Let’s try to practice a little brain-washing on ourselves. [1]

In 2000, the 100th anniversary of the publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams was accompanied by a new wave of triumphalist acclamations of how psychoanalysis is dead: with the new advances in brain sciences, it is finally put where it belonged all the time, to the lumber-room of pre-scientific obscurantist search for hidden meanings, alongside religious confessors and dream-readers. As Todd Dufresne [2] put it, no figure in the history of human thought was more wrong about all its fundamentals – with the exception of Marx, some would add. And, effectively and predictably, in 2005, the infamous The Black Book of Communism, listing all the Communist crimes, [3] was followed by The Black Book of Psychoanalysis, listing all the theoretical mistakes and clinical frauds of psychoanalysis. [4] In this negative way, at least, the profound solidarity of Marxism and psychoanalysis is now displayed for all to see.

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Is it with the gifts of Danaoi (the Greeks who laid siege to Troy) or with the passwords that give them their salutary non-sense that language, with the law, begins? For these gifts are already symbols, in the sense that symbol means pact and that they are first and foremost signifiers of the pact that they constitute as signified, as is plainly seen in the fact that the objects of symbolic exchange – pots made to remain empty, shields too heavy to be carried, sheaves of heat that wither, lances stuck into the ground – all are destined to be useless, if not simply superfluous by their very abundance.
Is this neutralization of the signifier the whole of the nature of language? On this assessment, one could see the beginning of it among sea swallows, for instance, during the mating parade, materialized in the fish they pass between each other from beak to beak. And if the ethologists are right in seeing in this the instrument of an activation of the group that might be called the equivalent of a festival, they would be completely justified in recognizing it as a symbol. [1]

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And what is a Chorus? You will be told that it’s you yourselves. Or perhaps that it isn’t you. But that’s not the point. Means are involved here, emotional means. In my view, the Chorus is people who are moved.
Therefore, look closely before telling yourself that emotions are engaged in this purification. They are engaged, along with others, when at the end they have to be pacified by some artifice or other. But that doesn’t mean to say that they are directly engaged. On the one hand, they no doubt are, and you are there in the form of a material to be made use of; on the other hand, that material is also completely indifferent. When you go to the theatre in the evening, you are preoccupied by the affairs of the day, by the pen that you lost, by the check that you will have to sign the next day. You shouldn’t give yourselves too much credit. Your emotions are taken charge of by the healthy order displayed on the stage. The Chorus takes care of them. The emotional commentary is done for you. [1]

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And why the Other with a capital O? For a no doubt mad reason, in the same way as it is madness every time we are obliged to bring in signs supplementary to those given by language. Here the mad reason is the following. You are my wife – after all, what do you know about it? You are my master – in reality, are you so sure of that? What creates the founding value of those words is that what is aimed at in the message, as well as what is manifest in the pretence, is that the other is there qua absolute Other. Absolute, that is to say he is recognized, but is not known. In the same way, what constitutes pretence is that, in the end, you don’t know whether it’s a pretence or not. Essentially it is this unknown element in the alterity of the other which characterizes the speech relation on the level on which it is spoken to the other. [1]

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Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella.
The lamella is something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba. It is just a little more complicated. But it goes everywhere. And as it is something – I will tell you shortly why – that is related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality, it is, like the amoeba in relation to sexed beings, immortal – because it survives any division, and scissiparous intervention. And it can turn around.

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Nothing forces anyone to enjoy except the superego. The superego is the imperative of jouissance – Enjoy! [1]

Although jouissance can be translated as “enjoyment,” translators of Lacan often leave it in French in order to render palpable its excessive, properly traumatic character: we are not dealing with simple pleasures, but with a violent intrusion that brings more pain than pleasure. This is how we usually perceive the Freudian superego, the cruel and sadistic ethical agency which bombards us with impossible demands and then gleefully observes our failure to meet them. No wonder, then, that Lacan posited an equation between jouissance and superego: to enjoy is not a matter of following one’s spontaneous tendencies; it is rather something we do as a kind of weird and twisted ethical duty.

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The true formula of atheism is not God is dead – even by basing the origin of the function of the father upon his murder, Freud protects the father – the true formula of atheism is God is unconscious [1]

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Strictly speaking, perversion is an inverted effect of the phantasy. It is the subject who determines himself as an object, in his encounter with the division of subjectivity. [...] It is in so far as the subject makes himself the object of another will that the sado-masochistic drive not only closes up, but constitutes itself. [...] the sadist himself occupies the place of the object, but without knowing it, to the benefit of another, for whose jouissance he exercises his action as sadistic pervert. [1]

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