translated by Asunción Alvarez

What lies beneath the myth of immediate access to all descriptions of sexuality is a thesis by which psychic functioning can ultimately be written as a computer program. This amounts to saying that the mind is, or would be, a Turing machine. This is the hope of an entire current in neuroscience; I say only a current, as it is not all of neuroscience. And yet, this hope entails an impossibility, formulated by Kurt Gödel in 1931 in his incompleteness theorem. Taking this limit as his starting point, Gödel conceived of a theory of the functioning of the human mind which was based on a radical distinction between everything that can be written as a Turing machine and everything in the subject’s functioning that arises from the impossibility of self-reflection for such a machine. And for the artistic works which have been presented to us the operation of self-reflection is fundamental. We require the enunciation that makes us see how the artist combines writing and representation—both veiling and unveiling—in such a way as to highlight the intention to display that escapes even the writing of the program for the realization of the work. The impossibility of inscribing enunciation, which is the fulcrum of self-reflection, is written S(A).

This text was read at the end of the Journées annuelles of the Scuola lacaniana di psicoanalisi in Naples, May 16-17 2009.