Jacques-Alain Miller. Psychoanalysis Stripped Bare by its Bachelor

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Jacques-Alain Miller

Psychoanalysis Stripped Bare by its Bachelor 1

On June 20 1992, Jacques-Alain Miller came to Bordeaux to give a lecture and direct anafternoon of the Clinical Section and the Secretariat of the city of Bordeaux. Book XVII of Lacan's Seminar, transcribed by Jacques-Alain Miller, had just been published by Seuil. He gave us his reading of it.

While reading Le Seminaire, L'envers de la psychanalyse, this week, sinceI was going to say a few words about it in Bordeaux, I kept thinking that this

Envers was an elixir. Perhaps because I was going to talk about it inBordeaux! I kept thinking it was an extraordinary product of distillation andthat, to produce these thirteen chapters, Lacan had crushed, blended anddistilled an enormous amount of material in casks, that with this rather short

book, we had a sort of nectar. Another image came to me as I read it, thesomewhat less benign image, of a dance of Death. Lacan's little schemas — which he has fun comparing to four-footed animals — from time to time thisweek, I saw them as four skeletons, skeletons performing a sort of furiousdance, a sort of dance of the death drive. At one point, Lacan evokes, and thiscan seem ludicrous, the jouissance after death. Nevertheless, this jouissanceafter death was often represented by those undulating skeletons coming tocapture living beings in the midst of their daily occupations and business.Reading this seminar I could hear a laugh from beyond the grave, Lacan'slaugh, accompanying "the very movement of our contemporary life", as heexpresses it in this work.

It also seemed to me that he had overcome, in this seminar, the trial of being an old man addressing the young — it's a very difficult exercise, that of the discourse of an old man who addresses the young — and that we found in

this seminar neither the admonition of the burgrave nor a call to wisdom, nor even the aversion for jouissance that we sometimes

1 T.N.This is a translation of an article published in Les Cahiers de laclinique analytique n° 3, 1999, Section Clinique de Bordeaux, from atranscription of J.-A. Miller's talk. The editors of the Bulletin of the N LS thank J.-A. Miller for having authorized the publication and the translation of this

text, and J.-P. Deffieux for the permission to re-edit it. Since I did not haveaccess during my translation to Russell Grigg's new translation, all thetranslations from L'envers de la psychanalyse are my own. I apologize to



Russell.

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find with old people. On the contrary, I thought that Lacan's judgment was

very sound. He had spotted the main themes of the epoch, that the youth of those times, twenty years ago, were captivated by an old imaginary, a heroic,insurrectional, and revolutionary imaginary and I remembered that the old manhad not told them they should submit. There is nothing in this seminar thatinvites the revolted youth to throw in the sponge, not a word that says this, butthe old man reminds these young people that there are structures, languagestructures and that it does not suffice to blow on them to make them disappear and that, if they are to have any chance to make something change, this must

be taken into account. He warns them that, in his opinion and for the moment,the machine of capitalism cannot be stopped. At the time, what was still calledthe cultural revolution was in full force in Red China and a certain number of us believed, according to the words of Mao Tse-tung, that " the east wind waswinning out over the west wind" as the president put it.

Perhaps we should recall other events of that time. It was just after thisseminar, two years after if my memory is correct, that the dollar began to float

— I am not saying it was because of Lacan's Seminar! — but it was two yearslater, I believe, that the dollar began to float, that is to say that the worldemerged from fixed rates and the Bretton Woods agreement, and financialspeculation resolutely supplanted the industrial revolution in the developmentof capitalism. Rereading the seminar this week, I found that all this wasanticipated by Lacan, and even the years of Reagan. Of course, I'm not hidingthat while reading it, I felt some nostalgia for this youth, which was my own,as welt as hearing Lacan pose the question of this epoch: whatever had bittenthe students of that time to get them worked up like that ? In our present-day

times, what has bitten the students is the tse-tse fly, the fly of sleepingsickness. And this might be why we do not produce seminars like this for them.

I gave as my title a paraphrase of Marcel Duchamp. Marcel Duchamp is areference for this seminar; at one moment, Lacan recalls his famous phrase: "

The bachelor has to make his chocolate himself "2

, inviting the protestor to becareful that he " ne se fasse pas chocolat lui-meme" 3. There is another celebrated expression of Marcel Duchamp's,



T.N. This is Lacan's rendering. Duchamp's actual sentence is "The bachelor has to grind his chocolate himself"

T.N. A reference to the idiom " Etre chocolat". " Je suis chocolat" meanssomething tike " I have been hoodwinked". Lacan's "qu'il ne se fasse paschocolat lui-meme" is a warning to the '68 protestors, something like" not tosaw off the branch they're sitting on".

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«The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even". It is probably adisguised reference to Lao Shi. But the phrase itself remains curious, it is the

bridegroom who is normally in the position to strip the bride bare. Why, then, bachelors? It must be supposed that stripping her bare does not forcibly makethem want to marry her!

This reference to the bachelor is coherent with what Lacan evokes in thetext parallel to this seminar and which is entitled Radiophonie. It is a text hegives us pieces of in this Seminar and it is really parallel to it. In this text, hereminds us that we must above all not believe that the psychoanalyst is

married to psychoanalysis, or more precisely, above all, not believe that he ismarried to truth.

It seems to me that this seminar L'envers de la psychanalyse is a stripping bare of psychoanalysis, really a depluming in the sense, which we can recall,of the Alphonse Allais story: the pasha before whom the dancer wiggles andwho orders that a veil be taken off, and then another, and again and againseven times until she is completely naked and then he says: "Once more", andthe guards pounce on her and take off her skin, and she continues to wiggle inthat state in front of the pasha. Here psychoanalysis is not only skinned, butrealty reduced to its skeleton. Lacan goes one step more, still further thanAlphonse Allais's pasha. The discourse of the analyst is really the skeleton of

psychoanalysis. It is thus that Lacan conceived it: not just to the skin, but rightdown to the bone !

In this seminar, Lacan, to begin with, deplumes Freud in a way. Truly, atthe end of the seminar, Freud leaves the scene in his shirt-tails, if I might say.

Moreover Lacan deplumes Hegel too. At one moment, for example, he says:no need to start up again with that grand comedy of the struggle to death, astruggle of pure prestige. Lacan thinks that, with his discourse of the master



and his discourse of the hysterical, he has reduced Hegel and his Phenomenology of the Spirit to the bare bone of what it is about. He alsodeplumes, in passing, Wittgenstein, by pointing out the traces of psychosisfound in the Tractatus logico-philosophicus. He deplumes, just a bit, Plato and

Aristotle, by imputing to them precisely having deplumed the slave, havingstolen his knowledge for philosophy.

But even over and beyond depluming Freud, he deplumes psychoanalysis,a veritable strip-tease and we watch the feathers of psychoanalysis fall awayone by one. It was also more or less during these years that De Gaulle said: " Iwant England naked!". We have the impression this is what Lacan is sayingabout psychoanalysis.

For example, this commonplace of psychoanalysis: the prohibition of incest with the mother, everyone knows that, even if we neglect that it

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is important to maintain it for the two sexes in analytic theory. Look atwhat Lacan says on page 180 about this prohibition of incest with the mother,he says: " It is the structured camouflage of a fundamental fact "4, which hethinks he is giving us raw.

Or again, on the subject of the father, he considers Freud's differentlaborious essays on the question of the father, with respect to the Oedipuscomplex and to Totem and Taboo, with his references to Moses and Monotheism, he considers all this as a tissue (I quote him on page 115) of enormous contradictions, baroque, he says, superfluity, and he thinks he is

presenting us the truth as with respect to which all these Freudianconstructions are really defences. They are defences against the truth that thefather is castrated, he says, which is moreover not his last word, but it is the

profound inspiration of this seminar to shed, to suppress, to cast off thesefamiliar constructions and to leave on the bottom the sort of residue that thisskeleton is, and to show how things are stirring in every corner and that it ismuch more fun like that. Much more fun, and if it can be said, much moremodern than those stories that are realty showing their age at the time of theevents that this seminar bathes in.

Lacan also deplumes contemporary history. He deplumes it by indicating

that it is dominated by the signifier's (as we call it) being everywhere. Thealethosphere is that today the invisible signifier is everywhere, and that of course this alethosphere, as he names it, no longer allows us to take fright from



the "eternal silence of infinite spaces", it no longer allows us to believe thatthere is silence in those spaces, because id is speaking in every corner and wenow know how to hear what it is saying, and we even know ourselves how toinject the signifier into it. We have there a whole world of which, Lacan notes,

no phenomenology of perception — allusion to Merleau-Ponty's book — willever give us the slightest idea.

The other side 5, the underside of psychoanalysis is not the underpinningsof psychoanalysis, although on occasion Lacan makes a sign in direction of these underpinnings, and at the beginning of his seminar The Four

Fundamental Concepts, he introduces a very precise reference to these pudenda of psychoanalysis that we must approach with prudence in theexposes.

The other side does not mean the opposite of psychoanalysis. The other side, the inside is rather a reference to the tram, to the stuff, to the texture; youhave on this subject an indication page 61 in this

T.N. the complete quotation from Lacan, referring to the mother asforbidden, is: " It is the ordered camouflage of a fundamental fact, that there isno possible place in a mythical union that could be defined as sexual betweenman and woman"

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book, the inside and the supposed outside are made of the same stuff. But, precisely, what Lacan calls the other side of psychoanalysis is the discourse of the master. The discourse of the master is also the skeleton of contemporarylife, the skeleton, for Lacan, of everyday life, that Freud had not neglected to

be preoccupied by and even to treat the psychopathology of. Let's say they arethe ways along which, today, we go towards death, we go towards deathwithout thinking about it and while trying on our way to have a good time.Evidently, Lacan's choice of inventing a discourse of the master as acounterpoint to psychoanalysis, not only is it not innocent, but it is very guilty.

This was really plucking on a very vibrant chord for the public of thosetimes, for these protesting students who were the privileged addressees of thatyear. He says this to them: the analyst is anything but a master. Being a master is the opposite of the position of the analyst. While those who have read

Lacan, his texts of the 1950s and 60s, even of the 40s, know that up till then hehad quite readily not neglected the resonances of mastery and, on the contrary,he had exalted the analyst as a master of truth, in this seminar, we have an



entirely different music.

So, let's examine a bit more closely this affair of the other side or theinside and the outside. First, this means that the discourse of the master would

be the outside of what psychoanalysis would be the other side of. But,secondly, something else can be heard all through this seminar. In a way, for the elaboration of psychoanalysis, Freud took the outside, the outer side, thevisible side and what was left for Lacan was the inside, the other side. And it isthus that he takes himself as reference, he refers to what he wrote in thevolume of his Ecrits, that

5 T.N. L'envers de la psychanalyse. In French " l'envers" (the other side or the wrong side! is opposed to (endroit" (the outside or the right side). Lacan's

use of the terms often refers them to the Moebius band. They are almostalways difficult to translate because their uses are covered by more thantwenty spatial-relation terms in English, in random order for endroit: theoutside, the outer side, the top side, the upside, the facade, the exterior..., for envers-. the other side, the reverse side, the inside, the inner side, the bottomside, the downside, the interior... Since this article plays on these differentuses, I have tried, while varying the translations, to approach the sense theycarry in each context, sometimes by giving two terms so as to give an idea of

the links and play between the different uses, sometimes alternating the termsused. Since there are two metaphors involved in this text the two sides of a piece of cloth, and the inside of a body, underneath its skin, I have insisted onthe opposition inside and outside. As an indication of the complexity of translating these two terms, I realized after having attended the study days,which were entitled in French " L'envers des families" and which we hadtranslated as " The Other Side of Families'" that a more appropriate translationwould have been "The Family Upside Down and Inside Out".

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he was attempting to take up Freud's project from the other side, the inside. Inthis optic, it is Freud the outside and Lacan the inside. But thirdly, we alsohave the suspicion that there might have been one Freud who was the outsideand another who was the inside of the first Freud. Thus, Lacan notes that wefind at one moment in Freud's work something tike a passage to the other side.And fourthly, it might also be that there is an outside of Lacan's work and thatin this seminar Lacan passes to the inside of the first Lacan. It is clear that inthis seminar there is a target, a veritable Saint Sebastian pierced with arrows,and this target is Lacan martyrized by Lacan.



Freud the outside and Lacan the inside, this is the very idea of what Lacancalled the " return to Freud" which he reveals the truth of here, that the returnto Freud was Freud turned inside out. We can say that Freud wanted to makeof Freud's name the Name-of-the-Father of psychoanalysis. There is no doubt

that Freud is the father of psychoanalysis, even if the doctor Breuer, Anna 0.and Wilhelm Fliess have their part in the story. However, Freud as the Name-of-the-Father of psychoanalysis, is a semblant, a semblant that we do withoutonly under the condition that we use it. Lacan's return to Freud, this other sideof Freud, is this operation itself.

In this seminar, it seems to me that Lacan evaluates the way he enteredinto psychoanalysis, which consisted in, first, using the name of Freud, that isto say re-establishing the prevalence of the Freudian reference in

psychoanalysis, to the point of spelling out Freud's text, but just as well,secondly, in doing without Freud, that is to say in re-founding psychoanalysis,

bringing up to date the foundations of analytic action and the analytic act, anddoing,this in accordance with the rules of an argumentative and deductivereasoning. Lacan, on the one hand, accords an almost blind confidence toFreud's Magister dixit, but on the other, he questions unremittingly theMagister dixit, interprets it, discomposes it, displaces it, formalizes it, andreduces it. In this seminar, what is unveiled is precisely this moment, propelled

by the insurrection of the students itself. We might say that Lacan takes off hismask. He takes off the mask of the studious Freudian he was wearing, not

because he then becomes less of a Freudian, but he does what is necessary tomake the Magister dixit fall like so many feathers, in order to unveil thestructure involved.

I present this to you with a certain dramatization so you might be yankedfrom the sweet sleep that this little round of little letters holding hands, like weused to dance in rings, necessarily brings on; one has the impression of beingin a schoolyard. But in fact, the dance is cruel and you can find the delights of its cruelty in this seminar, which we must really say is sardonic, so as toremain within the semantics of

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the dance of Death. Moreover, Lacan said that his relation to Freud duringthose years was obviously of the order of transference, but of a negativetransference. In this seminar, he wants Freud's skin.



The Name-of-the-Father is a semblant, Freud as the Name-of-the Father of psychoanalysis is a semblant, but it is not the only one, Lacan is another

Name-of-the Father. So many semblants that are nevertheless necessary inorder to cover the lack of the true on the true, the absence of a final guarantee

for everything we say. This is so perceptible in psychoanalysis that we spendour time quoting what these Names-of-the-Father have said. We pass our timeliterally, when we talk about psychoanalysis, quoting them. You will find inthis seminar, in effect, some very precise considerations about quotations.

But the semblant of the proper name is not simply a fetish. These namesof Freud and Lacan, which are constantly on our lips, are erected on the veilcovering the abyss of the absence of guarantee for everything we say. Butwhen we use these names, this signals in fact that we have touched the real.Each time that the signifier, that knowledge touches on the real, each time thatthe universal discourse ends up by confessing that it was there and we didn'tknow it before, like the alethosphere — the Hertzian waves —, each timeknowledge passes into the real, a proper name is always called on. This is why

physics is Newtonian, and why the units of measure of physical phenomena,the constants of their properties, are designated by proper names. It is why wehave Euler's constant as well as Planck's, the Gaussian curve, Cantor's settheory and even Banach spaces and Godel's theorem.

This is why, even if Freud's name as the Name-of-the-Father of psychoa-nalysis is a semblant — as this entire seminar clamours even if it is not explicit

—, the analytic discourse, inasmuch as it touches the real, is not a semblant.This i$ what Lacan tried to write, proceeded as if he were writing, with this

Envers. The analytic discourse certainly gives its place to the semblant, as anydiscourse does, but with this semblant as its departure point, it touches on thereal, at least at the level of its method, its method which is free association,that is to say the invitation made by the analyst to the subject to say everythingthat comes into his mind.

It is with reference to this method, to what it produces materially, thatLacan reconsiders the whole of the Freudian and psychoanalytic theoreticalconstruction. He judges all Freud's constructions, alt the commonplaces of

psychoanalysis, all the missteps of Freud, of his pupils and of the psychoanalysts of his time and of today, he judges all that by this one measure:the method that produces a certain material. It is a method that tries to touch

the real, by virtue of the83



fact that the operator will be isolated with an individual who speaks and willinvite him to speak in the mode of free association, while limiting himself tointervene, essentially, to speak in the mode of interpretation, because after all,it is by his interpretation that we recognize the practitioner of psychoanalysis.

We manage with this method to obtain profound modifications of the subject,not only as effects of truth that are, after all, always untrustworthy but, strictlyspeaking, by what we can call transferences or jouissance, which are of a

permanent character, and it must be admitted, to begin with, by a transferenceof jouissance onto the anatyst himself.

This is where Lacan expropriated Freud, he says explicitly on page 15 thatit was for him a matter of " inhabiting [Freud's discourse] in another way".This other way of inhabiting is what he brought to us and which was lacking,which was not present in Freud's construction : his theory of the signifier, thetaking into account of the field of language and of the function of speech, thatis to say of the conditions that support the psychoanalytic method in itsmateriality. In this seminar, Lacan's reference remains the materiality of thismethod, the fact that above all the subject is invited to speak as he wants to.

Perhaps I can bring your attention now to what extent in this seminar,Lacan I and Lacan II, can be distinguished, to what extent in this seminar Lacan II criticizes Lacan I. For example, those who have read Lacanremember perhaps how he exalts, in his first writings, the function of truth,which had been precisely neglected by the philistines of knowledge. Howsurprised someone would be who, having heard Lacan in 1953 in his " Reportfrom Rome", and coming back to hear him in 1970, could apprehend that asmuch as he had exalted truth previously, in this seminar he depreciates it,

devalues it, depresses it and that he promotes the function of knowledge. Hesays that truth is humbug, he says it outright in this seminar and herecommends in any case that we only use this word as it is used in formallogic, where this truth, deprived of any pathos, is reduced to a written index:capital T for true, capital F for false; we have a dehydrated truth.

Yet again, notice how, in this seminar The Other Side of Psychoanalysis,he makes fun of both Sade and Freud for their love of truth. He attributes tothem, moreover, a curious kinship. I had thought, before deciding to give a

presentation of the whole, that I would present to you here the kinship of Sadeand Freud that Lacan puts forth curiously in this seminar. Notice again that theone who, in his seminar L'ethique de la psychanalyse exalted transgression,



here makes fun of it, makes fun of the transgressing heroes, to say that

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we never get anywhere except by treading softly. And then, compare what he

says in this seminar about Plato's Meno with what he said about it in hisSeminaire II.

Perhaps I should be more precise: Lacan I, the one who undertook thereturn to Freud, this Lacan I entered into psychoanalysis with "The functionand field of speech and language in psychoanalysis". The Lacan II who is bornwith The Other Side of Psychoanalysis is the one who comes up with, if Imight put it this way "The field and instance of jouissance and writing". Thenew field he opens up here is the field of jouissance, unknown to us in 1953,and what seems to him to be essential to psychoanalysis is less speech, alwaysoccasional, as he says, than writing — not poetry —, the writing thatconstitutes this group of permutations of discourses. When Lacan I enteredinto psychoanalysis by stressing the structure of language correlative to a

parole full of invention, and at the same time as he borrowed from Saussureand Jakobson their idea of language structure, at about the same time he

borrowed from Austin his notion of "the speech act", supposed precisely to bethe attribute of the speaking subject in act in analysis.

The inspiration of this seminar is entirely different, it is, on the contrary,that speech is strictly constrained by a structure that precedes it, that there aretypes of enunciations that he calls Discourses and which are preciselydetermined by the position of the subject relative to a certain number of functions, what we were effectively looking for at the time. We were trying atthe time to distinguish types of enunciation according to the relation of thesubject to truth: for example, we could, without much difficulty, see that therelation to truth of an enounce-ment 6 of formal logic is not the same as therelation to truth of a poetic enouncement, or again, that the type of scientificenouncements did not respond to the same constraints as the type of

philosophic enouncements. It was also the time when our dear Althusser wastrying to oppose, to distinguish science and ideology. It was more or less thesame time that Foucault was working on his Archeology of Knowledge, also

looking for these types of enunciation.We have here, under the name of Discourse, the major types of



enunciation distinguished by Lacan, which are like moulds with which

6 T.N. I refer to Beckett for this translation of enonce by " enouncement".Beckett's use (in his self-translations) was indicated to me by Ann Banfieldand always works much better than any of the other "utterances" and like"statements", because it works in practically all contexts, for oral or written

phrases, and includes a relation to the speaker that " sentence" does notnecessarily have.

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enouncements are formed. It amounts to taking seriously his own initialenouncement, that the message always comes from the Other and that thesubject is only the path for its return. Lacan explains here that in this Other,fundamentally, there are pre-inscribed structures of this order. In order to bringhis audience and his future readers to understand this, he proposes at the startof this seminar a theory of places, an actual topological treatment of discourse,

by showing that what his discourse might enounce was always pre-understoodand pre-interpreted, depending on the place at which he was speaking ; and so,if he was speaking at the hospital without engaging in a medical discourse, hecould only provoke amusement and if he was speaking at the Ecole normalesuperieure, what he said could only be interpreted as a teaching. We have, in away, by these examples, manifested these types of enunciation.

How is this passage from Lacan I to Lacan II achieved? Lacan I is the onewho brought into evidence the effect of sense and the effect of truth in speech,in the signifying chain, and this remains the pivot of this teaching. He adds inthis seminar that along with the effect of sense, of truth or of the signified,

there is an effect of jouissance. This is how we can decipher most simply thefour terms of the discourse of the master.

What does Lacan call S 2? It is the minimal chain of signifiers, with respectto the Saussurian definition of the signifier that I can give you: the signifier isa differential position, that is to say it is posed by opposing, by difference, thisis the character that Saussure calls the diacritic of the signifier. A signifier does not exist by itself and its minimum is two. It is this that Lacan writes S,—

S2, and he thus writes the signifying pair as the minimum articulation of signifiers. If we give it a temporal value, if we say: to begin with the first andthen the second, it is difficult to call the first: signifier, and you will see that, in



this seminar, Lacan calls it occasionally the mark, because it only becomes asignifier starting with the second.

You have there the example of this retroactive functioning of the signifier,that is to say the first being always enigmatic, it is only with the second, inreturn, that it becomes clear and an effect of signification is produced. Lacansought this retroaction in what he was working on then, in Freud and his "Wolf-Man". So if we consider S 2, the effect of signification I evoked for yourapidly — S 1 is mysterious, with the second signifier it becomes clearer — wewrite underneath the the smalt s of the signified to say that in return the s must

be produced by virtue of S 2. This is where Lacan placed in the beginning hiseffect of signified or of signification or of sense, alt of which he had already

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given different definitions to.

Here you find it written barred capital S ($), which after all writes twothings simultaneously: first, that in this place we have no signifier, since we

have the signified, which is why he bars the S of the signifier; secondly, thereis no better way to define the subject in psychoanalysis, that is to say thesubject we are expecting to change by virtue of the signifier, if not byinscribing him at this very place, by inscribing him as an effect of signification. If we suppose that the analytic interpretation, that is, a signifier

brought by the analyst and introduced into the chain, is susceptible to changethe subject, it is because we treat the subject exactly like an effect of signification. So let's take this as far as we can and this is what Lacan did by

writing at this place barred S ($), the signifier of the subject.He adds a, which means in his language that in addition to these effects of

sense and of truth, there is an effect of jouissance. On occasion, he wrote it thisway to produce an equivoque: jouis-sens. Next to the sense, which is there, we

believe, to be understood, there is in addition a sens joui; that is what heretains.

This is why there is a time when knowledge captivates and then it

vanishes and then it ceases and it goes tranquilly back to the University, whichis the conservatory of knowledge when it no longer provokes jouissance. Atthat point, every professor puts his whole heart, his whole talent in trying to



provoke jouissance once more with this old knowledge. Some manage andothers do not, which is why we are not in a hurry to put psychoanalysis in theUniversity. As long as we manage to find enough jouissance, not only in the

practice of psychoanalysis but in addition in everything we can say about it,

and that we find enough jouissance to fill rooms, we will stay outside, on theoutskirts of the University.

Moreover, the University only opened its door furtively, just during thoseevents — at exactly that time the Department of psychoanalysis began at theUniversity of Paris VIII —, then the door was quickly closed and wethoroughly agree with this: they are pushing from their side to close it and weare pulling from our side so it might not open. Obviously, the day when thiseffect of jouissance has lost its tang, when we are really hobbling around, andthat will ond up by happening, at that moment they will take us into thehospice, and they will welcome us with open arms.

The most serious key to this seminar is what Freud called repetition. It iswhat Lacan calls in this seminar the " Freudian fable of repetition",

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and nevertheless it is with reference to this that he rethinks the whole of psychoanalysis.

Look at what he wrote about the compulsion of repetition, for example inthis text that was recently found in Spain and which has just been republishedin Spain and in France: if you want an image, its the Fort-Da, this episode of Freud's observation of a child, of a small child, who throwing a bobbin reel

away an,d pulling it back, scans the movement of phonemes that Freudtranscribes Fort-Da. You know that Lacan commented this a thousand and onetimes, and curiously I believe this example does not appear except veryallusively in the seminar whose axis is repetition. In 1958 for example, hesaid: "the compulsion of repetition discovered by Freud was identified by himas the insistence of a truth that cries out in the desert of ignorance". At thatdate, he linked the compulsion of repetition to the insistence of truth.

In the status you will find given here to this compulsion of repetition asfunction, he deciphers it on the contrary with reference to jouissance : wherehe saw the effect of truth, he here sees an effect, or more exactly, as he willsay more precisely, a product of jouissance. The essential of this seminar is to



say "the essential of what we are dealing with in the exploration of theunconscious is repetition". He had distinguished in his Four Fundamental Concepts the unconscious from repetition, and he says in this seminar that theessential of the unconscious is repetition.

To begin with, this gives us the key to this " Freud the inside of Freud"that I announced earlier. Lacan says very precisely, page 88: " It is even whatFreud discovered precisely around 1920 — this is a very precise reference in

Beyond the Pleasure Principle — and it is there, in a way, the turning point of Freud's discovery". It is a topological notation, but in a way, it is at thismoment that Freud passes somehow to the other side of his own doctrine.

Lacan specifies that his first finding was "to have spelled out the

unconscious". His first finding is fundamentally the interpretation of dreams,having perceived that through knowledge, without the subject's havingcognition of it, there is a whole organization that functions and makes sense,which can be found out through free association. But his second finding is the

beyond of the pleasure principle and, he says: " the essential of whatdetermines what we are dealing with in the exploration of the unconscious isrepetition". We can say this is the outline of this book, of this seminar, that Igave three parts to, which, I believe, are fairly easily distinguishable.

I entitled the first part "Axes of analytic subversion", which is an expres-sion that Lacan uses. He goes back to Beyond the Pleasure Principle in

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order to say that the essential of the unconscious is repetition. So, the essentialof the unconscious is not the effect of truth, it is the effect of jouissance. Thesecond part is the application of this unveiled position, the application toeverything that in Freud has to do with the father. The third part, for which Itook Balzac's title with Lacan's slip: "The other side of contemporary life", isthere precisely to say that because the Freudian father is only a camouflage,

because the Freudian father is only a mask, because the Name-of-the-Father isonly a semblant, today's protestor who attacks this mannequin is he too " chocolat" 7 .

The profound logic of this seminar is to start with what Freud himself articulated and which seems to be, as Lacan says, "an economic reduction of the field of jouissance", to start with repetition and to strip it bare. The second



part consists in unmasking the semblant of the father and, of course, hisresidual real, which no longer resembles a father, which no longer has thefigure of the father; and thirdly, to show this to the protestor and tell him he isonly attacking a scarecrow, that he is directing his blows in a direction

opposed to where things are going on. And its true, the poor children wewere ! We thought we were up against the C.R.S., and now their blows arefalling on the farmers. On the other hand, we are verifying today, well beyondwhat it was then, the racing; engine of a signifying system that is producingmore and more means of jouissance without producing any more satisfactions,a greater and greater want of jouissance, or more exactly, as Lacan says, andthat seems really to be the note of what we meet up with today, "honky-tonk

bits of surplus-jouissance".

I will here insist on this little notation that Lacan gives us: Beyond the pleasure principle is the turning point of Freud's work. It is quite coherent withwhat he says in his Ecrits, pages 67-68 — and we must always control theseminars, which always have a zone of a more or less important imprecision or even errors of transcription, with the Ecrits — he evokes precisely his takingup of the Freudian project by its inside, its other side. It is once more withreference to Beyond the pleasure principle that he says that Freud gave a newsense to the principle of pleasure by installing with respect to this principle

"the signifying articulation of repetition in the circuit of reality".

This is not at all what Lacan said before. If you reread his Seminar II, youwill see he opposes the homeostasis of the principle of pleasure and the

principle of the repetition of signifiers, which go beyond, which are still a power of disharmony and unbalance, whose result is that

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T.N. " Hoodwinked "89

instead of halting, instead of being satisfied, we say " More !", we want more,like the child who continues to play with his bobbin. Here, Lacan, and this isthe point of view that continues in this seminar, puts the pleasure principle andthe repetitions of signifiers on the same side. This is what produces the strangeeffects of this seminar, to show that the pleasure principle itself is the principlethat governs the repetition of signifiers. He also indicates in his Ecrits that this

pleasure principle of Freud's really has a new sense with respect to what might be traditional, Aristotelian about it, since it" lends itself to the forcing of itstraditional barrier on the side of a jouissance whose being takes the name of



masochism or even opens onto the death drive". This sentence, which is foundin his text" On our antecedents", is the program of his seminar The Other Sideof Psychoanalysis. He will find himself precisely on these traces.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle is the pivot of this seminar and at the sametime Lacan will talk of repetition in quite another way than Freud did. The ideathat there is an analytic discourse allows him to consider that his reference isthe same as Freud's, that he is in the same discourse as Freud, but withreference to this discourse, he says something very different. Because of thisreference to the same discourse he will continue to call himself Freudian.Instead of the Freudian fable, he tries to elaborate a teaching as close as

possible to the logical determinations of this structure. What is this logicaldetermination ? Take the very simple example of the Fort-Da, which Freuddeciphered tike this: the mother goes away, the abandoned child masters hisdispleasure by reproducing with this little object her departure and her returnand punctuating it with the phonemes. Lacan retranslates this first by insistingon the place of this moment of displeasure and its attraction for the subject. Itis precisely this mysterious satisfaction found in displeasure that he baptizes

jouissance.

This is why he poses several times in this seminar the question of the

masochist, of the one who knows effectively the profit and the satisfactionthere is to be drawn from pain, but as Lacan says: only a little pain, a verylittle pain; getting a little bit of pain from some other who is just cut out for it,and above all who is obedient. Sacher-Masoch, whom we owe the term itself to, had a very devoted wife who he could ask to push things a little bit over thelimit of the pleasure principle, to yank him out of his drowsy tranquillity so hemight be just a bit aware of his body.

Here Lacan is very attentive and even comical. He says: "It begins with atickle and ends up with a rousing fire". The rousing fire

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obviously is very painful; the tickle or the whip, so many marks, more or

less permanent, inflicted on the body, figure how there must be a mark, whichcan go so far as destruction when it reaches the extreme limits of passion, howa mark is needed on the body to extract from one's homeostasis an exquisite



displeasure. Lacan sees in fact in masochism the paradigm of this extraction of jouissance. It is only an example, of course ; you can keep it in mind to helpyou grasp that he makes of his S, the signifier that both provokes andcommemorates an irruption of jouissance, in the sense of the Fort o f the child

who keeps with this signifier something like the memory of both the toss andthe repletion when the bobbin returns. This definition, which Lacan proposesfor what he calls the unary trait, is a definition of the signifier without itscouple, which is not really a signifier according to Saussure's definition, butwhich is obviously calling for an S 2 just as the Fort calls for the Da and finally

just as the Fort calls for the couple Fort-Da, and this S 2 is the couple Fort-Daitself.

This gives you a short-circuited clarification of what can seem in the beginning so surprising about Lacan's proposal: knowledge is a means of jouissance. It is by the signifier, and first of alt by the mark, that jouissance isextracted. The thesis you have here: knowledge is a means to jouissance,corrects what Lacan had been saying for years, that the signifying chain haseffects of truth. It is what corrects and what completes this proposal.

If we question ourselves on the result of the functioning of the system of signifiers as a set, of the domestication of the body by the signifier, step 3 isoverall an effect of the dwindling of jouissance. This is what we observe after all for domestic animals, who are much less handsome in domesticity thanthey are in the wild: once taken into a system of language, they are somehowdevitalized. It is this general effect that Lacan disposes in this seminar, boththe signifier that produces jouissance and the signifier that deletes an original

jouissance that we know nothing about. Occasionally, he asks the question of what the jouissance of the oyster might be, or the castor or the tree, when itsays nothing. Is it infinitely painful or a complete jouissance? Fundamentally,

it is both.It is precisely with this step 3, the dwindling of jouissance, that Lacan will

deplume psychoanalysis, with the minus that is inscribed after S ] —S 2 in thechain that I am recomposing. In effect, he demonstrates, with reference toFreud's text, that what we call, firstly the prohibition of phallic jouissance (in

particular that you must not masturbate), secondly the prohibition that touchesthe jouissance of the mother (no incest), thirdly the invention, the idea, of themurder of the father, that these three fables of psychoanalysis are no more thanthe camouflage of this dwindling of jouissance, which is the almostmechanical effect



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of the hold language has on the body. By virtue of which, of course, we do our utmost so that still something else might surge from these marks on the body.

That is step 4 that Lacan calls little a, once we have lost all of the jouissance through language, which translates what Freud himself presents asmigrations of the libido. Freud's interest turned to discerning where the libidowas found in the body and he isolated the erogenous zones, which are like theisolates of the libido in the body, while sensing that it was not everywhere, thatit was concentrated. This is what Lacan goes back to, by showing andtranslating the almost mechanical effect of language on the body, so a minus,and we manage to recuperate something from this disaster, but with a minus.

You need to move heaven and earth to recuperate a little something from thisdisaster of jouissance. And it's always with "modest measures" as he says,whether it be by " tickling" or " grilling", we endeavour with whatever wehave at hand to bring back into this body a little bit of jouissance. This is the

bare bone, the skeleton of the affair.

Next to what is expressed there, I hope it was simply expressed, butsimplicity corresponds to Lacan's aim, we have the kitsch of Freud'sconstructions, which nevertheless must lead up to Oedipus. The father of the

primitive hoard comes into the second act, Moses breaks the Tables of the Lawon the Jewish people, and then the forbidden mother is presented and thechildren make merry. It must be said that there is a bit of buffoonery in Freudand Lacan's references in place of this are to energetics and thermodynamics;he plays with entropy and says: the dwindling of jouissance is like entropy, itturns and there is something, a quantity that begins to diminish whether youwant it to or not. This is not an example that must forcibly be taken seriously,except that in the place of Freud's mythical buffoonery, you have a scientific,

mechanical reference that he had already used in his Seminaire II, but withrather marked displacements.

So that you find in this seminar successively, on the one hand, thedepluming of the phallus, because this prohibition of phallic jouissance is infact a camouflage of this dwindling, translated in terms of prohibition. We

choose the phallus because it is the organ in the body whose jouissance can beisolated par excellence, and occasionally separated from the jouissance of theindividual who is dealing with it. Everything shows that this organ has its



independence and that it does not always respond in the twinkling of an eye.

Thus, on the one hand we have the prohibition of the phallus, on the other,the prohibition of incest with the mother that was inscribed in

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different cultures, and of which Lacan remarks that it is also a mechanicalcamouflage of this minus of jouissance; and finally there is the liaison of thefather, this father on occasion imagined as a depriver of jouissance, whom werender responsible for our not getting enough jouissance. Lacan says: he is notthe real father, he is the imaginary father that we imagine as a depriver, andwho is precisely the father that the protestors are roused up against, the father who we find in Freud in a fundamental liaison with death. This is what Lacanretranslates by saying radically: this father is castrated, this father cannot gain

jouissance and is still only another version of the fundamental minus of jouissance. What I am summarizing for you here takes up pretty much all theend of Lacan's seminar.

I will not have time unfortunately to speak to you of Freud and Sade. Thatis where Lacan really pushes his negative transference a bit far, he says: Freudand Sade, it's all the same and moreover he makes use of the fact that Sade had

a guilty relationship with his sister-in-law to suppose that Freud did too. Yousee how far that goes.

It's very coherent and I would have liked to ask the question: why does he put the accent on this? I'm going to give you the answer right away: it's because he shows that for one and the other, marriage, as it happens, hadtransformed their wives into their mothers and so they could no longer touchthem because of the prohibition of incest with the mother, that is to say that themarriage itself had become incestuous. They both probably had a look nextdoor at their sisters-in-law. What is interesting is precisely that the permissible

jouissance, matrimonial jouissance, which for the Jews is even a recommended jouissance — it is recommended to seek sexual pleasure with your wife, to thecontrary of the doctrine of the Church where it is recommended to do your duty but pleasure is something else — it is precisely the permissible jouissancethat is transformed into forbidden jouissance. This brings to light a new aspectof the Other woman. Visibly, Lacan supposes here that these two sisters-in-law — Freud's and Sade's — were hysterical, which meant that both Freud andSade were animated by the love of truth.

Lacan says then that the love of truth is situated exactly at the level of the

Jacques-Alain Miller. Psychoanalysis Stripped Bare by its Bachelor

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