Jacques-Alain Miller

Psychoanalysis Stripped Bare by its Bachelor1

On June 20 1992, Jacques-Alain Miller came to Bordeaux to give a lecture and direct an
afternoon 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, since
I 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 in
Bordeaux! I kept thinking it was an extraordinary product of distillation and
that, to produce these thirteen chapters, Lacan had crushed, blended and
distilled 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, the
somewhat 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 this
week, I saw them as four skeletons, skeletons performing a sort of furious
dance, a sort of dance of the death drive. At one point, Lacan evokes, and this
can seem ludicrous, the jouissance after death. Nevertheless, this jouissance
after death was often represented by those undulating skeletons coming to
capture living beings in the midst of their daily occupations and business.
Reading this seminar I could hear a laugh from beyond the grave, Lacan's
laugh, accompanying "the very movement of our contemporary life", as he
expresses 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 la
clinique analytique n° 3, 1999, Section Clinique de Bordeaux, from a
transcription of J.-A. Miller's talk. The editors of the Bulletin of the NLS 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 have
access during my translation to Russell Grigg's new translation, all the
translations from L'envers de la psychanalyse are my own. I apologize to
Russell.
77

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 man
had not told them they should submit. There is nothing in this seminar that
invites the revolted youth to throw in the sponge, not a word that says this, but
the old man reminds these young people that there are structures, language
structures 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 called
the 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 was
winning out over the west wind" as the president put it.

Perhaps we should recall other events of that time. It was just after this
seminar, 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 years
later, I believe, that the dollar began to float, that is to say that the world
emerged from fixed rates and the Bretton Woods agreement, and financial
speculation resolutely supplanted the industrial revolution in the development
of capitalism. Rereading the seminar this week, I found that all this was
anticipated by Lacan, and even the years of Reagan. Of course, I'm not hiding
that 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 bitten
the 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 sleeping
sickness. 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 a

reference for this seminar; at one moment, Lacan recalls his famous phrase: "
The bachelor has to make his chocolate himself "2, inviting the protestor to be
careful 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" means
something tike " I have been hoodwinked". Lacan's "qu'il ne se fasse pas
chocolat lui-meme" is a warning to the '68 protestors, something like" not to
saw off the branch they're sitting on".
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«The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even". It is probably a

disguised 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 make
them want to marry her!

This reference to the bachelor is coherent with what Lacan evokes in the
text parallel to this seminar and which is entitled Radiophonie. It is a text he
gives us pieces of in this Seminar and it is really parallel to it. In this text, he
reminds us that we must above all not believe that the psychoanalyst is
married to psychoanalysis, or more precisely, above all, not believe that he is
married 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 and
who orders that a veil be taken off, and then another, and again and again
seven times until she is completely naked and then he says: "Once more", and
the guards pounce on her and take off her skin, and she continues to wiggle in
that state in front of the pasha. Here psychoanalysis is not only skinned, but
realty reduced to its skeleton. Lacan goes one step more, still further than
Alphonse 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 right
down to the bone !

In this seminar, Lacan, to begin with, deplumes Freud in a way. Truly, at

the 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, a
struggle 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 also
deplumes, in passing, Wittgenstein, by pointing out the traces of psychosis
found in the Tractatus logico-philosophicus. He deplumes, just a bit, Plato and
Aristotle, by imputing to them precisely having deplumed the slave, having
stolen 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 away
one by one. It was also more or less during these years that De Gaulle said: " I
want England naked!". We have the impression this is what Lacan is saying
about 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 at

what 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 he
thinks he is giving us raw.

Or again, on the subject of the father, he considers Freud's different

laborious essays on the question of the father, with respect to the Oedipus
complex 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 Freudian
constructions are really defences. They are defences against the truth that the
father 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 these
familiar constructions and to leave on the bottom the sort of residue that this
skeleton is, and to show how things are stirring in every corner and that it is
much more fun like that. Much more fun, and if it can be said, much more
modern than those stories that are realty showing their age at the time of the
events 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. The
alethosphere 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 that
there is silence in those spaces, because id is speaking in every corner and we
now know how to hear what it is saying, and we even know ourselves how to
inject the signifier into it. We have there a whole world of which, Lacan notes,
no phenomenology of perception — allusion to Merleau-Ponty's book — will
ever give us the slightest idea.

The other side5, the underside of psychoanalysis is not the underpinnings

of 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 the
exposes.

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; you
have on this subject an indication page 61 in this

T.N. the complete quotation from Lacan, referring to the mother as

forbidden, is: " It is the ordered camouflage of a fundamental fact, that there is
no possible place in a mythical union that could be defined as sexual between
man 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 contemporary
life, 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 are
the ways along which, today, we go towards death, we go towards death
without 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 a
counterpoint 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 those
times, for these protesting students who were the privileged addressees of that
year. 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 he
had 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 the
inside 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, the
visible side and what was left for Lacan was the inside, the other side. And it is
thus that he takes himself as reference, he refers to what he wrote in the
volume 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 almost
always difficult to translate because their uses are covered by more than
twenty spatial-relation terms in English, in random order for endroit: the
outside, 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 bottom
side, the downside, the interior... Since this article plays on these different
uses, I have tried, while varying the translations, to approach the sense they
carry 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 terms
used. 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 on
the 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 had
translated as " The Other Side of Families'" that a more appropriate translation
would 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. In
this optic, it is Freud the outside and Lacan the inside. But thirdly, we also
have the suspicion that there might have been one Freud who was the outside
and another who was the inside of the first Freud. Thus, Lacan notes that we
find 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 that
in this seminar Lacan passes to the inside of the first Lacan. It is clear that in
this 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 Lacan
called the " return to Freud" which he reveals the truth of here, that the return
to Freud was Freud turned inside out. We can say that Freud wanted to make
of 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 without
only under the condition that we use it. Lacan's return to Freud, this other side
of Freud, is this operation itself.

In this seminar, it seems to me that Lacan evaluates the way he entered

into psychoanalysis, which consisted in, first, using the name of Freud, that is
to 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, and
doing,this in accordance with the rules of an argumentative and deductive
reasoning. Lacan, on the one hand, accords an almost blind confidence to
Freud's Magister dixit, but on the other, he questions unremittingly the
Magister dixit, interprets it, discomposes it, displaces it, formalizes it, and
reduces 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 his
mask. 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 to
make the Magister dixit fall like so many feathers, in order to unveil the
structure involved.

I present this to you with a certain dramatization so you might be yanked

from the sweet sleep that this little round of little letters holding hands, like we
used to dance in rings, necessarily brings on; one has the impression of being
in 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 to
remain within the semantics of
82

the dance of Death. Moreover, Lacan said that his relation to Freud during
those years was obviously of the order of transference, but of a negative
transference. 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 in
order 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 spend
our time quoting what these Names-of-the-Father have said. We pass our time
literally, when we talk about psychoanalysis, quoting them. You will find in
this seminar, in effect, some very precise considerations about quotations.

But the semblant of the proper name is not simply a fetish. These names
of Freud and Lacan, which are constantly on our lips, are erected on the veil
covering the abyss of the absence of guarantee for everything we say. But
when 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 that
the universal discourse ends up by confessing that it was there and we didn't
know it before, like the alethosphere — the Hertzian waves —, each time
knowledge 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 we
have Euler's constant as well as Planck's, the Gaussian curve, Cantor's set
theory 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 any
discourse does, but with this semblant as its departure point, it touches on the
real, 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 everything
that comes into his mind.

It is with reference to this method, to what it produces materially, that

Lacan reconsiders the whole of the Freudian and psychoanalytic theoretical
construction. 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 the
83
fact that the operator will be isolated with an individual who speaks and will
invite him to speak in the mode of free association, while limiting himself to
intervene, 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, strictly
speaking, by what we can call transferences or jouissance, which are of a
permanent character, and it must be admitted, to begin with, by a transference
of jouissance onto the anatyst himself.

This is where Lacan expropriated Freud, he says explicitly on page 15 that

it 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, the
taking into account of the field of language and of the function of speech, that
is to say of the conditions that support the psychoanalytic method in its
materiality. In this seminar, Lacan's reference remains the materiality of this
method, 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 Lacan
remember perhaps how he exalts, in his first writings, the function of truth,
which had been precisely neglected by the philistines of knowledge. How
surprised someone would be who, having heard Lacan in 1953 in his " Report
from Rome", and coming back to hear him in 1970, could apprehend that as
much as he had exalted truth previously, in this seminar he depreciates it,
devalues it, depresses it and that he promotes the function of knowledge. He
says that truth is humbug, he says it outright in this seminar and he
recommends in any case that we only use this word as it is used in formal
logic, 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 to
them, 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 Sade
and Freud that Lacan puts forth curiously in this seminar. Notice again that the
one 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 his
Seminaire II.

Perhaps I should be more precise: Lacan I, the one who undertook the
return to Freud, this Lacan I entered into psychoanalysis with "The function
and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis". The Lacan II who is born
with The Other Side of Psychoanalysis is the one who comes up with, if I
might put it this way "The field and instance of jouissance and writing". The
new 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, always
occasional, as he says, than writing — not poetry —, the writing that
constitutes this group of permutations of discourses. When Lacan I entered
into psychoanalysis by stressing the structure of language correlative to a
parole full of invention, and at the same time as he borrowed from Saussure
and Jakobson their idea of language structure, at about the same time he
borrowed from Austin his notion of "the speech act", supposed precisely to be
the 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 are
types of enunciations that he calls Discourses and which are precisely
determined 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 at
the time to distinguish types of enunciation according to the relation of the
subject to truth: for example, we could, without much difficulty, see that the
relation to truth of an enounce-ment6 of formal logic is not the same as the
relation to truth of a poetic enouncement, or again, that the type of scientific
enouncements did not respond to the same constraints as the type of
philosophic enouncements. It was also the time when our dear Althusser was
trying to oppose, to distinguish science and ideology. It was more or less the
same 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 Banfield
and 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 not
necessarily have.
85

enouncements are formed. It amounts to taking seriously his own initial

enouncement, that the message always comes from the Other and that the
subject 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 bring
his audience and his future readers to understand this, he proposes at the start
of this seminar a theory of places, an actual topological treatment of discourse,
by showing that what his discourse might enounce was always pre-understood
and 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, he
could only provoke amusement and if he was speaking at the Ecole normale
superieure, what he said could only be interpreted as a teaching. We have, in a
way, by these examples, manifested these types of enunciation.

How is this passage from Lacan I to Lacan II achieved? Lacan I is the one
who 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 in
this 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 the
four terms of the discourse of the master.

What does Lacan call S2? It is the minimal chain of signifiers, with respect
to the Saussurian definition of the signifier that I can give you: the signifier is
a differential position, that is to say it is posed by opposing, by difference, this
is 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 and
then 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 a
signifier 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, in
return, that it becomes clear and an effect of signification is produced. Lacan
sought this retroaction in what he was working on then, in Freud and his "
Wolf-Man". So if we consider S2, the effect of signification I evoked for you
rapidly — S1 is mysterious, with the second signifier it becomes clearer — we
write underneath the the smalt s of the signified to say that in return the s must
be produced by virtue of S2. This is where Lacan placed in the beginning his
effect 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 ($), which after all writes two
things simultaneously: first, that in this place we have no signifier, since we
have the signified, which is why he bars the S of the signifier; secondly, there
is no better way to define the subject in psychoanalysis, that is to say the
subject we are expecting to change by virtue of the signifier, if not by
inscribing him at this very place, by inscribing him as an effect of
signification. If we suppose that the analytic interpretation, that is, a signifier
brought by the analyst and introduced into the chain, is susceptible to change
the subject, it is because we treat the subject exactly like an effect of
signification. So let's take this as far as we can and this is what Lacan did by
writing at this place barred S ($), 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 this
way 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 he
retains.

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, which
is the conservatory of knowledge when it no longer provokes jouissance. At
that point, every professor puts his whole heart, his whole talent in trying to
provoke jouissance once more with this old knowledge. Some manage and
others do not, which is why we are not in a hurry to put psychoanalysis in the
University. 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 the
outskirts of the University.

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

The most serious key to this seminar is what Freud called repetition. It is
what Lacan calls in this seminar the " Freudian fable of repetition",
87

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 in

this text that was recently found in Spain and which has just been republished
in 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 Freud
transcribes Fort-Da. You know that Lacan commented this a thousand and one
times, and curiously I believe this example does not appear except very
allusively in the seminar whose axis is repetition. In 1958 for example, he
said: "the compulsion of repetition discovered by Freud was identified by him
as the insistence of a truth that cries out in the desert of ignorance". At that
date, he linked the compulsion of repetition to the insistence of truth.

In the status you will find given here to this compulsion of repetition as
function, he deciphers it on the contrary with reference to jouissance : where
he saw the effect of truth, he here sees an effect, or more exactly, as he will
say 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 the
unconscious is repetition". He had distinguished in his Four Fundamental
Concepts the unconscious from repetition, and he says in this seminar that the
essential 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 what
Freud 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 this
moment 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 having
cognition 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 what
determines what we are dealing with in the exploration of the unconscious is
repetition". We can say this is the outline of this book, of this seminar, that I
gave 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 essential
of the unconscious is not the effect of truth, it is the effect of jouissance. The
second part is the application of this unveiled position, the application to
everything that in Freud has to do with the father. The third part, for which I
took Balzac's title with Lacan's slip: "The other side of contemporary life", is
there 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 is
only 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, his
residual real, which no longer resembles a father, which no longer has the
figure of the father; and thirdly, to show this to the protestor and tell him he is
only 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 we
were ! We thought we were up against the C.R.S., and now their blows are
falling on the farmers. On the other hand, we are verifying today, well beyond
what it was then, the racing; engine of a signifying system that is producing
more and more means of jouissance without producing any more satisfactions,
a greater and greater want of jouissance, or more exactly, as Lacan says, and
that 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 with
what he says in his Ecrits, pages 67-68 — and we must always control the
seminars, which always have a zone of a more or less important imprecision or
even errors of transcription, with the Ecrits — he evokes precisely his taking
up of the Freudian project by its inside, its other side. It is once more with
reference to Beyond the pleasure principle that he says that Freud gave a new
sense 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, you
will 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

7
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 is
the point of view that continues in this seminar, puts the pleasure principle and
the repetitions of signifiers on the same side. This is what produces the strange
effects of this seminar, to show that the pleasure principle itself is the principle
that 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 its
traditional 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 found
in his text" On our antecedents", is the program of his seminar The Other Side
of Psychoanalysis. He will find himself precisely on these traces.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle is the pivot of this seminar and at the same
time Lacan will talk of repetition in quite another way than Freud did. The idea
that there is an analytic discourse allows him to consider that his reference is
the same as Freud's, that he is in the same discourse as Freud, but with
reference to this discourse, he says something very different. Because of this
reference 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 logical
determination ? Take the very simple example of the Fort-Da, which Freud
deciphered tike this: the mother goes away, the abandoned child masters his
displeasure by reproducing with this little object her departure and her return
and punctuating it with the phonemes. Lacan retranslates this first by insisting
on the place of this moment of displeasure and its attraction for the subject. It
is 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 satisfaction
there is to be drawn from pain, but as Lacan says: only a little pain, a very
little 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 the
limit of the pleasure principle, to yank him out of his drowsy tranquillity so he
might be just a bit aware of his body.

Here Lacan is very attentive and even comical. He says: "It begins with a
tickle 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, which
can go so far as destruction when it reaches the extreme limits of passion, how
a 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 help
you grasp that he makes of his S, the signifier that both provokes and
commemorates 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 and
the repletion when the bobbin returns. This definition, which Lacan proposes
for what he calls the unary trait, is a definition of the signifier without its
couple, which is not really a signifier according to Saussure's definition, but
which is obviously calling for an S2 just as the Fort calls for the Da and finally
just as the Fort calls for the couple Fort-Da, and this S2 is the couple Fort-Da
itself.

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 is
extracted. The thesis you have here: knowledge is a means to jouissance,
corrects what Lacan had been saying for years, that the signifying chain has
effects 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 is
overall an effect of the dwindling of jouissance. This is what we observe after
all for domestic animals, who are much less handsome in domesticity than
they are in the wild: once taken into a system of language, they are somehow
devitalized. It is this general effect that Lacan disposes in this seminar, both
the 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 it
says 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 the
chain that I am recomposing. In effect, he demonstrates, with reference to
Freud's text, that what we call, firstly the prohibition of phallic jouissance (in
particular that you must not masturbate), secondly the prohibition that touches
the jouissance of the mother (no incest), thirdly the invention, the idea, of the
murder of the father, that these three fables of psychoanalysis are no more than
the camouflage of this dwindling of jouissance, which is the almost
mechanical 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 as
migrations of the libido. Freud's interest turned to discerning where the libido
was found in the body and he isolated the erogenous zones, which are like the
isolates of the libido in the body, while sensing that it was not everywhere, that
it was concentrated. This is what Lacan goes back to, by showing and
translating 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 this
disaster of jouissance. And it's always with "modest measures" as he says,
whether it be by " tickling" or " grilling", we endeavour with whatever we
have 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, but

simplicity corresponds to Lacan's aim, we have the kitsch of Freud's
constructions, which nevertheless must lead up to Oedipus. The father of the
primitive hoard comes into the second act, Moses breaks the Tables of the Law
on the Jewish people, and then the forbidden mother is presented and the
children make merry. It must be said that there is a bit of buffoonery in Freud
and 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, it
turns and there is something, a quantity that begins to diminish whether you
want 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 with
rather marked displacements.

So that you find in this seminar successively, on the one hand, the
depluming of the phallus, because this prohibition of phallic jouissance is in
fact 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 be
isolated par excellence, and occasionally separated from the jouissance of the
individual 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 mechanical

camouflage of this minus of jouissance; and finally there is the liaison of the
father, this father on occasion imagined as a depriver of jouissance, whom we
render responsible for our not getting enough jouissance. Lacan says: he is not
the real father, he is the imaginary father that we imagine as a depriver, and
who 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 Lacan
retranslates 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 the
end of Lacan's seminar.

I will not have time unfortunately to speak to you of Freud and Sade. That
is where Lacan really pushes his negative transference a bit far, he says: Freud
and 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. You
see 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, had
transformed their wives into their mothers and so they could no longer touch
them because of the prohibition of incest with the mother, that is to say that the
marriage itself had become incestuous. They both probably had a look next
door 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 the
contrary of the doctrine of the Church where it is recommended to do your
duty but pleasure is something else — it is precisely the permissible jouissance
that is transformed into forbidden jouissance. This brings to light a new aspect
of 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 and
Sade were animated by the love of truth.

Lacan says then that the love of truth is situated exactly at the level of the
minus that earlier I enumerated after S1— S2; the truth, the effect of truth is
inscribed precisely where this minus is. Finally, this forbidden phallus, this
forbidden mother and this dead father can all be summarized by barred S [$],
by this minus that is the locus of the effect of truth. This is why Lacan says,
for example: the love of truth is never anything but the love of castration. But
it is also for this that he says, because this obviously has two faces, he
surprises us by saying that truth is the sister of jouissance. They are both
sisters, but truth
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might be the sister of jouissance as it is forbidden or lacking.

We might then turn our interest to the new version of transgression that
Lacan gives us: we do not have the hero who marches forward against
prohibitions, like the man of desire of the XVIIIth century that Lacan alludes
to in his seminar L'ethique de la psychanalyse, there are no great transgressors,
not even Sade. Everything shows this moreover — I do not know if you have
read his last biography written by Maurice Lever — everything demonstrates
that, in fact, when he held a ribald between four walls, he managed effectively
to scratch her a bit, but if he finally got caught it was because he was
extremely maladroit since there were much worse things being done during the
XVIIIth century. Either he was extremely maladroit or, and this is Lacan's
thesis, he wanted to be caught and the truth of Sade's position was his
masochism, which explains that this great lord, this great writer, passed so
much time in the Bastille.
In fact, jouissance only has " modest means". I'm thinking of the remark
of the billionaire in The Human Comedy, which it is appropriate to evoke here
since Lacan himself refers to Balzac in this seminar, the immortal sentence of
the baron of Nucingen who, having managed to ogle Esther, says: "I got at
least a hundred thousand francs of jouissance !" Obviously, the aim of Lost
Illusions is to show that, when you have extensive means, as this billionaire
does, you have a great deal of difficulty finding jouissance. This is the thesis
that Lacan defends by showing the rich are encumbered by their jouissance,
that the jouissance that we can have, which is always the jouissance of the
object a, that is, a little supplement, this jouissance always demands to pass
first by the minus. This is why the baron de Nucingen's story of love and
jouissance is not a happy story.
 The lesson to find in this is that only modest means allow us to have
access to jouissance, which, after all, leaves, for many of us, room for hope.
Since this seminar is really quite pessimistic, I prefer to end on this
encouraging note.

This text was not reread by the author.

We thank Jacques-Alain Miller for having authorized us to transcribe

and publish it. ***

Translated by Thelma Sowley

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