I

_ I "P rcsenraricn on Psychical Causality" fuits: The First Compteu Edition inE'lgluh (N~wYork: 'W: W, Norton, 2006), 130'.

71The Lacanian field--,---

2 William Gillespie, "Concepts of Vaginal Or gasm," Inte rnati onal J ourn al ofPsycho-Analysis 50 (1969):49 5--7.

'The Othe r Side of Psychoanalysis70

of tim es over th e course ofthe d ay on e hears "this bastard chain of fate andiner tia, of throws of the dice an d astonishmen t, of false success and missedencou nters, which make up the usual scr ipt of a human life"?l

Don 't expect anything more subvers ive in my d iscourse th an that I donot claim (0 have a solution.

~ev~rthclcss , it is clear that mere is no more burni ng quest ion than what.Ul discourse, refers to jolJissance.

Discourse is con stantly touching on it, by virtue of th e fact that this iswhe re it originates. And d iscou rse arouses it again ....-hen ever it att empts torerum to this origin. lr is in this re spect that it challenges all appeasem ent .

Freud has an odd discourse, it h as to be said, 0 01: that is most contraryto the coheren ce, to th e consistency, of a discourse. The subject of dis­course doe s not know himself as the subject h olding the discou rse .That hedoes not kn uw wh at h e is saying d oesn't m atter too much, one has alwaysfound a substitute lsuppliulluJ for thi s. Bu t "nat Freud says is tha t the sub ­iect does not kn ow who it is that is saying it .

Knowledge-x-I think I h ave in sisted upon this sufficiently to get it intoyour head- is something spoken, someth ing that is said . Well then, knowl­edge that speaks all by irself-c-thar's the unconscious.

This is the point at which it sho uld ha ve been att acked by what is moreor less d iffusely called phe no menology. It was not enough, to contrad ictFreud. to remind us that knowledge is known ineffably. The attack had tobear upon th is, which iss that F reud stresses wh at everyo ne is able 10

know- knowledge comes in bits , knowledge is en umera ble, it comes inparcels, and- th is is what isn't self-evident-wha t is said, the litany, is n otsaid by anyon e, it unfolds of its own accord.

With your permission, ] wanted to start with an aph orism .You will see whyI hesitated . I h~ve hesitated, as I usu ally do, but fortunately I am doing itbefore twelve thir ty-on e and thus have not delayed the end of om seminar thistime . If J star ted in the way I always feel like starting, I would star t abruptly.It's because I fed like doing it that I don't do it, I am sparing you, I am avoid­in~ shocks for you . I wanted to begin with an aphorism which, I hope. wiltstr ike you by its obviousness, because it's the reason that F reud has carried the

8 1

....

7 Henri Massis (1886---1970) was a right-wing inrcllcc rual who, despite hissupport for Pctain during the war, was elected to the Acedemie franl;aise in IQ60.T he " Fath er nf th e People" referred t il is Marshall Petain.. " An allmion 10 Erne-Sf Jones, ",Mother-Right and the Sexual Ignorance of

Savages:' l mernati onai J ..,urn.J of Pty..'}w-Anab·Jis 6 ( I n s): I09-30.

author , Henri Massis, has profiled by speaking these prophet ic words,"Walls are good ." Wen, someone called Sorgue, with this so Heideggerianna me, found a way to be with the N azi agents, an d to make himself a dou­ble agent- for whose benefit? For the benefit of the Father of the Peop le,who everyone hopes, as you know, wi.1l bring it about th at th e true will al sobe arranged {agm cel .7

The reference I evo ke concern ing the Father of the People has manylinks with th at of the real fathe r as th e agent of castra tion . As the Freu dianstatement canner do otherwise than set out from the master's discour se, ifonly because it speaks of the unconscious, all Freu d can make of thisfamous real father is the impossible. But then we actu ally do know this realfath er- he is something of a completely different order.

First , in gene ral, everybody ack nowled ges that he is (he one who works,and does so in order to feed his lit tle family. Ifhe is the agent of something,in a society th ai obviously does not give him a big role. it neverthelessremains the case tha t he has some exceedingly nice aspects . He works. Andalso he would very much like to be loved .

T h ere is something that shows that th e mystagogy (hat m akes him int oa tyrant is obviously lod ged somew here quite d ifferent. It 's at the level ofthe real father as a cons tructi on of language, as Freud always po in ted oUImoreover. The real fath er is nothing other than an effect of language andhas no other real. I am no t saying, " other reality," since reality is somethingquite different, it 's what I was talking about a moment ago.

I can even immediately go a little bit further and point out that thenotion of real father is scientifically un susta inable. T here is on ly on e realfa th er, which is the spe rmatozoon , an d at least up till now, nobody has everthough t to say that he was the son of this or tha t sperma tozoon . N atural ly.one can lodge objecti ons, aided by a number of examinations of bloodgroups, of rhesu s factor s. But this is quite recent, and it ha s absolutelynothing to do with anythin g that up till now ha s been said to be the func­tion of the fath er. J sense that I am ente ring d ange rous territory, but toobad - it is, after all, not only in the Aru ntas tribes that one could raise thequ estion ofwha t me father really is on an occasion whe n a woma n rinds sheis pregnant .S If th ere is on e qu estion that analysis co uld raise, it's that one.Why, in a psychoan alysis, wou ld it not be-one susp ects that this is th e casefrom time to time-the psychoanalyst who is the real fath er even if he is inno way the on e who has done it, there, on the level of the spe rm atozoo n?

148

12 7F rom mylh til str uctu re

3

T he Oilier Side' of Psychoanalysis

nieant in terms of the Freudian th ing. And final ly, wha t one quite simplycalls mon agrnl, "my agell[." You can see .....hat this means in general: " . payhim for tha t." N ot even, " I co mpe ns ate him for having nothing else to do,"or "I honor him/ ' f> as they say, pretending to begin from the fact that he isCapable of doing something else .

This is the ap propria te level of the term at .....hich to take both this " realf.lther" and this "agen t of castration." The real father ca rries out the workOf the m aster agency.

(, A s in "I pay him an bunura riu m."

\l7e are becoming increasing ly familiar with the functions of an agent. Weli...-e at a rime at which we know what this conveys- fake stuff, advertisingStuff, things that are th ere to he sold . But we also know that it works thi sw'ay, at the point we have come to in the expan sion, the paroxysm, of theniasrer's disco urse in a soc iety fou nded on it.

It is getting late.I am go ing to be forced to leave something out here, which I will ind i­

catc to you in passing , because we might perhap s return to the matte r athand, which for me is of some valu e, an d which for me does no t seemUnworthy of our making the effor t to darify. Since I am stressing, giving aVery special m ark to, the fun ction of agent, some d ay I will h ave to showYou all the elaborations it can lend itself to by int roducing the n ot ion of adou ble agent.

Everyone is aware that in ou r da y th is notion is one of the most indis­potable, th e most certain, obiects of fascination . The agent who star tsagain . H e doesn 't ju xt want the master's little market , which is the role ofeach. H e thinks that wh at h e is in conta ct with, namely that everyth ing thathas trw.' worth, I mean in th e ord er of iouissance, has nothing to d o with theweb of int r igues, In his little job it 's ultimately this th at he conserves.

h 's a st range story, one with many implications. The tru e dou ble agen till. the one who th inks that what escapes the web would also have to bearranged [agenci ]. Because if that is true, th e arrangem ent is going tobecome true, and by the same token the first arrangement, the one tha t wasObviou sly fake, will also become true.

This is m ost likely what was guiding a character who placed him self, noOne knows why, in the fun ct ion of prototypal agent of this master 's d is­COUTSC, insofar as he allowed himself to keep something whose essence an

147

T he qu estion I wo nder about is whether Freud read very closely.

M onsieur Caquou I think he did.The book is clear and ri!:orous. It 's fl.llsc, bill clear.

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139Yahw eh's ferocious ignoran ce

hypothesis that M oses had b een killed . The note is very brief, and gives areference to the work that we have a photocopy of, nothing more ." Ip ointed out just before that Jones mentions that, in a wo rk of 1935, whichis later than we have been able to verify ourselves, Sellin maintained h isposition.s

If, really, I have not up till now alrea dy overabused the effort that I haveJed you to make, for which I thank you , it would b e interesting, for what Iwill subsequently have to say, if you co uld give us some ide a of how H oseahas a meaning ,,:h ich has nothing to do with these minu tiae.

The important point is the use of the 'ich we were talking abou t the otherday. The novelty of Hosea, if I have und ers tood correctly, is in sum thi sappea l of a ve ry special kind . I hope that everyone will ge t out a little Bibleto obtain some idea of the tone of Hosea. It h as a rype of invect ive feroci ty,really te rrifying, which is th at of Yahweh speaking to his people in a lengthydiscourse. \Vh en I spoke of Hosea before obtaining Sellin 's book, I said, " Ihave read n oth ing in H osea th at is d ose to resembling what Sellin fin ds,"but on the oth er hand I pointed OUt in passing the importance of invective,of the imputation of a rite of sacr ed prostitution {hat extends from stan tofinis h, and, in oppos it ion . advance s of some kind wherebyYahweh declareshimself to be the sp ouse. It is possible to say that th is is th e beginning ofthe long tradition -ci n itse lf quite myst erious. and it does n ot seem to m e tobe obvious that we can rea lly locate its rnea ning .v-which makes Christ thespouse of the C hu rch and the C h urch the spouse of Chris t . It begins here,th ere is no tr ace of it p rior to Hosea.

The te rm used for spouse. 'i,h, is the very one whic h, in the second chap­ter of Genesis, is used to name Adam's par tner. The first time that anyonespeakss, that is to say, in vers e 27 of the first chapte r in which God createsthem man and wom an , is, if I read it properly, zahhar and nekeoah, The sec ­ond time--since things are always repeated twice in the Bible- ',ch is then ame for being, ob ject, the rib, in the for m 'ichd. As if by chance, on e onlyneed s to add a little a to it.

If vou could testify to its usage to designate the term where it concernssom ething even more divested of sexuality.

5 Fr eud actually makes several reference, to Sellin, and in one place qu oteshim at length. See Moses and Mon otheilln, SE 23:51- 2. . , .

6 Jones, S igmund Freud: Life and l\Vrh 3:400. The book IS Geschichte desisraclitisch-ju disch en Vofkes (Leipzig: Q udlo;l & M eyer, .193 5); sec pp. 7 ~;-8: Jon es sa~s

he was told by Jewish scho lars of th e day that Sellin subsequently Withdrew hissuggestion and apologized for havin g made it ." H()weve~, Jones goes on to say t?athe could never find any sup port for this In any of Sellm.s l a te~ wnungs. H e claim sthat in a work published s(J~t: thir~een. years 131e~ Se llll~ m amtame he h~s found" fur th er confirmation " for hie thesis "in the wrrnngs ot oth er proph ets Oanes,3:400).

T he Other Side of Psychoan alysis---

2

Monsieur Oaquoc In the second edition Seain left the exegesis of 1921 filr chap­ter'S 5 and 9. HQWc!1'Cr. 0'1 the other hand, he gave up pmmoh'ng his hYPOlhcs# ofM(~'l!.f ·death in his works on the [amaus dead savant ofthe Th.'Ult7'O-lsaiah." Heperll.:lPS retained the idea of Moses' death, bw he abandoned the idea of using itto interpret the chapter on the servant. I wonder whether Freud didn'l fall vu timto Selli" 's academic pmtig/'.

3 Sec Erne~t Jon es, S'l!» llm d Freud: Life and WOrks 3:400-1 (London : H o-garth Pr ess, 1957) . . . . h

4 Caquot seems to be referring to Sellin, Das Rossel des dcuteNje,'iJJam sc enBuches (Leipzig, 190R).

That 's true. But Freud do esn't build anything on this construct ion . He sim­ply indicates that a cer tain Sellin has recently expressed as defensible the

138

Something astounds me in Sellin 's thought. N aturally, we are unable topenetrat e Se llin's thought , but if we assume th at what is wr~tten has ~emeaning he decipher s in it when he recon stitutes a text with a certainse nse , there 's no guarantee anywhere that thi s text, if one can call it a text,or this voca lizat ion co uld be understood by anyone. In saying, for instance,that N umbers chapter 25 hides the event of M oses' murder, one is righ t inthe midst of amb iguity.

In the register of Se llin's thought, wh ich I do not bel ieve brings the ca t­egories of the unconscious inrc play, the fact of hid ing the event of Shiuimby such an absurd story is altogether unsustaina ble.

This is obviously where it gets interesting-the extraord inary latencyth at such a way of proceeding co mprises.

O ne can understand, up to a point, how Freud derives re inforcementhere for the idea that it is. a question of a memory, supposed in his register,that sta nds OUt despite all the intentio ns, desp ite a strong resistance . Itremains very ud d nevertheles s that it is supported by writings, and that itis with the aid of writings mat it can be redec iphcred .

jones att ests that Freud would have had, apparently, according to Sellinhimself communicated to him that he was not so confide nt ali alt that .?. . . .Moreover , as you indicated just before, he take" the quesuon up agam In

the second editio n.

161

X: lOn the relations between existentialism and structuralism.]

Yes, it's as if existential thought was the only guarantee ofa recourse to affects.

170

14 ,Interview on the steps of the Pantheon

3 The book in question is Science et nescience (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).

X: You spoke about the Other as the treasure trove of signifiers, and you said thatthere was no confronting it. Might it include incoherent things? The signifier is notnecessarily coherent.

X: Can you go back to what you started saying about Hegel?

I certainly won't be giving this morning's seminar here. This is not why Iam here. I am using the occasion to learn a bit about what some of youmight have to say to me, which doesn't easily occur when we are in a lec­ture theater.

It's precisely because I do think that that I have gone to all this effort forthe past eighteen or nineteen years. Otherwise I can't see why I would doit. And I can't see what would lead to my name's being added precisely toa list of philosophers, which doesn't seem to me to be entirely judicious.

the emergence, the coming into being, not of anxiety but of the concept ofanxiety, as Kierkegaard himself explicitly calls one of his works. It's not fornothing that historically this concept emerged at a certain moment. This iswhat I was counting on expounding for you this morning.

I am not alone in making this comparison with Kierkcgaard. Yesterday Ireceived a book by Manuel de Dieguez.> Well, the things he says about me!As I had to prepare my stuff for you and because it is all done at the very lastminute-what I have to tell you is never ready until the final hour, everythingI write down and recount to you is generally noted down between five andeleven in the morning-I haven't had the time to locate myself in all this greatto-do I am inserted into, in relation not only to Kicrkcgaard, but to Ockhamand Gorgias too. It's all there, as are huge chunks of what I recount. It's fairlyextraordinary, because without quoting me half of the book is called "Lacanand"-I'll give you three guessee-v'transcendental psychoanalysis." Read it.To me it seems to be pretty overwhelming. I hadn't thought of myself as allthat transcendental, but then, you can never be very certain. Someone oncesaid to me, concerning books that were published about him, "Ah! We dohave ideas, my friend, we do have ideas!" Let's move on.

X: Do you think, then, that the ideas you get from the practice ofpsychoanalysisgive you something that cannot be found outside it?

Are you sure that I have said what you are imputing to me?Where did I saythat there was no confronting the Other? I do not think I have said that at

The Other Side of Psychoanalysis144

No one can yet imagine the extent to which people attribute thoughts tome. I only have to mention someone and I am said to be condescending.It's the very model of academic vertigo. Why in fact wouldn't I speak aboutKierkegaard? It's clear that if I place all this emphasis on anxiety in theeconomy, for it's a question of economy, it's obviously not in order to neg­lect the fact that at a certain moment there was someone who represents

Someone whose intentions I don't need to describe is doing an entirereport, to be published in two days time, so as to denounce in a note thefact that I put affect in the background, that I ignore it. It's a mistake tothink I neglect affects-c-as if already everyone's behavior was not enough to

affect me. My entire seminar that year was, on the contrary, structuredaround anxiety, insofar as it is the central affect, the one around whicheverything is organized. Since I was able to introduce anxiety as the funda­mental affect, it was a good thing all the same that already, for a goodlength of time, I had not been neglecting affects.

I have simply given its full importance, in the determinism of dieVernein­

ung [negation], to what Freud has explicitly stated, that it's not affect that isrepressed. Freud has recourse to this famous Reprasentanewhich I translateas representant de la representation, and which others, and moreover not with­out some basis, persist in calling represemant-representauf, which absolutelydoes not mean the same thing.? In one case the representative is not a rep­resentation, in the other case the representative is just one representationamong others. These translations are radically different from one another.My translation implies that affect, through the fact of displacement, is effec­tively displaced, unidentified, broken off from its roots-it dudes us.

This is what is essential in repression. It's not that the affect is sup­pressed, it's that it is displaced and unrecognizable.

X: What do you thine of the relations that exist between you and Kierkegaardconcerning anxiety?

2 Lucan has in mind Freud's term "Vorste!lungsrepriiwlIlanz,"whieh Stracheyrenders as "ideational representative" in SE. Lacan's translation, representant de farepresentation, comes out as the "representation's representative," while the alterna­tive rendering, represenumt-represeniarf, would give,in English, the equally awkward"representative representative." See Jean Laplanehe and Serge Leclaire, "TheUnconscious: A Psychoanalytic Study," Yale French. Studies 48 (1972):118-75; andalsoMichelTort, "A propos du concept freudien de 'Representant'{Reprasentam:),"Gahiers pour l'anaiyse 5 (1966):41-67.

169

I am at tacking philooophy?That's greatl y exaggera ted .

X : [Inaudible.]

172

14 7Interview on the steps of the Pantheon

4 "Epilegomena to a T heory of the SoulWhich Has Been Presented as a Sci­ence," p p- 3--45 in Crossroad! in In" LJ./:Iy rinth (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,1984).

X: lJnaudible.]

Yesterd ay I read quite an amazing article in a review that, for person alreasons , I ha d n ever opened, which is called Illnconscienc. In the late st issueto be published a certain Cornelius Ca sroriadis , no less, has this questionabout my discourse, supposedly with reference to science." W'hat d oes hesay? He says what I find myself rep eating, namely that this discourse has anextremely precise reference to science , What he denoun ces as the essentialdifficulty of this discou rse. namely- I will spell it ou t for you-th is dis­placement that never ceases , is the very conditi on of ana lyt ic discourse, andit's in this respect that one can say that it is, I won ', say totally the d iscourseof science, but condi tioned by it, in th at th e discourse of science leaves nop lace for man.

I was counting on em phasizing this for you this morning. I won 't spoilwhat I am going to say about it next week .

X : Concerning anxiety, I tho/lght it WolS the opporirc oj ;\lUissance.

In th e articulation that I describ e as the un iversity discourse the a is in theplace of what? In the place, let' s say, of the exploited in the university dis-

'What I insist up on when I address the affects is the affect that is differentfrom all the others, that of anxiety, in that it 's said to have no ob ject. Lookat everything that has ever been writt en about anxiety, it 's always thi s thatis ins isted upon-fear has a referen ce to an object, wberea.. anxiety is saidto have no object, I say on m e contra ry th at anx iety is not without anobject. I haw already sta ted this, I did so a long time ago , and it's q uiteobvious that I 'Ai U still have to explain it to you again.

At the tim e I did not de signate this object as surplus jouissance, whichprove s th at there was someth ing to construct be fore I could name it assuch. It 's very precisely the . . . I am unab le to say the name, because, pre­cisely. it 's not a name. II's surplus ;Quissance, but it's not nam eable, even ifit 's approximately nameab le, tr ansla table, in th is way. This is why it h asbeen translated by the term "s urplus value." This object withou t whichanxie ty is not can still be addressed in some other way. It 's precisely th isthat over the cour se of th e year s I have given m ore an d more form to. 1 havein pa rticular given m any chatterboxes the opportunity to rush ha stily int oprim on the subject of what I m ay have had to say with the term "object a."

The Other Side of Psychoanalysis.-,-,--- -

14 6

X: That tnJnJj.,,"U it.

.Yo' linaudlble.}

I will try to give you th e essen tial part at my next seminar, if it takes place.

X:Thars an impression.

Yes, that is an impression . I was asked just a minute ago whether I believedthat things I rec ount may not be: problematic. I said that I did . M y Silkmoti vation for advancing them is because of a precise experien ce. the psy­choa nalyt ic experience . Ifit weren't for that I would con sider tha t I had nei­th er th e right nor abo ve all the desire to exten d the philosop hical discoursevery much beyon d the point at which it was most properly effaced .

This is perhaps precisely why my discourse is an ana lytic discourse. It's thestructure of ana lytic discourse to be like that. Le t 's say th at I adh ere to it asmuch as I can, without d arin g to say th at I strictly identity myself with it, ifI am successful.

X: W'hat .VOIi say is always decentered in relation to sense, you shun SC1l,~e,

That doesn 't transform it. It's a d ifferent discourse. l ois is wha t I am try­ing to show you by reminding those who have no idea about analytic CX~­

rience, to the entire exten t that I believe it to be so, that this is, all the same,its currency.T his is where I stan from . Otherw ise thi s discourse would nothave an aspect that is philosophically so problem atic, which was po intedout just before by the person over th ere, who spoke first , whe n he translatedit into sophistical terms. I don 't think this is right.The person I was talkingabout before places me as a kind of po int of emphasis, locates me at the cen­ter of so me kind of mixture, of fracturing, opening up of philosophical dis­course. It's not badly done, it's done in an extremely sympathetic manner,bu t my initial response--perh aps I will change my views on it-I said tomyself, "And yet, to place me in that heritage is quite some Emstelbmg, quitesome displacement, away from the imp ort of what I am capa ble of saying ."

171