descartes developed what one could call the subject of science. We know that the emergence of the Cartesian subject, the subject who says "I think, I am," constitutes a cut in the history of ideas. This cut has been identified as such, at any rate, in the history of philosophy. It is an error to think that the Cartesian cogito establishes the identity I=I. The Cartesian cogito is something different to the ego as function of synthesis which psychologists test It is an abuse to extend the specific identity of the Cartesian cogito to the whole psychical sphere - psychical acts, movements and representations. The Cartesian cogito is, at the time of its emergence, correlative of a very distinct moment. Lacan, following the Cartesian text very closely, and in a way which is not contradictory with the most rigorous reading of The Meditations so far, that of the philosopher Martial Guéroult, deciphered the first Meditation in this direction. You may know, even if it is only from having heard its being mentioned, about the function of the hyperbolic doubt in Descartes. This function is nothing else than the emptying of the universe of representations, of everything which is imaginary. The cogito in its identity only emerges as the ineradicable residue of this operation of emptying. It we follow Lacan’s witticism in this connection, the evidence is of an emptied subject (sujet évidé) who does not exist at all as a sphere which would contain lots of representations, qualities and a diversity of properties, but as a simple, vanishing jlot. Descartes says: "I am, I think" - but for how-long? I am only during the instant when I think.

This is a subject who at the moment of his emergence is not a substance at all; on the contrary, he is an entirely desubstantialised subject, who is not a soul in any way, who is not in relation with any nature; a subject for whom all natural adherences have been undone. This subject who has broken with all those adherences and with all signification apart from that punctual and vanishing residue where thought and being become one, is structurally the agent of the discourse of science. This is the subject who then makes the signifier work in its relation with the other signifiers. It is on the basis of this subject that one can simply trust the small letters of algebra. These, small letters are not words; they are not captured by metaphor and metonymy; they are separate from signification. This is also the subject who is correlative to Cartesian extension, that extension which is so singular that is entirely external to itself (as Merleau-Ponty used to say, "without shadow and without hiding place"), that extension which is entirely manipulable and which is effectively the foundation of the discourse of science. I must point out that Descartes does not remain in this point of the subject, because he immediately discovers that the subject is correlative of the divine big Other, supposed subject of knowing who guarantees the automatic manipulation of those small letters.

VIII. Lacan postulates, and this may appear to be paradoxical, that the subject of the Freudian unconscious. that subject which is ostensibly very different from a cogito, is the subject of science. Descartes’ punctual and vanishing subject. Two things should be distinguished in this respect. In the first place, this subject of science which emerges with Descartes is, at the same time that it emerges, rejected by the discourse of science. He is simultaneously one of its conditions; but it is a foreclosed condition, rejected to the exterior, which means that science presents itself as a discourse without subject, as an impersonal discourse, as the discourse of the supposed subject of knowing in person.

The academics, and I am one of them, always introduce themselves as the representatives of the supposed subject of knowing. This is particularly evident in the universities, in Caracas or in Brussels: the academics pretend to articulate statements (énoncés) as if these were without enunciation (énonciation). We know that when one says "I" too frequently, and when one puts oneself on the scale, there appears to be a transgression against the discourse of science and its impersonality. In the case of psychoanalysis, the teaching does not take place in the same way as in the other disciplines. In fact, it is in the discourse of science that one can truly find the subject of Chomsky, about whom I spoke in my previous lecture: the ideal speaker- hearer who knows perfectly well the detours of his language and who transmits (that is the hope) without equivocations. Chomsky’s formulation is the ideal of scientific language, not the language that we speak and the language that speaks to us. Indeed, in the history of science itself one can perceive what could be called returns of the subject. This is observable precisely when one believes in the possibility of identifying oneself with the supposed subject of knowing. We may think of Frege. who believed that he could malhematize classical logic completely, through the achievement of a perfect, unequivocal and total written language. What happened to Frege is one of the great dramas of the history of science. At the time when the second volume of his work was about to be published, he received a letter from Bertrand Russell in which Russell told him that there was a small paradox in his first volume which spoilt the whole work. It is a very short paradox of only one paragraph, it fits within a sheet of paper, and Prege spent the last twenty years of his life ruminating over that significant fact. There are those lapses within the discourse of science which put all certainties in question. There is still another example taken from the history of mathematical logic which is, par excellence, where the perfect certainty of the discourse of science should be established. I am referring to the famous proof of Gödel. When Gödel postulated his theorem, the guarantee provided by the Other for the manipulation of the small letters, which had commenced with Descartes, appeared to suddenly collapse. I quote these examples simply to evoke the discourse of science in so far as this rejects the subject; and in turn, the subject also fractures the consistency of that discourse.

In the second place, the subject of the unconscious, in Lacan’s sense, is nothing else but subject of the signifier, that is to say, the subject of science, but regained in a scientific field as the subject who speaks. He is a subject who serves in an integral form as the vehicle of the signifier. Psychoanalysis is different from all forms of initiation and contemplative asceticism known in Antiquity. It is also different from all the vague bodily manipulations which are again fashionable today - those exercises through which an attempt is made to help the subject to get rid of his pain, to encourage him. to influence him by suggestion and to stimulate him. The psychoanalytic exercise is different from all initiation precisely because, if psychoanalysis is to work, the subject is not to have any form of mental preparation, contemplation or asceticism. On the contrary, the subject of psychoanalysis must arrive without preparation and must offer himself for the exercise without any previous purification. He must attend his sessions regularly, in a manner that can be called bureaucratic, and tell everything that goes through his head. He must not prepare fine speeches. It is not a question of purification through language, but on the contrary of releasing the material in disorder. And which is the operation peculiar to the psychoanalyst? To guarantee that all this material released in disorder has a cause. In this respect the fundamental postulate of psychoanalysis is determinist. Everything has a cause. This is one of the two formulations of the principle of sufficient reason, which emerged only with Leibniz. Once again, this is a principle linked to the discourse of science and which, incidentally, Heidegger commented in his work The Essence of Reasons. This is why in the psychoanalytic operation the psychoanalyst plays the part of the supposed subject of knowing. The analyst occupies this place in order to render the analytic operation possible. It is a very dangerous place, because this can easily lead the psychoanalyst to identify himself with the good God. This is, in fact, what we can verify in the history of psychoanalysis. The analysts have gladly identified with the divinity. They even experience a very special infatuation: given that as a consequence of their function they are supposed to know, they do not feel obliged to know anything. I mean that they can well be swimming in ignorance, but this does not prevent that, as their position is that of the Other in the experience, they consider themselves to be perfect. Sometimes they regard themselves as the model for their patients, as their ideal; sometimes they confuse the psychoanalytic treatment with a form of education which would simply aim at leading the subject to identifying with the psychoanalyst. They believe themselves to be the sovereign good. Lacan has made remarks like these, and naturally he did not make many friends among the psychoanalysts through them. If he is occasionally critical of the practitioners of other disciplines, certainly he is less critical of them than of his colleagues.

Lacan has also stated that the analytic experience does not consist in the identification of the patient with the psychoanalyst, but on the contrary in the evacuation of the supposed subject of knowing. There is only one practice that could truly be called atheist, and that is psychoanalysis. This is why priests are so interested in psychoanalysis. One can also observe the opposite trend. One can see psychoanalysts, even of Lacan’s school, like Françoise Dolto, telling the masses that the first psychotherapist was Jesus Christ, which pleases neither the psychoanalysts nor the Church. This is what after thirty years of Lacan’s discourse one can again hear in Paris. We must be sceptical about the effects that can be achieved through the! production of theory.

It is already time to finish. I still have to discuss two points, which I shall only do briefly.

IX. This point was originally aimed at showing how Lacan has, in the analytic experience itself, structured those paradoxes of communication which I presented in my second lecture and which prompted Professor Cadenas to say that they rendered knowledge impossible. I would have liked to demonstrate how Lacan, in a domain which is undoubtedly very difficult, attempts to structure those paradoxes. It is true that generalized equivocation is a motive to lose one’s mind; and yet this generalized equivocation has a structure.

X. I would have like to acquaint you with that formula of Lacan’s which I presented rather abruptly: "The woman does not exist." It is a very good example precisely because Lacan attempts to write this paradox in a logical form; by this I mean he borrows the tools of mathematical logic. One should not believe that logic is simply what is taught at the first classes of the University about the principle of contradiction, and that where the principle of contradiction is not valid, there is no logic. This is an error. On the contrary. There exists something like Russell’s paradox which requires elaboration. There are inconsistent mathematical logics, founded on the negation of the principle of contradiction. It is possible to make a mathematical logic work while negating the principle of contradiction. If there are logicians present here, I think they will not disqualify what I am saying, given the existence of inconsistent mathematical logics. Lacan’s logic of the signifier. that logic which suits the unconscious and which does not know of contradiction, as Freud^said, is an inconsistent logic. The whole algebra of Lacanian terms .is organized around inconsistency.

I hope that logicians from Venezuela, if they are present here, will not contradict me, since the development of inconsistent mathematical logics has taken place particularly in Latin America. The Brazilian, Argentinian and Chilean schools of mathematical logic, whose recent symposium has been published two years ago by the North Holland Collection of works on logic, have shown all the resources that from the mathematical point of view can be found in the inconsistent logics. This demonstrates that there are more things in science than one imagines.

Lacan developed an inconsistent logic .of the phallus. He thought, very faithful in this respect to his teacher. Little Hans, that the phallus could be considered as a predicate. Lacan was able to arrange the Freudian paradoxes of castration of the basis of an inconsistent logic of the predicate phallus.

The term extimacy (extimité), coined by Lacan from the term “intimacy” (intimité), occurs two or three times in the Seminar, and it will be for us to transform this term into an articulation, a structure, to produce it as an S1 which would allow us to go beyond and over the confusion that we first experience when faced with such a signifier.

1. $

For analysts, referring only to the analytic experience is illusory; for Freud’s and Lacan’s works are also part of our relation to psychoanalysis. And our common reading of the commentary on Freudia texts which forms the subject of the first ten years of Lacan’s Seminar is not unlike the lectio of the Middle Ages. At that time, the lesson of a master was to be divided into three parts: littera, sensus and sententia. Littera is the level of the construction of the text, the most grammatical level; sensus is the level of the signified, of the explicit and easy meaning; and sententia is the deep understanding of meaning. Only this level of sententia can justify the discipline of commentary.

The problem posed by Lacan’s teaching is precisely that one of its constants is a commentary on Freud. Moreover, of his own sayings, Lacan makes maxims or sententiae (in the Middle Ages, the word also meant “common place”). Thus, he does not allow the Other to choose what of Lacan must be repeated - and this, because he formalizes his own thought by expressing it in formulas which are simple, or which at least seem simple. Thus, "The unconscious is structured like a language.” “Desire is the desire of the Other,” and "The signifier represents the subject for another signifier” are sententiae of Lacan. At present, part of our task lies in culling these sententiae, in gathering them into a florilegium. Thus we do with Lacan, because he seems to present himself as an author in the medieval sense of the word, i.e., as the one who knows what he says.

Despite his sententiae however, Lacan is not an author. His work is a teaching. We must take this into consideration; we must know that following his star requires that we do not synchronize and dogmatize this teaching, that we do not hide but rather stress its contradictions, its antinomies, its deadlocks, its difficulties. For, a teaching on the analytic experience is like a work in progress and implies a back and forth motion between text and experience.

2. Extimacy (extimité)

Why this title? First, because last year I gave my attention to gathering, developing, articulating the quaternary structures in Lacan’s teaching; and as a result it seems to me that extimacy must be formalized and dealt with apart from these structures. Second, I could not disregard this question of extimacy since I am particularly devoting myself to the question of the Real in the Symbolic. It so happens that extimacy is a term used by Lacan to designate in a problematic manner me real in the symbolic. Third, it seems to me that this term has a great potential for crystallization. When reconsidering the problems of analytic experience and of Lacan’s teaching from this starting point, one realizes indeed that a number of scattered questions raised by our practice fall into place. Fourth, this expression “extimacy” is necessary in order to escape the common ravings about a psychism supposedly located in a bipartition between interior and exterior.

Let us qualify this last point, however, for it is not enough to say that this bipartition is unsatisfactory; we must also elaborate a relation in its stead. Indeed, it is so easy to slide into this interior-exterior bipartition that we need, for our own use, to substitute for it another relation, the simplest possible, which we will represent with the following drawing:

This very simple diagram of Lacan’s means that the exterior is present in the interior. The most interior - this is how the dictionary defines “intimate” (l’intime) - has, in the analytic experience, a quality of exteriority. This is why Lacan invented the term extimate. The word indeed is not current yet. But with a little effort and luck, it will perhaps come to exist - in a few centuries - in the Académie Française dictionary.

It should be observed that the term “interior” is a comparative which comes to us from Latin and of which intimus is the superlative. There, there is an effort on the part of language to reach the deepest point in the interior. Let us note as well that quotations from literary works given by dictionaries show that one says commonly, constantly that the most intimate is at the same time the most hidden. Therefore, paradoxically, the most intimate is not a point of transparency but rather a point of opacity. And this point of opacity is generally used to found the necessity of certain covers, the most common being the religious cover, as we are going to see.

3. A —> $

Extimacy is not the contrary of intimacy. Extimacy says that the intimate is Other-like a foreign body, a parasite. In French, the date of birth of the term “intimacy” can be located in the seventeenth century; it is found for instance in Madame de Sevigné’s Correspondence, a model of intimacy, from which comes mis sentence: “I could not help telling you all this detail, in the intimacy and love of my heart, like someone who unburdens herself to a maid whose tenderness is without parallel.” Is it not charming that one of the first occurrences in the French language of the term “intimacy” already has a relation to a kind of confession of the heart to someone full of tenderness?

In psychoanalysis, it seems to us natural from the start to place ourselves in the register of intimacy, for there is no experience more intimate than that of analysis, which takes place in private and requires trust, the most complete lack of restraint possible, to the point that in our consulting rooms - these places reserved for the confessions of intimacy - analysands, though in the house of someone else, sometimes act as if they were at home. This is confirmed when such an analysand takes out of his pocket the key to his own house as he is reaching the door-step of his analyst.

However, in no way can one say that the analyst is an intimate friend of his analysand. The analyst, on the contrary, is precisely extimate to this intimacy. Perhaps this shows that one cannot have one’s own house. Perhaps also it is this position of the psychoanalyses extimacy which makes so distinct and so constant the role of the Jew in the history of psychoanalysis.

If we use the term extimacy in this way, we can consequently make it be equivalent to the unconscious itself. In this sense, the extimacy of the subject is the Other. This is what we find in ‘The Agency of the Letter” (Écrits, 172), when Lacan speaks of “this other to whom I am more attached than to myself, since, at the heart of my assent to my identity to myself, it is he who stirs me” (translation modified) - where the extimacy of the Other is tied to the vacillation of the subject’s identity to himself. Thus the writing A—> $ is justified.

There are several covers of this point of extimacy, one of which is the religious cover. Thus Saint Augustine speaks of God as interior intimo meo, “more interior than my innermost being.” God here is thus a word which covers this point of extimacy which in itself has nothing likeable. This implies this schema:

where the circle of the subject contains as the most intimate (intime) of its intimacy the extimacy of the Other. In a certain way, this is what Lacan is commenting on when he speaks of the unconscious as discourse of the Other, of this Other who, more intimate than my intimacy, stirs me. And this intimate which is radically Other, Lacan expressed with a single word: extimacy.

We could apply this term to the psychiatric clinic and call men automatism “extimate automatism” in so far as it manifests in obvious fashion the presence of the Other and of its discourse at the very center of intimacy. In the analytic clinic, it is interesting to note that it is always when extimacy is punctualized that an analyst’s hesitations about the diagnosis occur, between obsession and psychosis for example, despite the very clear distinctions that he makes in other respects between one and the other. Extimacy indeed is so structural for the speaking being that no analyst can say he has never encountered it, if only in the experience of his own hesitations.

4. a ◊ A

Let us introduce now a dimension other than the one from our previous schema, by posing the petit a as pan of the Other. The structure is the same but, this time, the exterior circle is that of the Other and the central area, the area of extimacy, is occupied by a.

This is not the negation of the preceding schema but a new use of the same structure, which responds to another consideration. Up to this point in our argument, we have used the concept of the Other as something obvious. Now, the question of extimacy leads us to problematize this concept, to ask the question of the alterity of the Other, i.e., of why the Other is really other.

“What is the Other of the Other?” is the very simple question asked by Lacan in order to ground the alterity of the Other. To say that this Other of the Other is the subject would not take us very far, for the precise reason that the subject of the analytic experience is nothing that it is a barred function.

The first attempt made by Lacan was to posit that the Other of the Other of the signifier was the Other of the law. This hypothesis concludes his essay on psychoses. [1] There would exist an Other who lays down the law to the Other. This would imply the existence of a metalanguage which would be the Law, for the Law as absolute is a metalanguage.

Later Lacan, thinking against Lacan, says on the contrary that “there is no Other of the Other,” that “there is no metalanguage.” To whom does he say this? He says it to the previous Lacan. Thus, there is no reason to confuse an effort at rationality with a dogmatization. Let us note that this famous sententia, “There is no Other of the Other,” implies a devalorization and a pluralization of the Name-of-the-Father. But it also implies a problem in grounding the alterity of the Other. Indeed, what is it, this Other, if not a universal function, an abstraction? Father Takatsuga Sasaki’s reaction, for example, testifies to it when he tells us that this kind of abstraction seems impossible in the Japanese language, in which there is no Other but various categories of alterity, of plurality.

The Other that we experience through the religious cover is omnivalent. It is precisely what is called, in Christianity, the neighbour. It is a way to nullify extimacy; it grounds what is common, what conforms conformity. It belongs fundamentally, as universal, to this conformity. But if there is no Other of the Other, what is the ground of its alterity?

Jouissance is precisely what grounds the alterity of the Other when there is no Other of the Other. It is in its relation to jouissance that the Other is really Other. This means that no one can ground the alterity of the Other from the signifier, since the very law of the signifier implies that one can always be substituted for the other and vice versa. The law of the signifier is indeed the very law of 1-2, and in this dimension, it is as though there is a democracy, an equality, a community, a principle of peace. Now, what we are attempting to see is what makes the Other other, i.e., what makes it particular, different, and in this dimension of alterity of the Other, we find war. In racism, for example, it is precisely a question of the relation to an Other as such, conceived in its difference. And it does not seem to me that any of the generous and universal discourses on the theme of “we are all fellow-beings” have had any effectiveness concerning this question. Why? Because racism calls into play a hatred which goes precisely toward what grounds the Other’s alterity, in other words its jouissance. If no decision, no will, no amount of reasoning is sufficient to wipe out racism, it is indeed because it is founded on the point of extimacy of the Other. It is not simply a matter of an imaginary aggressivity which, itself, is directed at fellow-beings. Racism is founded on what one imagines about the Other’s jouissance; it is hatred of the particular way, of the Other’s own way of experiencing jouissance. We may well think that racism exists because our Islamic neighbor is too noisy when he has parties; nevertheless it is a fact that what is really at stake is that he takes his jouissance in a way different from ours. Thus the Other’s proximity exacerbates racism: as soon as there is closeness, there is a confrontation of incompatible modes of jouissance. For it is simple to love one’s neighbor when he is distant, but it is a different matter in proximity. Racist stories are always about the way in which the Other obtains a plus-de-jouir: either he does not work or he does not work enough, or he is useless or a little too useful, but whatever the case may be, he is always endowed with a part of jouissance that he does not deserve. Thus true intolerance is the intolerance of the Other’s jouissance. Of course, we cannot deny that races do exist, but they exist in so far as they are, in Lacan’s words races of discourse, i.e., traditions of subjective positions.

5. a ⊂ A

One usually stresses what, of the Other, is subject. When Lacan speaks, for example, of the subject-supposed-to-know, there seems to be no difficulty: there is a way of the Other which is to be a subject. However, we must point out something else, i.e., what in the Other is object. We will develop this point from two seminars by Lacan, The Ethics, and Le transfert.

The opposition between das Ding, the Thing, and the Other is laid out in The Ethics. This antinomy is worked out enigmatically - which explains the fact that das Ding has long remained wrapped in mystery. But it is the case that, in the Seminar on transference, which comes immediately after The Ethics, this opposition if transformed into a relation which can be written in this way: a ⊂ A. Lacan makes this transformation from a metaphor borrowed from philosophy which is nowadays known as that of Silenus which contains the object, agalma, inside itself. Here, we see a revolution ir
Lacan’s teaching, for this relation, established in a literary, mythical non-formalist way, appears to be completely antagonistic to earlier developments. The Other, in Le transfert, is no longer only the place of the signifier, there the object is included in the Other - which appears somewhat mystical because the Seminar works only with the idea of interior and exterior. Plato’s model is nothing more: a cover which looks like a Silenus and inside of which something else is found. We must therefore formalize this model of interior and exterior.

Something has been introduced in Lacan’s teaching which has only been understood recently, i.e., the devalorization of the Other of the signifier. He could thus say: “The Other does not exist,” which does not prevent the Other from functioning, for many things function with without existing. However, the sentence, “The Other does not exist,” is meaningless if it does not imply that a, on the contrary, exists. The Lacanian Other, the Other that functions, is not real. That is what allows us to understand that a is real, to understand how this a as plus-de-jouir founds not only the Other’s alterity but also what is real in the Symbolic Other. It is not a matter of a link of integration, of interiorization, but of an articulation of extimacy.

Let us illustrate this with the incident which interrupted my class: a bomb scare. [2] The bomb did not exist. However, we had the proof that, without existing, it could produce its effect. My class is of me order of the signifier and is held in a place devoted to teaching, where an object was introduced which, let me tell you, had a great effect, but which no one knew the location of. Thus did we prove that at the very moment when this object crops up via die signifier “Bomb!” the Other is emptied, disappears. Only the object remains, the object in a desert.

This is a good example of the antinomy existing between A and a. And this antinomy is compatible with the formula which we write a ⊂ A. For this object, the bomb - an object which is perfectly efficacious without existing or which perhaps will explode tomorrow or next week - is the result of the discourse of the Other. It is not a natural phenomenon, not an earthquake; it is not a substance but on the contrary a result, a product of the discourse of science. The sentence, “Bomb!” is located on the level of intersections which Lacan studied to prove mat the presence of the subject of the enunciation does not need the presence of the énoncé. At the same time, this sentence gives a clear indication of the relation between signifier and object. Indeed, if the signifier “Bomb!” is truly a reference to the bomb, it still does not represent this bomb; it does not say where the bomb is. There is thus a link between this signifier and the object, but we cannot say that “Bomb” is the signifier of this bomb. The best proof of this is that no one will get the idea to go speak to the bomb so that it will not blow up.

To be done with this point, which has a paradigmatic value, my own position is to say that the young woman who burst into the room shouting “Bomb!” should have written this on a sheet of paper and handed it to me. At that time, I would have asked the people from one side of the room to leave, then from another side, then from a third one; i.e., I would have tried to do things in the most orderly way. This indicates a clinical difference between her and me, and the importance of the way a subject situates him or herself in a moment of crisis. When I asked this person why she had not warned me in writing, she answered: “But the bomb could have exploded any moment “Of course, but identifying with the bomb may not be the best way to get out of such a situation.

6. Quod without quid

This part of my development concerns the type of the object and what makes its localization in the place of the Other difficult When we speak of the objet a, we are not speaking about an object summoned opposite the subject of the representation. If we take the bomb, for example, no one is there to gaze at it; it is really an object incompatible with the presence of the subject; it implies a physical disappearance of bodies and persons that, in this example, represent the subject. If you can sit down opposite a painting and chat with the people next to you, it is not so with the bomb; when you speak about this type of object, the subject disappears.

The objet a is not a chapter of ontology. Indeed, ontology says what is common to all objects. It consists in gathering several features of the object of representation before the object itself is experienced. This is what Heidegger called “ontological pre-comprehension”: we can know a priori that an object is an object if it has such and such a feature. We can also enumerate the object’s criteria. An ontology tells a priori what can be said about objects. These are Aristotle’s categories, where the said is already placed on the object. An ontology is indeed always a doctrine of categories. It can be said that there the structure of objects is already the same as that of the énoncé.

But when we speak of objet a, we speak of another objectivity - let’s say of another “objectify,” an objectity which is not summoned opposite the subject of representation. For representation is not an imaginary function. In The Ethics, Vorstellung is the Symbolic itself - what Lacan will formalize a few years later with the representation of the subject by the signifier. The definition, in the Lacanian sense, of Vorstellung refers thus to the symbolic and not to the Imaginary. However, this new objectify is such that one cannot avoid experiencing it It is an object articulated not to the subject but to if division, to a subject which does not represent to itself the objects of the world but which is itself represented. For this reason, we cannot say that the structure of this object is identical to that of the énoné. There is no specificity of the object in the Other, where, nonetheless, the objet a does not dissolve. It escapes categories because it does not have the same structure as the énoncé. By using the medieval reference reactualized by Yankelevich, we can say that here it is a matter of a quod, in the sense of difference between quodity and quidity. We could also say that it is a question of the difference between existence an essence, of something that there is, but the essence of which one cannot define in the Other.

One can say that it is - i.e., quidity - but one cannot say what it is. There we have a kind of paradox of the quod: something exists but without quid. m this way no one can describe the bomb I was speaking about earlier, except the person who would encounter it, but then, he would not live long! This quod without quid is a “being without essence” (this expression is found once or twice in Lacan).

A/a is constructed on the model of another formula of Lacan, i(a)/a, which means that in reality, the image of the other clothes or covers the real of the object. But this can also be said of capital A. A/a is a formula which implies the devalorization of the Other. It indicates that the Other does not exist, that it has no other status than that of illusion. For this reason, Lacan was able to characterize the end of an analysis as “cynical.” Cynicism means here the end of the illusion of the Other. And sometimes, this fall allows a new access to jouissance, to a jouissance that Lacan terms perverse because it does not involve the relation to the Other. Sometimes, in fact, this is what someone gains at the end of an analysis - which is then nothing more than the naiveté of this cynicism.

Cynicism as such is indeed a form of naiveté, because it consists in thinking that the fact that the Other does not exist means that it does not function. However, deducing from the fact that the Other does not exist that we can erase its universal function and that only jouissance real is naive. Thus, Lacan could say that psychoanalysis made scoundrels stupid. They become so because they think, after an analysis, that the values of the Other do not function.

For lack of time, we won’t develop here me analyst’s position between cynicism and sublimation. Let us only specify mat sublimation can be written a/A. This does not mean that the analyst is only semblance of object - which would imply that the ultimate truth of the objet a is that it is real. The apparatus of analytic discourse involves something more difficult: the objet a is a semblance as such. In the expression “semblance of object” that we often use, we find the naïve belief that the objet a is real. However, the objet a as such, as I must emphasize, is a semblance. And the A which is below me bar can perfectly function as supposition - the fact that it does not exist, as such.

8. a ◊ Φ

We are going to introduce here a case that was presented in Barcelona [3] and in which we can see a way to refer to the absolute risk. It concerns a woman who gets married, then goes to a lawyer to establish a deed stipulating that she will give up all her rights the day her husband ceases to desire her. This case seems to me paradigmatic for explaining the antinomy between these two terms, since it concerns the very inversion of marriage, marriage being precisely what can permit one to insure oneself against the cause of desire. Marriage implies that the cause of desire is inscribed in the signifier, whereas this woman goes to her lawyer to inscribe in the law the risk of desire.

It concerns what I call, in Lacan, the formula of the second paternal metaphor. It corresponds point by point to the formula of the Name-of-the-Father, which we must absolutely not forget but, in the clinic itself, we must refer to the second formula, which poses the signification of the phallus as minus φ and which forces us to operate with the inexistence and the inconsistency of the Other, and not with the function of its consistency. This seems to me to have important consequences for analytic practice.

10. The objet a

The Real, when it concerns the objet a, is thus a semblance. It is so because it is a lie. Where does the objet a come from in Lacan? It comes from the partial object of Karl Abraham, i.e., from a corporeal consistency. The interesting thing is to see that Lacan transforms this corporeal consistency into a logical consistency. It is a fact, and a significant one: Lacan reduces the objet a, which is not a signifler, to a logical consistency. This is why we can read unmistakably, in Encore, that the objet a introduces a semblance of being. Note that he does not say that there is an opposition between semblance and real, quite the opposite. But it is not enough to develop the logical consistency of the Other; it is also necessary to articulate it with the logical consistency of the objet a. It is only from there that
one can understand that the real can be situated only from the deadlocks of logic. Lacan introduces this use of the category of the real in L’étourdit. [4] If there were an ontic in psychoanalysis, it would be the ontic of the objet a. But precisely, this is not the road taken by Lacan. The one he took is the road of logical consistency. It is only in this way that we can conceive of the analyst as the objet a. The analyst is not only a corporeal consistency. He is so also, obviously, as presence, but his value comes especially from logic. And this does not allow one to sit quietly between the signifier and the object, but requires on the contrary seeing in what sense the objet a is a logical consistency. To speak in this way is perhaps equivalent to thinking against what we said previously, but you know now that thinking against oneself is also the lesson of Lacan.

I will add as a final note that this festival of mathemes that I gave here rests on the in-depth work which is done in my class in a looser, more entertaining way, where I make it more palatable by using stories. But these stories are not, for all that, more valuable than the in-depth work of which the present text is the result.

Notes:

[1] See "Of a question to any possible treatment of psychosis".

[2] The class of February 19 1986 was interrupted by a bomb scare and was rescheduled the same evening in another location.

[3] See Ornicar? 43, Winter 1988, Paris: Navarin. p. 107.

[4] See Scilicet 4, 1983, p. 5.

Text established by Elisabeth Doisneau and translated by Françoise Massardier-Kenney.

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Nietzsche wrote that a philosophy is always the biography of the philosopher. Maybe a biography of the philosopher by the philosopher himself is a piece of philosophy. So I shall tell you nine stories taken of my private life, with their philosophical morality… The first story is the story of the father and the mother.

My father was an alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure and agrégé of mathematics: my mother an alumna of the École Normale Supérieure and agrégée of French literature. I am an alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure and agrégé, but agrege of what, of philosophy, that is to say, probably, the only possible way to assume the double filiation and circulate freely between the literary maternity and the mathematical paternity. This is a lesson for philosophy itself : the language of philosophy always constructs its own space between the matheme and the poem, between the mother and the father, after all.

Someone saw that very clearly, my colleague, the French analytic philosopher Jacques Bouveresse, from the Collège de France. In a recent book in which he paid me the horror of speaking of me, he compared me to a five-footed rabbit and says in substance: "This five-footed rabbit that Alain Badiou is runs at top speed in the direction of mathematic formalism, and then, all of a sudden, taking an incomprehensible turn, he goes back on his steps and runs at the same speed to throw himself into literature." Well, yes, that’s how with a father and a mother so well distributed, one turns into a rabitt.

Now the second story: about mother and philosophy.

My mother was very old and my father was not in Paris. I would take her out to eat in a restaurant. She would tell me on these occasions everything she had never told me. It was the final expressions of tenderness, which are so moving, that one has with one’s very old parents. One evening, she told me that even before meeting my father, when she was teaching in Algeria, she had a passion, a gigantic passion, a devouring passion, for a philosophy teacher. This story is absolutely authentic. I listened to it, obviously, in the position you can imagine, and I said to myself: well, that’s it, I have done nothing else except accomplish the desire of my mother, that the Algerian philosopher had neglected. He had gone off with someone else and I had done what I could to be the consolation for my mother’s terrible pain — which had subsisted underneath it all even until she was eighty-one.

The consequence I draw for philosophy is that, contrary to the usual assertion according to which “the end of metaphysics” you know, is being accomplished, and all that, philosophy precisely can not have an end, because it is haunted, from within itself, by the necessity to take one more step within a problem that already exists. And I believe that this is its nature. The nature of philosophy is that something is eternally being bequeathed to it. It has the responsibility of this bequeathal. Your are always treating the bequeathal itself, always taking one more step in the determination of what was thus bequeathed to you. As myself, in the most unconscious manner, I never did anything as a philosopher except respond to an appeal that I had not even heard.

The third story is about the famous notion of engagement.

I arrive in Paris in 1955, during the beginning of the war in Algeria. The horrors of this war that are today coming into the open - mass murders, torture, razzia, systematic rapes - are well known to everyone. Nevertheless, we are a small number in 1955, a very small number to want stop these horrors, to be against the war in Algeria. We demonstrate, from time to time, boulevard Saint-Michel, shouting "Peace in Algeria!", and when we get to the end of the street, the police are waiting for us, striking us with their cloaks, and we were joyfully knocked senseless. What is strange is that we could not say anything but this: we have to do it again. And yet, I can tell you this, the “pelerine” cloak is not particularly gay. I even think I prefer to be clubbed. But we had to do it again, because that’s what the pure present is: wanting the end of this war, as few as we were to share this wanting. I drew the conviction that philosophy exists if it takes charge of the quick of the contemporary. It is not simply a question of engagement, or a question of political exteriority, but that something of the contemporary is always raw, and philosophy must testify to this raw or take place within it, however sophisticated its intellectual production be.

The story number four is about love and religion.

Before coming to Paris, I lived in a province, I am a provincial who came to Paris a bit late. And one of the traits that characterized my provincial youth is that a majority of the girls were still raised in religion. These girls were still kept or reserved for an interesting destiny. Which gave an important figure to the masculine parade: the different manners to shine in front of these girls still pious, the principal of these being to refute the existence of God. This was an important exercise of seduction, both because it was transgress! ve, and rhetorically brilliant when one had the nieans of doing it.

Before conquering their virtues, the souls had to be yanked out of the Church. Which of the two is the worst, that’s for the priests to decide. But out of this conies the idea, that I had very early, that the most argumentative, the most abstract philosophy also always constitutes a seduction. A seduction whose basis is sexual, no doubt about it. Of course, philosophy argues against the seduction of images and I remain Platonist on this point. But it also argues in order to seduce. We can thus understand the Socratic function of corruption of the youth. Corrupting youth means being seductively hostile to the normal regime of seduction. I maintain and I repeat that is the destiny of philosophy to corrupt the youth, to teach it that immediate seductions have little value, but also that superior seductions exist. In the end, the young man who knows how to refute the existence of God is more seductive than the one who could only propose to the girl. a game of tennis. It’s a good reason to become a philosopher.

This is what has become the place of the question of love, as a key question of philosophy itself, exactly in the sense it already had for Plato in Symposium. The question of love is necessarily at the heart of philosophy, because it governs the question of its power, the question of its address to its public, the question of its seductive strength. On this point, I believe I have followed Socrates’s very difficult direction: “the one who follows the path of total revelation must begin at an early age to be taken by the beauty of bodies”.

The fifth story is a marxist one.

Naturally, my family tradition was to the left. My father had bequeathed to me two images: the image of the anti-nazi resistant during the war, and then the image of the socialist militant in power, because he was mayor of a big French town, Toulouse, for thirteen years. My story is the story of a rupture with this sort of official left.

There are two periods in the history of my rupture with the official left. The last, well known, is May 68 and its continuation. The other, less known, more secret and so even more active. In 1960 there was a general strike in Belgium. I will not give the details. I was sent to cover this strike as a journalist - I was often a journalist, I have written, it seems to me, hundreds of articles, maybe thousands. I met mine workers on strike. They have reorganized the entire social life of the country, by constructing a sort of new popular legitimacy. They have even edited a new money. I assisted at their assemblies, I spoke with them. And I was from then on convinced, up till this day I am speaking to you, that philosophy is on that side. “On that side” is not a social determination. It means: on the side of what is spoken orpronounced there, on the side of this obscure part of common humanity. On the side of equality.

The abstract maxim of philosophy is necessarily absolute equality. After my experience of mine workers strike in Belgium, I have give a philosophical order to myself : “transform the notion of truth in such a way that it obeys the equalitarian maxim, this is why I gave the truth three attributes:

1) It depends on an irruption, and not on a structure. Any truth is new, this will be the doctrine of the event.

2) All truth is universal, in a radical sense, the anonymous equalitarian for-all, the pure for-all, constitutes it in its being, this will be its genericity.

3) A truth constitutes its subject, and not the inverse, this will be its militant dimension.

All that, in a still total obscurity, is at work when I meet in 1960 the Belgium Mine Workers.

The story number six is a very moral story.

After 68, during what we can call the red years, when we invented new things, when we created bonds with peoples that we did not know, when we were in the conviction that an entirely other world than that of our academic destiny awaited us, we entered into a political enterprise with a good many people, - and some of them, me included, continue this new political enterprise.

But what really struck me, the experience I wish to speak of here, is the experience of those who, starting with the middle of the 1970s, renounced this enterprise. Not only did they renounce this enterprise, but they entered into a systematic renegation that, starting with the new philosophers, from the end of the 1970s, little by little establish themselves, spread and dominate. And this is planted in philosophy like an arrow. It is a question in itself: How is it possible that one can cease being the subject of a truth? How is it possible that one return to the routine of the world This question nourishes my conviction that what is constitutive of philosophy is to stay not only within the vividness of the event, but within its becoming, that is, within the treatment of its consequences. Never to return to structural passivity : That is properly constitutive of philosophy as thought. It is what I simply called fidelity. And fidelity forms a knot, it is a concept that brings together the subject, the event and truth. It is what traverses the subject with regard to an event capable of constituting a truth.

Here again I think of Plato. At the end of Book IX of the Republic, Socrates responds to the objection that the ideal city which he had traced the plan of would probably never exist. This is a massive objection that the young people make: “All that is magnificent, but we don’t see it coming!”. Socrates responds more or less like this: that this city exists or may one day exist is of no importance, because it is only its laws that must dictate our conduct. That is the principle of consequence. And it is not a question that is inferred from a problem of existence or inexistence. It’s our philosophical duty : to continue.

It’s my story seven which is an erotic story. This is what is expended by all biographers. Will you be disappointed? I will stay within the discreet erotic genre. A “soft” story.

Just like everyone, in the 50s and 60s, we were tormented by sexuality. This torment is certainly stil very perceptible in my first novels, Almagestes, in 1964 and then Portulans in 1967. But literature is a filter here. In the end, this trouble is foreign to philosophy strictly speaking., in conformity to its great classical tradition. I would say that I learned little by little why. It is certain that sexual situations are fascinating, and it is also certain that the formalism of these situations, the erotic formalism is extraordinarily poor. And all its force depends on a repetitive injunction, with variations of little amplitude. I would say then that little by little in life a relation of charmed connivance is established with this formalism. Finally neither transgressive fascination, nor the repression of the superego are really at their place in this affair. All that is delicious, and, after all, without great consequence for thought. I have come to conclude philosophically, that as acute as this pacifying charmed connivance might be, at least for me, desire is not a central category for philosophy, and cannot be. Or rather desires only touches philosophy - just as well as jouissance - as bodies are seized in love. That is why, from this long crossing through sexual torment the final result is, as I had already said for other reasons, that love, and not desire, must instantly return into the constitution of the concept.

The story number eight is a formal story, or a story concerning forms.

I said, on the subject of the erotic injunction, “formalism”, and I said it as a philosopher. Because I deeply believe that what permits a singular truth - amorous as well as political — to touch philosophy is, in the end, its form. In this sense, I would sustain that the only philosophy is formalist. Perhaps in the sense of Plato when he says: “the only veritable thought is in forms” — what is often translated by “Idea” is better rendered by “form”. And I believe that the creation of concepts lies in this: philosophy conceives the singularity of theorms of truth. And there again, we have a Platonic program. Why Platonic? Dialectics is the science of forms. And form is, in philosophy, singularity. It is, as Socrates says in Phaedo, “the unique form of what remains identical to itself.”

From this we have an intimate tie between philosophy and mathematics (a tie strongly thematized by Plato himself.) If the philosophic concepts are in the end the form of the concepts of truth, then they must support the proof of formalization. Whatever this proof be. All the great philosophers have submitted the concept to an overwhelming, speculative form of formalization. I think this is why mathematics must have remained a passion for me? I scrutinize this precisely - in mathematics: What is thought capable of when it is devoted to, pure form? As the literality of form? And the conclusion I have progressively drawn is that what it is capable of, when it is ordained as pure form, is thinking being as such, being as being. Which gives my provoking formula according to which effective ontology is nothing else than constituted mathematics. Which, obviously, in the eyes of the psychoanalyst, means that my desire is only there to sublimate the image of my mathematician father.

The final story, the story number nine, is about my masters.

Philosophy is a question of mastery, and this in a triple sense. First because it belongs in effect to what Lacan called the discourse of the master. Then because it supposes, in its very subjectivity, the encounter with a master. Finally and lastly, because if we look closely at it, philosophy always ends up by constituting a discourse that is ordained to a principal signifier, a master signifier, such as is, in my thought, the signifier “truth. In the three cases, philosophy is a question of mastery; So, biographically, who were my masters?

During the decisive years of my education, I had three masters: Sartre, Lacan and Althusser. They were not masters of the same thing.

What Sartre taught me was simply, existentialism. But what does existentialism mean? It means that you must have a tie between the concept on the one hand and on the other the existential agency of choice, the agency of the vital decision. The conviction that the philosophic concept is not worth an hour of toil if, be it by mediations of a great complexity, it does not reverberate, clarify and ordain the agency of choice, of the vital decision. And in this sense, the concept must be, also and always, an affair of existence. That is what Sartre taught me.

Lacan taught me the connection, the necessary link between a theory of subjects and a theory of forms. He taught me how and why the very thinking of subjects, which had so often been opposed to the theory of forms, was in reality intelligible only within the framework of this theory. He taught me that the subject is a question that is not at all of a psychological character, but is an axiomatic and formal question. More than any other question!

Althusser taught me two things: that there was no object proper to philosophy — this is one of his great theses —, but that there were orientations of thought, lines of separation. And, as Kant had already said, a sort of perpetual fight, a fight that was constantly begun again, in new conditions. He taught me consequently the sense of delimitations, of what he called the demarcation. In particular the conviction that philosophy is not the vague discourse of totality, or the general interpretation of what there is. That philosophy must be delimited, that it must be separated from what is not philosophy. Politics and philosophy are two distinct things, art and philosophy are two distinct things, science and philosophy are two distinct things.

Finally, I was able then to keep all my masters. I kept Sartre despite the disregard he was object of for a long time. I kept Lacan despite what must really be called the terrible character of his disciples. And I kept Althusser despite the substantial political divergences that opposed me to him starting with May 68. Crossing through the possibility of oblivion, the dissemination of disciples and the political conflict, I succeeded in conserving my fidelity to three disparate masters.

And I maintain today that in philosophy masters are necessary; I maintain a constitutive hostility to the tendency towards democratic professionalization of philosophy and to the imperative that is rampant today and humiliates youth: “Be little, and work as a team.” I would also say that the masters, must be combined and surmounted, but finally, it is always disastrous to deny them.

It’s the end, now. And when I am at my wits’ end, my trick is to pass the stick on to the poet. I have chosen the poet of my adolescence. Saint John Perse. With him, I can speak of another dimension of life, the companions, the companions of existence.

The companions of the poet are different from the companions of the philosopher. The companions of the philosopher are the different societies within which the question of a truth is at least posed. The companions of the poet are often the companions of his solitude, which is why Saint John Perse enumerates them as companions in exile, at the moment when he himself must go into exile. And aftet the enumeration of his companions, he returns to his solitude, and he says that:

Stranger, on all the beaches of this world, with neither audience nor witness, press to the ear of the West a seashell without memory:
Precarious host on the outskirts of our cities, you will not cross the sill of Lloyds, where your word is not honored and your gold has no title…
‘I shall inhabit my name’ was his response to the questionnaires of the port;
And on the tables of exchange, you have nothing but trouble to produce,
Just as these great moneys in iron exhumed by lightning.

“I shall inhabit my name”: this is precisely what philosophy tries to render possible for each and every one. Or rather, philosophy searches for the formal conditions, the possibility for each and every one to inhabit his name, to be simply there, and recognized by all as the one who inhabits his name, who, by right of this, as inhabiting his name, is the equal of anyone else.

That is why we mobilize so many resources. That is also what our monotonous biography can be used for: to constantly begin again the search for the conditions by which the proper name of each one can be inhabited.

Author’s Bio

The University in the New Reich

June 30, 1933 *

We have the new Reich and the university that is to receive its tasks from the Reich’s will to existence. There is revolution in Germany, and we must ask ourselves: Is there revolution at the university as well? No. The battle still consists of skirmishes. So far, a breakthrough has only been achieved on one front: because new life is being educated (durch die Bildung neuen Lebens) in the work camp and educational association (Erziehungsverband) as well as at the university, the latter has been relieved of educational tasks to which it has till now believed it had an exclusive right.

The possibility could exist that the university will suffer death through oblivion and forfeit the last vestige of its educational power. It must, however, be integrated again into the Volksgemeinschaft and be joined together with the State. The university must again become an educational force that draws on knowledge to educate the State’s leaders to knowledge. This goal demands three things: 1. knowledge of today’s university; 2. knowledge of die dangers today holds for the future; 3. new courage.

Up to now, research and teaching have been carried on at the universities as they were for decades. Teaching was supposed to develop out of research, and one sought to find a pleasant balance between the two. It was always only the point of view of the teacher that spoke out of this notion. No one had concerned himself with the university as community. Research got out of hand and concealed its uncertainty behind the idea of international scientific and scholarly progress. Teaching that had become aimless hid behind examination requirements.

A fierce battle must be fought against this situation in the National Socialist spirit, and this spirit cannot be allowed to be suffocated by humanizing, Christian ideas that suppress its unconditionality. Nor is it enough to desire to take the new situation (dem Neuen) into account by painting everything with a touch of political color. Of great danger are the noncommittal plans and slogans that are turning up everywhere; and so, too, is the “new” concept of Wissenschaft, which is nothing more than the old one with a slight anthropological underpinning. All of the talk about “politics” is nonsense as well, for it does nothing to put an end to the old routine way of doing and thinking about things (dem alten Schlendrian). What the real gravity of the new situation (des Neuen) calls for is the experience of affliction, is the active engagement with real conditions (die zugreifende Auseinandersetzung mit den wirklichen Zuständen). Only that activity is justified that is performed with full inner commitment to the future. The warning cry has already been sounded: “Wissenschaft is endangered by the amount of time lost in martial sports and other such activities.” But what does that mean, to lose time, when it is a question of fighting for the State! Danger comes not from work for the State. It comes only from indifference and resistance. For that reason, only true strength should have access to me right path, but not half-heartedness.

New courage allows these dangers to be seen clearly. Only it alone opens our eyes to that which is to come and which is now emerging. It forces each teacher and pupil to make up his mind about the fundamental questions of Wissenschaft, and this decision is of epochal importance, for on it depends whether we Germans shall remain a people that is, in the highest sense of the word, knowing. The new teaching which is at issue here does not mean conveying knowledge, but allowing students to learn and inducing them to learn. This means allowing oneself to be beset by the unknown and then becoming master of it in comprehending knowing; it means becoming secure in one’s sense for what is essential. It is from such teaching that true research emerges, interlocked with the whole through its rootedness in the Volk and its bond to the State. The student is forced out into the uncertainty of all things, in which the necessity of engagement (Einsatz) is grounded. University study must again become a risk (Wagnis), not a refuge for the cowardly. Whoever does not survive the battle, lies where he falls. The new courage must accustom itself to steadfastness, for the battle for the institutions where our leaders are educated will continue for a long time. It will be fought out of the strengths of the new Reich that Chancellor Hitler will bring to reality. A hard race (Geschlecht) with no thought of self must fight this battle, a race that lives from constant testing and that remains directed towards the goal to which it has committed itself. It is a battle to determine who shall be the teachers and leaders at the university (ein Kampf um die Gestalt des Lehrers und des Führers an der Universität).

* This speech was given by Heidegger as part of a series of political lectures organized by the Heidelberg Student Association. It appeared originally in Heidelberger Neuste Nachrichten, ]uly 1, 1933. Compiled by Richard Wolin and translated by William S. Lewis. Published in New German Critique, 45, Fall 1988.

Declaration of Support for Adolf Hitler

November 11, 1933 *

German teachers and comrades!

German Volksgenossen and Volksgenossinnen!

The German people has been summoned by the Führer to vote; the Führer, however, is asking nothing from the people. Rather, he is giving the people the possibility of making, directly, the highest free decision of all: whether the entire people wants its own existence (Dasein) or whether it does not want it.

Tomorrow the people will choose nothing less than its future.

This election remains absolutely incomparable with all previous elections. What is unique about this election is the simple greatness of the decision that is to be executed. The inexorability of what is simple and ultimate (des Einfachen und Letzten) tolerates no vacillation and no hesitation. This ultimate decision reaches to the outermost limit of our people’s existence. And what is this limit? It consists in the most basic demand of all Being (Sein), that it keep and save its own essence. A barrier is thereby erected between what can be reasonably expected of people and what cannot. It is by virtue of this basic law of honor that the German people retain the dignity and resoluteness of its life. However, the will to self-responsibility is not only the basic law of our people’s existence; it is also the fundamental event in the bringing about of the people’s National Socialist State. From this will to self-responsibility, every effort, be it humble or grand, of each social and occupational group (Stand) assumes its necessary and predestined place in the social order (in den Standort und Rang ihrer gleich notwendigen Bestimmung). The labor of the various groups (Stände) supports and strengthens the living framework of the State; labor recovers for the people its rootedness; labor places the State, as the reality of the people, into the field of action of all essential forces of human Being.

It is not ambition, not desire for glory, not blind obstinacy, and not hunger for power that demands from the Fuhrer that Germany withdraw from the League of Nations. It is only the clear will to unconditional self-responsibility in suffering and mastering the fate of our people. That is not a turning away from the community of peoples. On the contrary: with this step, our people is submitting to that essential law of human Being to which every people must first give allegiance if it is still to be a people.

It is only out of the parallel observance by all peoples of this unconditional demand of self-responsibility that there emerges the possibility of taking each other seriously so that a community can also be affirmed. The will to a true national community (Volksgemeinschaft) is equally far removed both from an unrestrained, vague desire for world brotherhood and from blind tyranny. Existing beyond this opposition, this will allows peoples and states to stand by one another in an open and manly fashion as self-reliant entities (das offene und mannhafte Aufsich und Zueinanderstehen der Volker und Staaten). What is it that such a will brings about? Is it reversion into barbarism? No! It is the averting of all empty negotiation and hidden deal-making through the simple, great demand of self-responsible action. Is it the eruption of lawlessness? No! It is the clear acknowledgement of each people’s inviolable independence. Is it the denial of the creative genius of a spiritual (geistig) people and the smashing of its historical traditions? No! It is the awakening of the young who have been purified and are growing back to their roots. Their will to the State will make this people hard towards itself and reverent towards each genuine deed.

What sort of event is this then? The nation is winning back the truth of its will to existence, for truth is the revelation of that which makes a people confident, lucid, and strong in its actions and knowledge. The genuine will to know arises from such truth. And this will to know circumscribes the right to know. And from there, finally, the limits are measured out within which genuine questioning and research must legitimize and prove themselves. Such is the origin of Wissenschaft, which is constrained by the necessity of self-responsible volkisch existence. Wissenschaft is thus the passion to educate that has been restrained by this necessity, the passion to want to know in order to make knowing. To be knowing, however, means: to be master of things in clarity and to be resolved to action.

We have declared our independence from the idol of thought that is without foundation and power. We see the end of the philosophy that serves such thought. We are certain that the clear hardness and the sure, steady competence (werkgerechte Sicherheit) of unyielding, simple questioning about the essence of Being are returning. For a volkische Wissenschaft, the courage either to grow or to be destroyed in confrontation with what is (dem Seienden), which is the first form of courage, is the innermost motive for questioning. For courage lures one forward; courage frees itself from what has been up to now; courage risks the unaccustomed and the incalculable. For us, questioning is not the unconstrained play of curiosity. Nor is questioning the stubborn insistence on doubt at any price. For us, questioning means: exposing oneself to the sublimity of things and their laws, it means: not dosing oneself off to the terror of the untamed and to the confusion of darkness. To be sure, it is for the sake of this questioning that we question, and not to serve those who have grown tired and their complacent yearning for comfortable answers. We know: the courage to question, to experience the abysses of existence and to endure the abysses of existence, is in itself already a higher answer than any of the all-too-cheap answers afforded by artificial systems of thought.