Sache und Wort Niederschriften Nebenmensch Fremde
I am going to try to speak to you about the thing – das Ding.
If I introduce this term, it is because there are certain ambiguities, certain insufficiencies, in relation to the true meaning in Freud of the opposition between reality principle and pleasure principle; that is to say in relation to the material which I am trying to explore with you this year, so as to make you understand its importance for our practice as an ethics. And these ambiguities have to do with something that is of the order of the signifier and even of the order of language. What we need here is a concrete, positive and particular signifier. And I don’t find anything in the French language – I would be grateful to those who might be sufficiently stimulated by these remarks to suggest a solution – anything that could correspond to the subtle opposition in German, which it is not easy to bring out, between the two terms that mean “thing” – das Ding and die Sache.
We have only one word in French, the word “la chose” (thing), which derives from the Latin word “causa.” Its etymological connection to the law suggests to us something that presents itself as the wrapping and designation of the concrete. There is no doubt that in German, too, “thing” in its original sense concerns the notion of a proceeding, deliberation, or legal debate. Das Ding may imply not so much a legal proceeding itself as the assembly which makes it possible, the Volksversammlung.
Don’t imagine that this use of etymology, these insights, these etymological soundings, are what I prefer to guide myself by – although Freud does remind us all the time that in order to follow the track of the accumulated experience of tradition, of past generations, linguistic inquiry is the surest vehicle of the transmission of a development which marks psychic reality. Current practice, taking note of the use of the signifier in its synchrony, is infinitely more precious to us. We attach a far greater weight to the way in which Ding and Sache are used in current speech. Moreover, if we look up an etymological dictionary, we will find that Sache, too, originally had to do with a legal proceeding. Sache is the thing that is juridically questioned or, in our vocabulary, the transition to the symbolic order of a conflict between men.
Nevertheless, the two terms are not at all equivalent. For that matter you may have noted last time in Mr. Lefèvre-Pontalis’s remarks a quotation of terms whose thrust, as he brought out in his presentation, was to raise this question, it seems to me, in opposition to my doctrine – and it is all the more praiseworthy in his case since he doesn’t know German. It had to do with that passage in Freud’s article entitled “The Unconscious,” in which the representation of things, Sachvorstellung, is on every occasion opposed to that of words, Wortvorstellung.
I will not enter today into the discussion of the factors that would allow one to respond to that passage, so often invoked at least in the form of a question mark, by those of you who are inspired by my lectures to read Freud. It is a passage which appears to them to constitute an objection to the emphasis I place on signifying articulation as providing the true structure of the unconscious.
The passage in question seems to go against that, since it opposes Sachvorstellung, as belonging to the unconscious, to Wortvorstellung, as belonging to the preconscious. I would just beg those who stop at that passage – the majority of you presumably do not go and verify in Freud’s texts what I affirm here in my commentaries – I would beg them to read together, one after the other, the article called “Die Verdrängung” or “Repression,” which precedes the article on the unconscious, then that article itself, before arriving at the passage involved. I will just note for the rest of you that it has precisely to do with the question that the schizophrenic’s attitude poses for Freud, that is to say, the manifestly extraordinary prevalence of affinities between words in what one might call the schizophrenic world.
Everything that I have just discussed seems to me to lead in only one direction, namely, that Verdrängung operates on nothing other than signifiers. The fundamental situation of repression is organized around a relationship of the subject to the signifier. As Freud emphasizes, it is only from that perspective that it is possible to speak in a precise, analytical sense – I would call it operational – of unconscious and conscious. He realizes that the special situation of the schizophrenic, more clearly than that of any other form of neurosis, places us in the presence of the problem of representation.
I will perhaps have the opportunity to come back to this text later. But you will note that by offering the solution he seems to be offering in opposing Wortvorstellung to Sachvorstellung, there is a problem, an impasse, that Freud himself emphasizes and that can be explained by the state of linguistics in his time. He, nevertheless, understood and formulated admirably the distinction to be made between the operation of language as a function – namely, the moment when it is articulated and, in effect, plays an essential role in the preconscious – and the structure of language, as a result of which those elements put in play in the unconscious are organized. In between, those coordinations are set up, those Bahnungen, that concatenation, which dominate its whole economy.
I have digressed too much, since today I only want to restrict myself to the remark that Freud speaks of Sachvorstellung and not Dingvorstellung. Moreover, it is no accident if the Sachvorstellungen are linked to Wortvorstellungen, since it tells us that there is a relationship between thing and word. The straw of words only appears to us as straw insofar as we have separated it from the grain of things, and it was first the straw which bore that grain.
I don’t want to begin developing a theory of knowledge here, but it is obvious that the things of the human world are things in a universe structured by words, that language, symbolic processes, dominate and govern all. When we seek to explore the frontier between the animal and the human world, it is apparent to what extent the symbolic process as such doesn’t function in the animal world – a phenomenon that can only be a matter of astonishment for us. A difference in the intelligence, the flexibility, and the complexity of the apparatuses involved cannot be the only means of explaining that absence. That man is caught up in symbolic processes of a kind to which no animal has access cannot be resolved in psychological terms, since it implies that we first have a complete and precise knowledge of what this symbolic process means.
The Sache is clearly the thing, a product of industry and of human action as governed by language. However implicit they may first be in the genesis of that action, things are always on the surface, always within range of an explanation. To the extent that it is subjacent to and implicit in every human action, that activity of which things are the fruit belongs to the preconscious order, that is to say, something that our interest can bring to consciousness, on condition that we pay enough attention to it, that we take notice of it. The word is there in a reciprocal position to the extent that it articulates itself, that it comes to explain itself beside the thing, to the extent also that an action – which is itself dominated by language, indeed by command – will have separated out this object and given it birth.
Sache and Wort are, therefore, closely linked; they form a couple. Das Ding is found somewhere else.
I would like today to show you this Ding in life and in the reality principle that Freud introduces at the beginning of his thought and that persists to the end. I will point out the reference to it in a given passage of the Entwurf on the reality principle and in the article entitled “Die Verneinung” or “Denegation” in which it is an essential point.
This Ding is not in the relationship – which is to some extent a calculated one insofar as it is explicable – that causes man to question his words as referring to things which they have moreover created. There is something different in das Ding.
What one finds in das Ding is the true secret. For the reality principle has a secret that, as Lefèvre-Pontalis pointed out last time, is paradoxical. If Freud speaks of the reality principle, it is in order to reveal to us that from a certain point of view it is always defeated; it only manages to affirm itself at the margin. And this is so by reason of a kind of pressure that one might say, if things didn’t, in fact, go much further, Freud calls not “the vital needs” – as is often said in order to emphasize the secondary process – but die Not des Lebens in the German text. An infinitely stronger phrase. Something that wishes. “Need” and not “needs.” Pressure, urgency. The state of Not is the state of emergency in life.
This Not des Lebens intervenes at the level of the secondary process, but in a deeper way than through that corrective activity; it intervenes so as to determine the Qἠ level – the quantity of energy conserved by the organism in proportion to the response – which is necessary for the conservation of life. Take note that it is at the level of secondary process that the level of this necessary determination is exercised.
Let us return to the reality principle that is thus invoked from the point of view of its necessity effect. This remark puts us on the track of what I call its secret, namely, the following: As soon as we try to articulate the reality principle so as to make it depend on the physical world to which Freud’s purpose seems to require us to relate it, it is clear that it functions, in fact, to isolate the subject from reality.
We find in it nothing more than that which biology, in effect, teaches us, namely, that the structure of a living being is dominated by a process of homeostasis, of isolation from reality. Is that all Freud has to tell us when he speaks of the functioning of the reality principle? Apparently, yes. And he shows us that neither the quantitative element nor the qualitative element in reality enters the realm – the term he uses is Reich – of the secondary process.
Exterior quantity enters into contact with the apparatus called the φ system, that is to say, that part of the whole neuronic apparatus which is directly turned to the exterior or, roughly speaking, the nerve ends at the level of the skin, the tendons, and even the muscles and the bones, deep sensitivity. Everything is done so that Q quantity is definitely blocked, stopped in relation to that which is supported by another quantity, the Qἠ quantity – the latter determines the level that distinguishes the ψ apparatus within the neuronic whole. For the Entwurf is, in fact, the theory of a neuronic apparatus in relation to which the organism remains exterior, just as much as the outside world.
Let us turn to quality. There, too, the outside world doesn’t lose all quality. But, as the theory of the sensory organs shows, this quality is inscribed in a discontinuous way, according to a scale cut off at each end and shortened in relation to the different sensory fields in question. A sensory apparatus, Freud tells us, doesn’t only play the role of extinguisher or of shock-absorber, like the φ apparatus in general, but also plays the role of sieve.
He doesn’t go any further in the direction of potential solutions that properly belong to the domain of the physiologist, of the man who wrote The Sensations, Mr. Piéron. The question of whether, in the field likely to provoke visual, auditory or other perceptions, the choice is made in this way or that is not pursued further. Still, we do have there also the notion of a deep subjectivization of the outside world. Something sifts, sieves, in such a way that reality is only perceived by man, in his natural, spontaneous state at least, as radically selected. Man deals with selected bits of reality.
In truth, that only occurs in a function which is localized in relation to the economy of the whole; it doesn’t concern quality to the extent that it provides deeper information, that it achieves an essence, but only signs. Freud only sees them playing a role insofar as they are Qualitätszeichen, but the function of sign isn’t significant in relation to opaque and enigmatic quality. It is a sign to the extent that it alerts us to the presence of something that has, in effect, to do with the outside world; it signals to consciousness that it has to deal with the outside world.
Consciousness has to come to terms with that outside world, and it has had to come to terms with it ever since men have existed and thought and tried out theories of knowledge. Freud doesn’t take the problem any further except to note that it is certainly highly complex and that we are still a long way from being able to outline a solution of that which organically determines its particular genesis so precisely.
But given this, is that all that is involved when Freud speaks to us of the reality principle? Isn’t this relation no more than that which certain theorists of behaviorism suggest to us? The kind which represents the fortunate encounters of an organism faced with a world where it doubtless finds something to eat and of which it is capable of assimilating certain elements, but which is in principle made up of random events and chance meetings, chaotic. Is that all Freud expresses when he speaks of the reality principle?
That is the question I am raising here today with the notion of das Ding.
Before going any further, I will once again draw your attention to the contents of the little table with its double column that I introduced two weeks ago (see p. 34).
In one column there is the Lustprinzip; in the other, the Realitätsprinzip. Unconscious activity is on the side of the pleasure principle. The reality principle dominates that which, whether conscious or preconscious, is in any case present in the order of reasoned discourse, articulatable, accessible and emerging from the preconscious. I pointed out that to the extent that they are dominated by the pleasure principle, the thought processes are unconscious, as Freud emphasizes. They are only available to consciousness to the extent that they can be verbalized, that a reasoned account brings them within range of the reality principle, within range of a consciousness that is perpetually alert, interested through the investment of its attention in discovering something that may happen, so as to allow it to find its bearings in the real world.
It is in his own words that the subject in the most precarious of ways manages to grasp the ruses thanks to which his ideas are made to fit together in his thought, ideas that often emerge in the most enigmatic of ways. The need to speak them, to articulate them, introduces within them an often artificial order. Freud liked to insist on this point when he said that one always finds reasons for finding this attitude or that mood come over one, one after the other, but there is after all nothing to confirm that the true cause of their successive emergence is given us. It is precisely this that analysis adds to our experience.
There is always an abundance of reasons to make us believe in some rational explanation for the sequentiality of our endopsychic forms. However, as we know, in the majority of cases their true connections are to be found somewhere completely different.
Thus the process of thought is to be found in the field of the unconscious – I mean that thought process through which access to reality finds its way, the Not des Lebens, which maintains at a certain level the investment of the apparatus. It is only accessible through the artifice of the spoken word. Freud even goes so far as to say that it is only insofar as relations are spoken that we can hear ourselves speak, that there is Bewegung, movement of speech – I don’t think the use of this word is very common in German, and if Freud uses it, it is to emphasize the strangeness of the notion he insists on. It is only insofar as this Bewegung announces itself in the ω system that something may be known concerning whatever is introduced into the circuit to any degree – into the circuit that at the level of the φ apparatus tends above all to discharge itself through movement, so as to maintain tension at the lowest possible level.
The conscious subject is aware of what is involved in the process of Abfuhr, and appears under the sign of the pleasure principle only insofar as there is something centripetal in the movement, that there is a sense of movement toward speech, a sense of effort. And that would be limited to a dim perception, capable at the most of opposing in the world the two important qualities that Freud doesn’t fail to characterize as monotonous – i.e., immobility and mobility, that which can move and that which it is impossible to move – if certain movements of a different structure didn’t exist, that is, the articulated movements of words. That is once again something that is characterized by monotony, pallor, lack of color, but that is also the way everything that has to do with the thought processes reaches consciousness, with those tiny attempts to proceed from Vorstellung to Vorstellung, from representation to representation, around which the human world is organized. It is only insofar as something in the sensory-motor circuit manages to interest the ψ system at a certain level that something is perceived retroactively, something tangible, in the form of a Wortvorstellung.
That is how the conscious system, the ω system, can register something that happens in the psyche. Freud refers to it on a number of occasions, not without caution and sometimes ambiguously, as an endopsychic perception.
Let me emphasize further what is going on in the ψ system. From the Entwurf on, Freud isolates an Ich system. We will see its metamorphoses and transformations in subsequent developments of the theory, but it appears right away with all the ambiguity that Freud will reaffirm later when he says that the Ich is to a great extent unconscious.
The Ich is precisely defined in the Einführung des Ichs as a system that is uniformly invested with something which has a Gleichbesetzung – Freud did not write that term but I am following the drift of what he says relative to an equal, uniform investment. There is in the ψ system something that is constituted as an Ich and which is “eine Gruppe von Neuronen…. die konstant besetz ist, also dem durch die sekundäre Funktion erforderten Vorratsträger entspricht” – the term Vorrat in particular is repeated here. The maintenance of this investment characterizes a regulatory function there. And I am speaking of function here. If there is an unconscious, it is the Ich insofar as it is an unconscious function. And we have to deal with it insofar as it is regulated by that Besetzung, by that Gleichbesetzung. Whence the value of the decussation on which I insist and which we will see maintained in its duality throughout the development of Freud’s thought.
Now the system which perceives and registers, and which will later be called the Wahrnehmungsbewusstsein, is not on the level of the ego to the extent that it maintains equal and uniform and, as far as possible constant, the Besetzung that regulates the functioning of thought. Consciousness is elsewhere; it is an apparatus that Freud has to invent, that he tells us is intermediary between the ψ system and the φ system, yet that at the same time everything in the text informs us we should not put at the boundary between them. The fact is that the ψ system enters directly, doubtless through an apparatus, and spreads itself directly throughout the φ system, where it only gives up a part of the quantity that it brings with it.
The ω system functions elsewhere in a more isolated position, one that is less easily situated than any other apparatus. In fact, it isn’t from exterior quantity that the ωneurons extract their energy, Freud tells us; one can assume at most that they “sich die Periode aneignen,” they appropriate the period. That is what I was alluding to just now when I was referring to the choice of sensory apparatus. It plays a guiding role there in relation to the contributions coming from the Qualitätszeichen, in order to allow with the least movement all those departures that are individualized as attention paid to this or that chosen point on the circuit, and that will permit a better approximation to the process than the pleasure principle would tend to make automatically.
As soon as Freud tries to articulate the function of this system, something strikes us about this coupling, this union, which seems a fusion, between Wahrnenhmung, perception, and Bewusstsein, consciousness, expressed in the symbol W-Bw. I enjoin you to refer to letter 52 that, as Lefèvre-Pontalis noted last time, I have remarked on a number of times.1 It is a letter in which Freud begins to explain to Fliess in confidence his conception of how the unconscious must work. His whole theory of memory has to do with the sequence of Niederschriften, of inscriptions. The fundamental demand to which the whole system responds is that of ordering, in a coherent conception of the psychic apparatus, the different fields of that which he finds effectively functioning in the memory traces.
In letter 52 Wahrnehmung, that is to say the impression of the external world as raw, original, primitive, is outside the field which corresponds to a notable experience, namely, one that is effectively inscribed in something that, it is quite striking to note, Freud expresses right at the beginning of his thought as a Niederschrift, something that presents itself not simply in terms of Prägung or of impression, but in the sense of something which makes a sign and which is of the order of writing. And I wasn’t the one who made him choose that term.
The first Niederschrift occurs at a certain age that his first estimate has him situate before four years old, but that’s not important. Later, up to the age of eight, another, more organized Niederschrift, one that is organized in terms of memories, seems to me to constitute more precisely an unconscious. It’s not important if Freud is right or wrong; we have seen since how we can trace the unconscious and its organization of thought much further back. What is important is that next we have the level of the Vorbewusstsein and then that of the Bewusstsein insofar as it is not the sign of a time but of a terminus. In other words, that discussion which takes us forward from a meaning of the world to speech that can be formulated, the chain that extends from the most archaic unconscious to the articulate form of speech in a subject, all that takes place between Wahrnehmung and Bewusstsein, between glove and hand, so to speak The progress that interests Freud is then situated somewhere that, from the point of view of the topology of the subject, is not easily identified with a neuronic apparatus. Yet what goes on between Wahrnehmung and Bewusstsein must after all have to do with the unconscious, since that’s how Freud represents it to us – this time not simply in the form of a function, but of an Aufbau, of a structure, as he puts it himself in making the opposition.
In other words, it is to the extent that the signifying structure interposes itself between perception and consciousness that the unconscious intervenes, that the pleasure principle intervenes. Yet it is no longer in the form of a Gleichbesetzung or the function of the maintenance of a certain investment, but insofar as it concerns the Bahnungen. The structure of accumulated experience resides there and remains inscribed there.
At the level of the Ich, of the functioning unconscious, something regulates itself that tends to exclude the outside world. On the other hand, what is expressed at the level of Übung is discharge. And one finds the same intersection as in the whole economy of the apparatus. The structure regulates discharge; the function restrains it. Freud also calls that Vorrat, provisions; this is the word he uses for the larder of his own unconscious, Vorratskammer. Vorratsträger is the Ich as the basis of quantity and of energy that constitutes the core of the psychic apparatus.
On that basis there enters into play what we will see function as the first apprehension of reality by the subject. And it is at this point that that reality intervenes, which has the most intimate relationship to the subject, the Nebenmensch. The formula is striking to the extent that it expresses powerfully the idea of beside yet alike, separation and identity.
I ought really to read you the whole passage but I will limit myself to the climactic sentence: “Thus the complex of the Nebenmensch is separated into two parts, one of which affirms itself through an unchanging apparatus, which remains together as a thing, als Ding.”
That’s what the awful French translation you have at your disposal misses when it says “something remains as a coherent whole.” It has nothing to do with an allusion to a coherent whole that would occur in the passage from the verb to the noun, quite the contrary. The Ding is the element that is initially isolated by the subject in his experience of the Nebenmensch as being by its very nature alien, Fremde. The complex of the object is in two parts; there is a division, a difference in the approach to judgment. Everything in the object that is quality can be formulated as an attribute; it belongs to the investment of the ψ system and constitutes the earliest Vorstellungen around which the destiny of all that is controlled according to the laws of Lust and Unlust, of pleasure and unpleasure, will be played out in what might be called the primary emergences of the subject. Das Ding is something entirely different.
We have here an original division of the experience of reality. We find it as well in Verneinung. Look it up in the text. You will find the same function with the same significance of that which, from within the subject, finds itself in the beginning led toward a first outside – an outside which, Freud tells us, has nothing to do with that reality in which the subject will subsequently have to locate the Qualitätszeichen, signs that tell him that he is on the right track in his search for satisfaction.
That is something which, even prior to the test of this search, sets up its end, goal and aim. That’s what Freud indicates when he says that “the first and most immediate goal of the test of reality is not to find in a real perception an object which corresponds to the one which the subject represents to himself at that moment, but to find it again, to confirm that it is still present in reality.”
The whole progress of the subject is then oriented around the Ding as Fremde, strange and even hostile on occasion, or in any case the first outside. It is clearly a probing form of progress that seeks points of reference, but with relation to what? – with the world of desires. It demonstrates that something is there after all, and that to a certain extent it may be useful. Yet useful for what? – for nothing other than to serve as points of reference in relation to the world of wishes and expectations; it is turned toward that which helps on certain occasions to reach das Ding. That object will be there when in the end all conditions have been fulfilled – it is, of course, clear that what is supposed to be found cannot be found again. It is in its nature that the object as such is lost. It will never be found again. Something is there while one waits for something better, or worse, but which one wants.
The world of our experience, the Freudian world, assumes that it is this object, das Ding, as the absolute Other of the subject, that one is supposed to find again. It is to be found at the most as something missed. One doesn’t find it, but only its pleasurable associations. It is in this state of wishing for it and waiting for it that, in the name of the pleasure principle, the optimum tension will be sought; below that there is neither perception nor effort.
In the end, in the absence of something which hallucinates it in the form of a system of references, a world of perception cannot be organized in a valid way, cannot be constituted in a human way. The world of perception is represented by Freud as dependent on that fundamental hallucination without which there would be no attention available.
Here we come to the notion of the spezifische Aktion of which Freud speaks on a number of occasions, and that I would like to shed some light on here. There is, in fact, an ambiguity in the Befriedigungserlebnis. What is sought is the object in relation to which the pleasure principle functions. This functioning is in the material, the web, the medium to which all practical experience makes a reference. How then does Freud conceive of this experience, this specific action?
In this connection one has to read his correspondence with Fliess to appreciate the significance of it, and in particular that letter referred to above, which still has a lot to tell us. He says that an attack of hysteria is not a discharge. It is a warning to those who always feel the need to place the emphasis on the role of quantity in the functioning of affect. There is no field more favorable than that of hysteria to suggest to what extent in the concatenation of psychic events a fact is a question of relative contingency. It is by no means a discharge, sondern eine Aktion – an action, moreover, which is Mittel von Reproduktion von Lust.
We will see how what Freud calls an action is made clear. The essential characteristic of any action is to be a Mittel, a means of reproduction. In its root at least it is this: “Das ist er [der hysterische Anfall] wenigstens in der Wurzel.” And elsewhere “sonst motiviert er sich von dem Vorbewusstsein allerlei Gründen” – an action may be motivated on all kinds of grounds which are located at the level of the preconscious.
Immediately afterwards Freud explains what its essence consists of. And he illustrates at the same time what an action as Mittel zur Reproduktion means. In the case of hysteria, of a crisis of tears, everything is calculated, regulated, and, as it were, focused on den Anderen, on the Other, the prehistoric, unforgettable Other, that later no one will ever reach.
The thoughts we find expressed here allow us to make a first approach to the problem of neurosis and to understand its correlative or regulatory term. If one goal of the specific action which aims for the experience of satisfaction is to reproduce the initial state, to find das Ding, the object, again, we will be able to understand a great many forms of neurotic behavior.
The behavior of the hysteric, for example, has as its aim to recreate a state centered on the object, insofar as this object, das Ding, is, as Freud wrote somewhere, the support of an aversion. It is because the primary object is an object which failed to give satisfaction that the specific Erlebnis of the hysteric is organized.
On the other hand – this is Freud’s distinction and we don’t need to give it up – in obsessional neurosis, the object with relation to which the fundamental experience, the experience of pleasure, is organized, is an object which literally gives too much pleasure. Freud perceived this clearly; it was his first apperception of obsessional neurosis.
What in its various advances and many byways the behavior of the obsessional reveals and signifies is that he regulates his behavior so as to avoid what the subject often sees quite clearly as the goal and end of his desire. The motivation of this avoidance is often extraordinarily radical, since the pleasure principle is presented to us as possessing a mode of operation which is precisely to avoid excess, too much pleasure.
So as to move fast – as fast as Freud in his first apperceptions of ethical reality, insofar as it functions in the subject whom he is dealing with – I will outline the positing of the subject in the third of the major categories that Freud distinguishes at the beginning – hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and paranoia. As far as paranoia is concerned, Freud gives us a term that I invite you to reflect on as it first emerged, namely, Versagen des Glaubens. The paranoid doesn’t believe in that first stranger in relation to whom the subject is obliged to take his bearings.
The use of the term belief seems to me to be emphasized in a less psychological sense than first seems to be the case. The radical attitude of the paranoid, as designated by Freud, concerns the deepest level of the relationship of man to reality, namely, that which is articulated as faith. Here you can see easily how the connection with a different perspective is created that comes to meet it – I already referred to it when I said that the moving force of paranoia is essentially the rejection of a certain support in the symbolic order, of that specific support around which the division between the two sides of the relationship to das Ding operates – as we will see in subsequent discussions.
Das Ding is that which I will call the beyond-of-the-signified. It is as a function of this beyond-of-the-signified and of an emotional relationship to it that the subject keeps its distance and is constituted in a kind of relationship characterized by primary affect, prior to any repression. The whole initial articulation of the Entwurf takes place around it. Let us not forget that repression still posed a problem for Freud. And everything that he will subsequently say about repression, in its extraordinary sophistication, can only be understood as responding to the need to understand the specificity of repression compared to all the other forms of defense.
It is then in relation to the original Ding that the first orientation, the first choice, the first seat of subjective orientation takes place, and that I will sometimes call Neuronenwahl, the choice of neurosis. That first grinding will henceforth regulate the function of the pleasure principle.
It remains for us to see that it is in the same place that something which is the opposite, the reverse and the same combined, is also organized, and which in the end substitutes itself for that dumb reality which is das Ding – that is to say, the reality that commands and regulates. That is something which emerges in the philosophy of someone who, better than anyone else, glimpsed the function of das Ding, although he only approached it by the path of the philosophy of science, namely, Kant. In the end, it is conceivable that it is as a pure signifying system, as a universal maxim, as that which is the most lacking in a relationship to the individual, that the features of das Ding must be presented. It is here that, along with Kant, we must see the focal point, aim and convergence, according to which an action that we will qualify as moral will present itself. And which, moreover, we will see present itself paradoxically as the rule of a certain Gut or good.
Today I will simply emphasize this: the Thing only presents itself to the extent that it becomes word, hits the bull’s eye,2 as they say. In Freud’s text the way in which the stranger, the hostile figure, appears in the first experience of reality for the human subject is the cry. I suggest we do not need this cry. Here I would like to make a reference to something that is more inscribed in the French than in the German language – each language has its advantages. The German das Wort, word, is both le mot and la parole in French. The word le mot has a particular weight and meaning. “Mot” refers essentially to “no response.” “Mot,” La Fontaine says somewhere, is what remains silent; it is precisely that in response to which no word is spoken. The things in question are things insofar as they are dumb – some people might object that these things are placed by Freud at a higher level than the world of signifiers that I have described as the true moving force of the functioning in man of that process designated as primary. And dumb things are not exactly the same as things which have no relationship to words.
It is enough to evoke a face which is familiar to everyone of you, that of the terrible dumb brother of the four Marx brothers, Harpo. Is there anything that poses a question which is more present, more pressing, more absorbing, more disruptive, more nauseating, more calculated to thrust everything that takes place before us into the abyss or void than that face of Harpo Marx, that face with its smile which leaves us unclear as to whether it signifies the most extreme perversity or complete simplicity? This dumb man alone is sufficient to sustain the atmosphere of doubt and of radical annihilation which is the stuff of the Marx brothers’ extraordinary farce and the uninterrupted play of “jokes”3 that makes their activity so valuable.
Just one more thing. I have spoken today of the Other as a Ding. I would like to conclude with something that is much more accessible to our experience. And that is the isolated use that French reserves for certain forms of the pronoun of interpellation. What does the emission, the articulation, the sudden emergence from out of our voice of that “You!” (Toi!) mean? A “You” that may appear on our lips at a moment of utter helplessness, distress or surprise in the presence of something that I will not right off call death, but that is certainly for us an especially privileged other – one around which our principle concerns gravitate, and which for all that still manages to embarrass us.
I do not think that this “You” is simple – this you of devotion that other manifestations of the need to cherish occasionally comes up against. I believe that one finds in that word the temptation to tame the Other, that prehistoric, that unforgettable Other, which suddenly threatens to surprise us and to cast us down from the height of its appearance. “You” contains a form of defense, and I would say that at the moment when it is spoken, it is entirely in this “You,” and nowhere else, that one finds what I have evoked today concerning das Ding.
So as not to end with something that might seem to you to be so optimistic, I will focus on the weight of the identity of the thing and the word that we can find in another isolated use of the word.
To the “You” which, according to me, tames, but which tames nothing, a “You” of vain incantation and fruitless connection, there corresponds what may happen to us when some order comes from beyond the apparatus where there lurks that which, along with ourselves, has to do with das Ding. I am thinking of what we answer when we are made responsible or accountable for something. “Me!” (Moi!).4 What is this “Me!”, this “Me!” all by itself, if it is not a “Me!” of apology, a “Me!” of refusal, a “Me!” that’s simply not for me?
Thus from its beginning the “I” as thrust forth in an antagonistic movement, the “I” as defense, the “I” as primarily and above all an “I” that refuses and denounces rather than announces, the “I” in the isolated experience of its sudden emergence – which is also perhaps to be considered as its original decline – this “I” is articulated here.
I will speak about this “I” again next time in order to explore further the way in which moral action presents itself as an experience of satisfaction.
December 9, 1959
1 The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, pp. 158–162.
2 The French here contains a pun: “faire mouche” means to hit the bull’s-eye and by analogy with that Lacan creates the phrase “faire mot,” to become word.
3 In English in the original.
4 It should be noted that the emphatic first pronoun “moi” is also used in French to mean both “self” and “ego.”