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Jacques Lacan
If the nature of this contribution has been set by the theme of this
volume of La Psychanalyse, I yet owe to what will be found in it to
insert it at a point somewhere between the written and spoken word
- it will be halfway between the two.
A written piece is in fact distinguished by a prevalence of the
"text" in the sense which that factor of speech will be seen to take on
in this essay, a factor which makes possible the kind of tightening
up that I like in order to leave the reader no other way out than the
way in, which I prefer to be difficult. In that sense, then, this will not
be a written work.
The priority I accord to the nourishing of my seminars each
time with something new has until now prevented my drawing on
such a text, with one exception, not outstanding in the context of the
series, and I refer to it at all only for the general level of its argument.
For the urgency which I now take as a pretext for leaving aside
such an aim only masks the difficulty that, in trying to maintain this
discourse on the level at which I ought in these writings to present
my teaching, I might push it too far from the spoken word which,
with its own measures, differs from writing and is essential to the
instructive effect I am seeking.
That is why I have taken the expedient offered me by the invita-
tion to lecture to the philosophy group of the union of humanities
students1 to produce an adaptation suitable to my talk; its necessary
generality having to accommodate itself to the exceptional character
'The lecture took place on 9th May 1957 in the Descartes Amphitheatre of the Sorbonne.
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Jacques Lacan
of the audience, but its sole object encountering the collusion of their
common preparation, a literary one, to which my title pays homage.
How should we forget in effect that until the end of his life Freud
constantly maintained that such a preparation was the first requisite
in the formation of analysts, and that he designated the eternal uni-
versitas litterarum as the ideal place for its institution.2
And thus my recourse to the movement of this speech, feverish-
ly restored, by showing whom I meant it for, marks even more clearly
those for whom it is not meant. I mean that it is not meant for those
who for any reason, psychoanalytic or other, allow their discipline to
parade under a false identity; a fault of habit, but its effect on the
mind is such that the true identity may appear as simply one alibi
among others, a sort of refined reduplication whose implications will
not be missed by the most acute.
So one observes the curious phenomenon of a whole new tack
concerning language and symbolization in the International Journal
of Psychoanalysis, buttressed by many sticky fingers in the pages
of Sapir and Jespersen - amateurish exercises so far, but it is even
more the tone which is lacking. A certain seriousness is cause for
amusement from the standpoint of veracity.
And how could a psychoanalyst of today not realize that his
realm of truth is in fact the word, when his whole experience must
find in the word alone its instrument, its framework, its material, and
even the static of its uncertainties.
As our title suggests, beyond what we call "the word," what the
psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole
structure of language. Thus from the outset we have alerted informed
minds to the extent to which the notion that the unconscious is merely
the seat of the instincts will have to be rethought.
But this "letter," how are we to take it here? How indeed but
literally.
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3This aspect of aphasia, very suggestive in the direction of an overthrow of the concept of
"psychological function," which only obscures every aspect of the question, appears in its
proper luminosity in the purely linguistic analysis of the two major forms of aphasia
worked out by one of the leaders of modern linguistics, Roman Jakobson. See the most
available of his works, the Fundamentals of Language, with Morris Halle (Mouton and Co.,
'S-Gravenhage), part II, Chs. 1 to 4.
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Jacques Lacan
S
5
which is read as: the signifier over the signified, "over" corresponding
to the line separating the two levels.
This sign should be attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure al-
though it is not found in exactly this form in any of the numerous
schemas which none the less express it in the printed version of his
lectures of the years 1906-07, 1908-09, and 1910-11, which the
piety of a group of his disciples caused to be published under the
4We may recall that the discussion of the necessity for a new language in the communist
society did in fact take place, and Stalin, much to the relief of those depending on his
philosophy, cut off the discussion with the decision: language is not a superstructure.
5By "linguistics" we understand the study of existing languages in their structure and in the
laws revealed therein; this leaves out any theory of abstract codes sometimes included under
the heading of communication theory, as well as the theory, originating in the physical sci-
ences, called information theory, or any semiology more or less hypothetically generalized.
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6Cf. the De Magistro of Saint Augustine, especially the chapter "De significatione locutionis"
which I analysed in my seminar of 23rd June 1954.
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Jacques Lacan
7So, Mr. I. A. Richards, author of a work precisely in accord with such an objective, has
in another work shown us its application. He took for his purposes a page from Mong-tse
(Mencius to the Jesuits) and called the piece, Mencius on the Mind. The guarantees of the
purity of the experiment are nothing to the luxury of the approaches. And our expert on
the traditional Canon which contains the text is found right on the spot in Peking where
our demonstration-model mangle has been transported regardless of cost.
But we shall be no less transported, if less expensively, to see a bronze which gives out
bell-tones at the slightest contact with true thought, transformed into a rag to wipe the
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and one can see already how it seems to favor the sort of erroneous
interpretation just mentioned.
I replaced this in my lecture with another, which has no greater
claim to correctness than that it has been transplanted into that in-
congruous dimension which the psychoanalyst has not yet altogether
renounced because of his quite justified feeling that his conformism
takes its value entirely from it. Here is the other diagram:
LADIES GENTLEMEN
where we see that, without greatly extending the scope of the signifier
concerned in the experiment, that is, by doubling a noun through
the mere juxtaposition of two terms whose complementary meanings
ought apparently to reinforce each other, a surprise is produced by
an unexpected precipitation of meaning: the image of twin doors
symbolizing, through the solitary confinement offered Western Man
for the satisfaction of his natural needs away from home, the im-
perative that he seems to share with the great majority of primitive
communities which submits his public life to the laws of urinary
segregation.
It is not only with the idea of silencing the nominalist debate
with a low blow that I use this example, but rather to show how in
fact the signifier intrudes into the signified, namely in a form which,
not being immaterial, raises the very question of its place in reality.
For the blinking gaze of a near-sighted person would be quite justified
in doubting whether this was indeed the signifier as he peered closely
at the little enamel signs which bore it, a signifier of which the signi-
fied received its final honors from the double and solemn procession
from the upper nave.
blackboard of the most dismaying British psychologism. And not without eventually being
identified with the meninx of the author himself - all that remains of him or his object
after having exhausted the meaning of meaning of the latter and the good sense of the
former.
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Jacques Lacan
Besides the fact that the rails in this story offer a material count-
erpart to the line in the Saussurian formula (and in a form designed
to suggest that its resistance may be other than dialectical), we should
add that only someone who didn't have his eyes in front of the holes
(it's the appropriate image here) could possibly confuse the place of
the signifier and the signified in this story, or not see from what shin-
ing center the signifier goes forth to reflect its light into the shadow of
incomplete meanings. For this signifier will now carry a purely animal
Dissension, meant for the usual oblivion of natural mists, to the un-
bridled power of ideological Warfare, relentless for families, a tor-
ment to the Gods. Ladies and Gentlemen will be henceforth for these
children two countries towards which each of their souls will strive on
divergent wings, and between which a cessation of hostilities will be
the more impossible since they are in truth the same country and
neither can compromise on its own superiority without detracting
from the glory of the other.
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ventilators through which, like warm and cold air, scorn and indigna-
tion come hissing out below.
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Jacques Lacan
only the correlations between signifier and signifier supply the stand-
ard for all research into meaning, as is indicated in fact by the very
notion of "usage" of a taxeme or semanteme which in fact refers to
the context just above that of the units concerned.
But it is not because the undertakings of grammar and lexicology
are exhausted within certain limits that we must think that beyond
those limits meaning reigns supreme. That would be an error.
For the signifier, by its very nature, always anticipates on mean-
ing by unfolding its dimension before it. As is seen at the level
of the sentence when it is interrupted before the significant term: "I
shall never . . .," "All the same it is . . .," "And yet there may be
." Such sentences are not without meaning, a meaning all the
more oppressive in that it is content to make us wait for it.8
But the phenomenon is no different which by the mere recoil of
a "but" brings to the light, comely as the Shulamite, honest as the
dew, the negress adorned for the wedding and the poor woman ready
for the auction-block.9
From which we can say 'that it is in the chain of the signifier
that the meaning "insists" but that none of its elements "consists"
in the meaning of which it is at the moment capable.
We are forced, then, to accept the notion of an incessant sliding
of the signified under the signifier - which F. de Saussure illustrates
with an image resembling the wavy lines of the upper and lower
Waters in miniatures from manuscripts of Genesis; a double flow in
which the guidelines of fine streaks of rain, vertical dotted lines sup-
posedly confining segments of correspondence, seem too slight.
All our experience runs counter to this linearity, which made me
speak once, in one of my seminars on psychosis, of something more
like spaced upholstery buttons as a schema for taking into account
the dominance of the letter in the dramatic transformation which the
dialogue can bring about in a subject.'0
8To which verbal hallucination, when it takes this form, opens a communicating door with
the Freudian structure of psychosis - a door until now unnoticed.
9The allusions are to the "I am black, but comely . . ." of the Song of Solomon, and to
the nineteenth century clich6 of the "poor but honest" woman. (Trans.)
1OWe spoke in our seminar of 6th June 1956, of the first scene of Athalie, incited by an
allusion - tossed off by a high-brow critic in the New Statesman and Nation - to the
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Jacques Lacan
lines which require the harmonics of the tree just as much as their
continuation:
Which the storm treats as universally
As it does a blade of grass."
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12We give homage here to the works of Roman Jakobson - to which we owe much of this
formulation; works to which a psychoanalyst can constantly refer in order to structure his
own experience, and which render superfluous the "pesonal communications" of which we
could boast as much as the next fellow.
Let us thank also, in this context, the author [R. M. Loewenstein] of "Some remarks on
the role of speech in psycho-analytic technique" (I.J.P., Nov.-Dec., 1956, XXXVII, 6, p.
467) for taking the trouble to point out that his remarks are "based on" work dating from
1952. This is no doubt the explanation for the fact that he has learned nothing from work
done since then, yet which he is not ignorant of, as he cites me as their editor (sic).
124
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13"Sa gerbe n'etait pas avare ni haineuse," a line from "Booz endormi." (Trans.)
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coming from nature, know not our caution or our casting out, and
even in their accumulation remain prodigal by our standards.
But if in this profusion, the giver has disappeared along with his
gift, it is only in order to rise again in what surrounds this figure by
which he was annihilated. For it is the figure of the burgeoning of
fecundity, and this it is which announces the surprise which the poem
sings, namely the promise which the old man will receive in a sacred
context of his accession to paternity.
So, it is between the signifier in the form of the proper name of
a man, and the signifier which metaphorically abolishes him that the
poetic spark is produced, and it is in this case all the more effective
in realizing the meaning of paternity in that it reproduces the mythic
event in terms of which Freud reconstructed the progress, in the indi-
vidual unconscious, of the mystery of the father.
Modern metaphor has the same structure. So this ejaculation:
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Jacques Lacan
sense comes out of non-sense, that is, at that frontier which, as Freud
discovered, when crossed the other way produces what we generally
call "wit" (Witz); it is at this frontier that we can glimpse the fact
that man tempts his very destiny when he derides the signifier.
But to draw back from that place, what do we find in metonymy
other than the power to bypass the obstacles of social censure? This
form which lends itself to the truth under oppression; doesn't it show
the very servitude inherent in its presentation?
One may read with profit a book by Leo Strauss, of the land
which traditionally offers asylum to those who chose freedom, in
which the author gives his reflections on the relation between the art
of writing and persecution.'4 By pushing to its limits the sort of con-
naturality which links that art to that condition, he lets us glimpse a
certain something which in this matter imposes its form, in the effect of
the truth on desire.
But haven't we felt for some time now that, having followed the
path of the letter in search of the truth we call Freudian, we are
getting very warm indeed, that it is burning all about us?
Of course, as it is said, the letter killeth while the spirit giveth
life. We can't help but agree, having had to pay homage elsewhere to
a noble victim of the error of seeking the spirit in the letter; but we
should like to know, also, how the spirit could live without the letter.
Even so, the claims of the spirit would remain unassailable if the
letter had not in fact shown us that it can produce all the effects of
truth in man without involving the spirit at all.
It is none other than Freud who had this revelation, and he called
his discovery the Unconscious.
14Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, The Free Press, Glencoe, Ill.
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Jacques Lacan
stencil would create for our view in a topical painting the pictures,
rather grim in themselves, of the rebus or hieroglyph.
Excuse me if I seem to have to spell out the text of Freud; I do
it not only to show how much is to be gained by not cutting or abridg-
ing it, but also in order to situate the development of psychoanalysis
according to its first guide-lines, which were fundamental and never
revoked.
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'6That is the process by which the results of a piece of research are assured through a
mechanical exploration of the entire extent of the field of its object.
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f(S) I
s
We have shown the effects not only of the elements of the horizontal
signifying chain, but also of its vertical dependencies, divided into two
fundamental structures called metonymy and metaphor. We can
symbolize them by, first:
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of 0 S ) ss (+)s
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Jacques Lacan
191t is quite otherwise if by posing a question such as "Why philosophers?" I become more
candid than nature, for then I am asking the question which philosophers have been asking
themselves for all time and also the one in which they are in fact the most interested.
135
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what I am, to coming into being, I cannot doubt that even if I lose
myself in the process, in that process, I am.
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mined. Between the enigmatic signifier of a sexual trauma and its sub-
stitute term in a present signifying chain there passes the spark which
fixes in a symptom the meaning inaccessible to the conscious subject
in which is its resolution - a symptom which is in effect a metaphor
in which flesh or function are taken as signifying elements.
And the enigmas which desire seems to pose for a "natural
philosophy" - its frenzy mocking the abyss of the infinite, the secret
collusion by which it obscures the pleasure of knowing and of joyful
domination, these amount to nothing more than that derangement of
the instincts that comes from being caught on the rails - eternally
stretching forth towards the desire for something else - of metonymy.
Wherefore its "perverse" fixation at the very suspension-point of the
signifying chain where the memory-screen freezes and the fascinating
image of the fetish petrifies.
There is no other way to conceive the indestructibility of un-
conscious desire, when there is no natural need which, when pre-
vented from satisfying itself, isn't dissipated even if it means the
destruction of the organism itself. It is in a memory, comparable to
what they call by that name in our modern thinking-machines (which
are in turn based on an electronic realization of the signifying com-
pound), it is in this sort of memory that is found that chain which
insists on reproducing itself in the process of transference, and which
is the chain of dead desire.
It is the truth of what this desire was in its history which the
patient cries out through his symptom, as Christ said that the stones
themselves would have cried out if the children of Israel had not lent
them their voice.
And that is why only psychoanalysis allows us to differentiate
within memory the function of recall. Rooted in the signifier, it re-
solves the Platonic puzzles of reminiscence through the ascendancy
of the historic in man.
One has only to read the "Three Essays on Sexuality" to ob-
serve, in spite of the pseudo-biological glosses with which it is decked
out for popular consumption, that Freud there derives any accession
to the object from the dialectic of the return.
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Jacques Lacan
tom and of its curative resolution shows the true nature of neurosis:
whether phobic, hysterical or obsessive, a neurosis is a question which
being poses for the subject "from the place where it was before the
subject came into the world" (Freud's phrase which he used in ex-
plaining the Oedipal complex to little Hans).
The "being" referred to is that which appears in a lightning
moment in the void of the verb "to be" and I said that it poses its
question for the subject. What does that mean? It does not pose it
before the subject, since the subject cannot come to the place where
it is posed, but it poses it in place of the subject, that is, in that place
it poses the question with the subject, as one poses a problem with a
pen, or as man in antiquity thought with his soul.
It is only in this way that Freud fits the ego into his doctrine.
Freud defined the ego by the resistances which are proper to it. They
are of an imaginary nature much in the same sense as those adapta-
tional activities which the ethology of animal behavior shows us in
courting-pomp or combat. Freud showed their reduction in man to a
narcissistic relation, which I elaborated in my essay on the mirror-
stage. And he grouped within it the synthesis of the perceptive func-
tions in which the sensori-motor selections are integrated which de-
termine for man what he calls reality.
But this resistance, essential for the solidifying of the inertias
of the imaginary order which obstruct the message of the unconscious,
is only secondary in relation to the specific resistances of the journey
in the signifying order of the truth.
That is the reason why an exhaustion of the mechanisms of de-
fence, which Fenichel the practitioner shows us so well in his studies
of technique (while his whole reduction on the theoretical level of
neuroses and psychoses to genetic anomalies in libidinal development
is pure platitude), manifests itself, without Fenichel's accounting for
it or realizing it himself, as simply the underside or reverse aspect
of the mechanisms of the unconscious. Periphrasis, hyperbaton, ellip-
sis, suspension, anticipation, retraction, denial, digression, irony, these
are the figures of style (Quintilian's figurae sententiarum); as cata-
chresis, litotes, antonomasia, hypotyposis are the tropes, whose terms
139
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20A German comic newspaper of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Trans.)
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220ne of my Colleagues went so far in this direction as to wonder if the Id of the last
phase wasn't in fact the "bad Ego."
23Note, none the less, the tone with which one spoke in that period of the "elfin pranks"
of the unconscious; a work of Silberer's is called, Der Zufall und die Koboldstreiche des
Unbewussten - completely anachronistic in the context of our present soul-managers.
142
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a key (false only in that it opened all locks of the same make) the
lock which this lady took to be a worthy signifier of her educational
intentions, and doing it with ostentation in her sight - what "other"
was he aiming at? She who was supposed to intervene and to whom
he would then say: "Do you think my obedience can be secured with
145
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24To pick the most recent in date, Francois Mauriac, in the Figaro Litteraire of May 25,
excuses himself for not "narrating his life." If no one these days can undertake to do that
with the old enthusiasm, the reason is that, "a half century since, Freud, whatever we think
of him" has already passed that way. And after being briefly tempted by the old saw that
this is only the "history of our body," Mauriac returns to the truth that his sensitivity as a
writer makes him face: to write the history of oneself is to write the confession of the deep-
est part of our neighbors' souls as well.
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the Other, it is only because Freud shows me that they are the terms
to which must be referred the effects of resistance and transfer against
which, in the twenty years I have engaged in what we all call after him
the impossible practice of psychoanalysis, I have done unequal battle.
And it is also because I must help others not to lose their way there.
It is to prevent the field of which they are the inheritors from
becoming barren, and for that reason to make it understood that if
the symptom is a metaphor, it is not a metaphor to say so, no more
than to say that man's desire is a metonymy. For the symptom is a
metaphor whether one likes it or not, as desire is a metonymy for all
that men mock the idea.
Finally, if I am to rouse you to indignation that, after so many
centuries of religious hypocrisy and philosophical bravado, nothing
valid has yet been articulated on what links metaphor to the question
of being and metonymy to its lack, there must be an object there to
answer to that indignation both as its provocator and its victim: it
is humanistic man and the credit, affirmed beyond reparation, which
he has drawn on his intentions.
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