Freud comments somewhere that if psychology succeeded in making some people anxious, by insisting excessively on the reign of the instincts, it nevertheless also promoted the importance of the moral agency.
This is an obvious truth, one that is confirmed every day in our practice.
Furthermore, we still do not rate highly enough in the world outside the exorbitant character of the power of the sense of guilt, which is exercised without the subject’s knowledge. Thus it is that which presents itself in the massive guise of the sense of guilt that I believe is important to focus on more narrowly this year. Moreover, it is important to articulate it so as to bring out the originality, the revolution in thought, that was the effect of the Freudian experience in the field of ethics.
Last time I tried to show you the meaning in Freudian psychology of the Entwurf in connection with which Freud organized his first intuition concerning what takes place in the experience of the neurotic. I tried, in particular, to show you the pivotal function that we must accord something which is to be found in a detour taken by the text. And it is one that it is important not to miss, especially since Freud picks up on it again in a variety of forms right to the end. I mean das Ding.
Right at the beginning of the organization of the world in the psyche, both logically and chronologically, das Ding is something that presents and isolates itself as the strange feature around which the whole movement of the Vorstellung turns – a Vorstellung that Freud shows us is governed by a regulatory principle, the so-called pleasure principle, which is tied to the functioning of the neuronic apparatus. And it is around das Ding that the whole adaptive development revolves, a development that is so specific to man insofar as the symbolic process reveals itself to be inextricably woven into it.
We find das Ding again in the Verneinung article of 1925, an article that is full of ideas and also of questions. It occurs in a formula which we must assume to be essential since it is placed at the center of the article and is, so to speak, the crucial enigma. Das Ding has, in effect, to be identified with the Wieder zu finden, the impulse to find again that for Freud establishes the orientation of the human subject to the object. Yet you should note that this object is not even stated. And here we might give its due to a certain textual criticism, whose attachment to the signifier sometimes seems to take a talmudic turn. It is remarkable that the object in question is nowhere articulated by Freud.
Moreover, since it is a matter of finding it again, we might just as well characterize this object as a lost object. But although it is essentially a question of finding it again, the object indeed has never been lost. In this orientation to the object, the regulation of the thread, the Vorstellungen relate to each other in accordance with the laws of a memory organization, a memory complex, a Bahnung (that is to say, a facilitator, but also, I would say more decidedly, a concatenation) whose neuronic apparatus perhaps allows us to glimpse those operations in a material form, and whose functioning is governed by the law of the pleasure principle.
The pleasure principle governs the search for the object and imposes the detours which maintain the distance in relation to its end. Even in French the etymology of the word – which replaced the archaic “quérir (“to search”)” – refers to circa, detour. The transference of the quantity from Vorstellung to Vorstellung always maintains the search at a certain distance from that which it gravitates around. The object to be found confers on the search its invisible law; but it is not that, on the other hand, which controls its movements. The element that fixes these movements, that models the return – and this return itself is maintained at a distance – is the pleasure principle. It is the pleasure principle which, when all is said and done, subjects the search to encounter nothing but the satisfaction of the Not des Lebens.
Thus the search encounters in its path a series of satisfactions that are tied to the relation to the object and are polarized by it. And at every point they model, guide and support its movements according to the particular law of the pleasure principle. This law fixes the level of a certain quantity of excitation which cannot be exceeded without going beyond the limit of the Lust/Unlust polarity – pleasure and unpleasure are the only two forms through which that same and single mode of regulation we call the pleasure principle expresses itself.
The admission of quantity is regulated by the width of the channels that do the conducting, by the individual diameters that a given organism can support – the thing is expressed metaphorically by Freud, but it is almost as if we were to take it literally. What happens once the limit is exceeded? The psychic impulse is not as such capable of advancing any further toward what is supposed to be its goal. Instead it is scattered and diffused within the psychic organism; the quantity is transformed into complexity. In a kind of expansion of the lighted zone of the neuronic organism, here and there in the distance, it lights up according to the laws of associative facilitation, or constellations of Vorstellungen which regulate the association of ideas, unconscious Gedanken, according to the pleasure principle.
The limit has a name. It is something more than the Lust/Unlust polarity Freud speaks of.
I would have you note that it is avoidance, flight, movement, which in the beginning, even before the system starts to function, normally intervenes in order to regulate the invasion of quantity in accordance with the pleasure principle. And it is to the motor system that the function of regulating the bearable or homeostatic level of tension for the organism is handed over in the end. But the homeostatis of the nervous system, which is the site of autonomous regulatory mechanism, is distinct from the general homeostasis (with all the potential for conflict that that implies), the homeostasis which activates the balance of moods. The balancing of moods occurs, but as an order of stimulation arising from within. That is how Freud expresses it. Certain stimulations come from within the nervous system, and he compares them to external stimulations.
I would like us to stop for a moment at this limit of pain.
Those commentators who collected the letters to Fliess consider that Freud slipped up by using the term motorisch, motor, instead of secretorisch, cell, nucleus, organ. I once said that it did not seem to be clear that it was such a slip. Freud tells us, in effect, that in the majority of cases, the reaction of pain derives from the fact that the motor reaction, the flight reaction, is impossible. And the reason for this is that the stimulation, the excitation, comes from within. Consequently, it seems to me that this so-called slip is only present in order to point to the fundamental homology between the relationship of pain and the motor reaction. Besides – this idea occurred to me a long time ago, and I hope you will not find it absurd – in the organization of the spinal marrow, the neurons and axons of pain coexist at the same level and at the same spot as certain neurons and axons of the tonic motor system.
Thus, even pain must not be simply attributed to the register of sensory reactions. I would say, and this is something that the surgery of pain reveals, that it is not a question of something simple, which can be considered a simple quality of sensory reaction. The complex character of pain, the character that, so to speak, makes it an intermediary between afferent and efferent, is suggested by the surprising results of certain operations, which in the case of some internal illnesses, including some cancers, allow the notation of pain to be preserved, when the suppression or removal of a certain subjective quality has been effected, which accounts for the fact that it is unbearable.
All this belongs to the sphere of modern physiological research, and it does not yet allow us to explain the problem fully. I will, therefore, limit myself to suggesting that we should perhaps conceive of pain as a field which, in the realm of existence, opens precisely onto that limit where a living being has no possibility of escape.
Isn’t something of this suggested to us by the insight of the poets in that myth of Daphne transformed into a tree under the pressure of a pain from which she cannot flee? Isn’t it true that the living being who has no possibility of escape suggests in its very form the presence of what one might call petrified pain? Doesn’t what we do in the realm of stone suggest this? To the extent that we don’t let it roll,1 but erect it, and make of it something fixed, isn’t there in architecture itself a kind of actualization of pain?
What happened during the period of the Baroque, under the influence of an historical movement that we will come back to later, would support this idea. Something was attempted then to make architecture itself aim at pleasure, to give it a form of liberation, which, in effect, made it blaze up so as to constitute a paradox in the history of masonry and of building. And that goal of pleasure gave us forms which, in a metaphorical language that in itself takes us a long way, we call “tortured.”
I hope you will pardon my digression, since it does, in fact, point in the direction of the themes we will take up again later, in connection with the man of pleasure and the eighteenth century, and the very style it introduced into the investigation of eroticism.
Let us return to our Vorstellungen, and try to understand them now, to surprise them in their operations, so as to understand what is involved in Freudian psychology.
The character of imaginary composition, of the imaginary element of the object, makes of it what one might call the substance of appearance, the material of a living lure – an apparition open to the deception of an Erscheinung, I would say, if I took the liberty of speaking German; that is to say, that by means of which the appearance is sustained, but which is also at the same time an unremarkable apparition – something that creates that Vor, that third element, something that is produced starting from the Thing. Vorstellung is something that is essentially fragmented. It is that around which Western philosophy since Aristotle and φαντασíα has always revolved.
Vorstellung is understood by Freud in a radical sense, in the form in which it appears in a philosophy that is essentially marked by the theory of knowledge. And that is the remarkable thing about it. He assigned to it in an extreme form the character philosophers themselves have been unable to reduce it to, namely, that of an empty body, a ghost, a pale incubus of the relation to the world, an enfeebled jouissance, which through the age-old interrogations of the philosophers makes it the essential feature. And by isolating it in this function, Freud removes it from its tradition.
And the sphere, order, and gravitation of the Vorstellungen, where does he locate them? I told you last time that if one reads Freud carefully, one has to locate them between perception and consciousness, between the glove and the hand.
It is between perception and consciousness that is inserted that which functions at the level of the pleasure principle. Which is what precisely? – The thought processes insofar as they regulate by means of the pleasure principle the investment of the Vorstellungen, and the structure in which the unconscious is organized, the structure in which the underlying unconscious mechanisms are flocculated. And it is this which makes the small curds of representation, that is to say, something which has the same structure as the signifier – a point on which I insist. That is not just Vorstellung, but as Freud writes later in the same article on the unconscious, Vorstellungsrepräsentanz;and he thus turns Vorstellung into an associative and combinatory element. In that way the world of Vorstellung is already organized according to the possibilities of the signifier as such. Already at the level of the unconscious there exists an organization that, as Freud says, is not necessarily that of contradiction or of grammar, but the laws of condensation and displacement, those that I call the laws of metaphor and metonymy.
Why should it be a surprise, therefore, if Freud tells us that these thought processes that take place between perception and consciousness would not mean anything to consciousness, if they were not transmitted there by the mediation of a discourse, of that which can be clarified in the Vorbewusstsein, in preconsciousness? But what does that mean? Freud leaves us with little doubt; it is a question of words. And we must, of course, situate the Wortvorstellungen that are involved in relation to our argument here.
Freud tells us this is not the same thing as the Vorstellungen whose thought processes of superposition, metaphor and metonymy we follow through the unconscious mechanism. It is something entirely different. The Wortvorstellungen inaugurate a discourse that is articulated on the thought processes. In other words, we know nothing about our thought processes, unless we engage in psychology – allow me to say that to make my point more forcefully. We only know them because we are speaking of something which goes on inside us, because we are speaking of them in terms that are unavoidable – terms whose indignity, emptiness and vanity we are also aware of. It is from that moment when we speak of our will and our understanding as distinct faculties that we have a preconscious, and that we are able, in effect, to articulate in a discourse something of that chattering by means of which we articulate ourselves inside ourselves, we justify ourselves, or we rationalize for ourselves, with reference to this or that, the progress of our desire.
It is definitely a discourse that is involved. And Freud emphasizes that, after all, we know nothing else except this discourse. That which emerges in the Bewusstsein is Wahrnenhmung, the perception of this discourse, and nothing else. That is exactly what he thinks.
That is why he tends to reject utterly superficial representations or, to use Silberer’s term, the functional phenomena. There are no doubt in a given phase of a dream things that represent the functioning of the psyche to us imagistically – a notable example represents the layers of psychic activity in the form of the game of Chutes and Ladders. What does Freud say? Involved here is the production of dreams by a mind given to metaphysics or, in other words, to psychology, which tends to expand on what the discourse necessarily imposes on us when we should be trying to distinguish a certain rhythm in our inner experience. But this representation, Freud tells us, overlooks that structure, that most profound gravitation, which is established at the level of the Vorstellungen. And he affirms that these Vorstellungen gravitate, operate exchanges and are modulated according to laws that you will recognize, if you have followed my teaching, as the fundamental laws of the signifying chain.
Have I managed to make myself understood? It seems to me difficult to be any clearer as far as this essential point is concerned.
We have now reached the point where we must distinguish the effective articulation of a discourse, of the gravitation of the Vorstellungen, in the form of Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen of these unconscious articulations. We must examine what in such circumstances we mean by Sachvorstellungen. The latter are to be set in polar opposition to word play, to Wortvorstellungen, but at this level they go together. As far as das Ding is concerned, that is something else. Das Ding is a primordial function which is located at the level of the initial establishment of the gravitation of the unconscious Vorstellungen.
I did not have time last week to make you appreciate how in ordinary German usage there is a linguistic difference between Ding and Sache.
It is clear that in every case they cannot be used interchangeably. And that even if there are cases where one can use either one, to choose one or the other in German gives a particular emphasis to the discourse. I ask those who know German to refer to the examples in the dictionary. One does not use Sache for religious matters, but one nevertheless says that faith is not jederman Ding – it is not for everybody. Master Eckhart uses Ding to refer to the soul, and heaven knows that for Master Eckhart the soul was a Grossding, the biggest of things. He certainly would not use the term Sache. If I wanted to make you sense the differences by giving you a general measure of the way in which the use of the signifier breaks down differently in German relative to French, I would cite this sentence that I was on the point of citing last time, but that I held back because I am not after all a Germanist, and I wanted to make use of the interval to test it on the ears of some people whose mother tongue is German. One could say that “Die Sache ist das Wort des Dinges.” Or, in French, “L’affaire est le mot de la chose (“The affair is the word of the thing.”).”
It is precisely as we shift into discourse that das Ding, the Thing, is resolved into a series of effects – in the sense that one can say mieine Sache. That suggests all my kit and caboodle, and is something very different from dasDing – that thing to which we must now return.
You will not be surprised if I tell you that at the level of the Vorstellungen, the Thing is not nothing, but literally is not. It is characterized by its absence, its strangeness.
Everything about it that is articulated as good or bad divides the subject in connection with it, and it does so irrepressibly, irremediably, and no doubt with relation to the same Thing. There is not a good and a bad object; there is good and bad, and then there is the Thing. The good and the bad already belong to the order of the Vorstellung; they exist there as clues to that which orients the position of the subject, according to the pleasure principle, in connection with that which will never be more than representation, search for a privileged state, for a desired state, for the expectation of what? Of something that is always a certain distance from the Thing, even if it is regulated by the Thing, which is there in a beyond.
We see it at the level of what the other day we noted were the stages of the φ system. Here there are Wahrnehmungszeichen, here there is Vorbewusstsein, here there are the Wortvorstellungen, insofar as they reflect in a discourse what goes on at the level of the thought processes. And the latter are themselves governed by the laws of the Unbewusst, that is to say, by the pleasure principle. The Wortvorstellungen, as a reflection of discourse, stand in opposition to that which is ordered in the Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen according to an economy of words. And in the Entwurf Freud calls these Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen conceptual memories, which is no more than a first approximation of the same notion.
At the level of the φ system, that is to say, at the level of what takes place before the entry into the ψ system, and the crossover into the space of the Bahnung and the organization of the Vorstellungen, the typical reaction of the organism as regulated by the neuronic system is avoidance. Things are vermeidet, avoided. The level of the Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen is the special site of Verdrängung. The level of Wortvorstellungen is the site of Verneinung.
I will stop there for a moment to explain the meaning of a point which is still a problem for some of you in connection with Verneinung. As Freud notes, it is the privileged means of connotation at the level of discourse for whatever is verdrängt or repressed in the unconscious. Vemeinen is the paradoxical way in which what is hidden, verborgen, in the unconscious is located in spoken, enunciated discourse, in the discourse of Bewusstwerden; vemeinen is the manner in which what is simultaneously actualized and denied comes to be avowed.
One should continue this study of Verneinung that I have just begun with a study of the negative particle. Following Pichon’s example, I have already pointed out here the subtly differentiated use in French of this pleonastic “ne,” which, as I showed, makes it seem paradoxical when, for example, the subject enunciates his own fear.
We do not say “Je crains qu’il vienne” (“I am afraid he may come”), as logic would seem to demand, but “Je crains qu’il ne vienne” (“I am afraid he may [not] come”).2 This “ne” has a floating place between the two levels of the graph that I showed you how to use, so as to distinguish between the level of enunciation and the level of the enunciated. By enunciating “I am afraid that …,”1 make it appear both in its reality, and in its reality as a wish –” … he may come.” And it is here that in French the little “ne” is interposed, which points to the discordance between the levels of enunciation and of the enunciated.
The negative particle “ne” only emerges at the moment when I really speak, and not at the moment when I am spoken, if I am on the level of the unconscious. And I think it is a good idea to interpret Freud in a similar way when he says that there is no negation at the level of the unconscious. Given that immediately afterwards, he shows us that there is indeed negation. That is to say, in the unconscious there are all kinds of ways of representing negation metaphorically. There are all kinds of ways of representing it in a dream, except, of course, for the little negative particle “ne,” because the particle only belongs to discourse.
The concrete examples show us the distinction that exists between the function of discourse and the function of speech.
Thus the Verneinung, far from being the pure and simple paradox of that which presents itself in the form of a “no,” isn’t just any old “no.” There is a whole world of no-saying (non-dit), of interdiction (interdit), since it is in that very form that the Verdrängt, which is the unconscious, essentially presents itself. But the Verneinung is the most solid beachhead of that which I would call the “intersaid” (entre dit) in the same way that we say “interview.” One might just as easily explore a little common usage in the sphere of the language of love, in all that is said when, for example, one says, “I do not say that …” or quite simply in the way people express themselves in Corneille: “No, I do not hate you.”
You can see that in this game of Chutes and Ladders, from a certain point of view Verneinung represents the inverse of Verdrängung, and that there is a difference of organization between them with relation to the function of avowal. Let me point out to those for whom this still constitutes a problem that there is a correspondence between that which is fully articulated at the level of the unconscious, Verurteilung, and that which takes place at the level pointed to by Freud in letter 52, in the first signifying signification of Verneinung, that of Verwerfung.
One of you who shall remain nameless, Laplanche, in a dissertation on Hölderlin that we will, I hope, have the opportunity to discuss here some time, asked himself and asked me, what Verwerfung might be. He wanted to know if it was the paternal No / Name (Non-de-père), as is the case in paranoia, or the No/Name of the Father (Nom-du-père).3 If that’s what it is, there are few pathological examples that put us in the presence of its absence, of its effective refusal. If it is the No / Name of the Father, are we not entering into a series of difficulties concerning the fact that something is always signified for the subject who is attached to experience, whether present or absent, something which for one reason or another and to a variety of degrees has come to occupy that place for him?
Of course, the notion of signifying substance cannot fail to create a problem for an alert mind. But don’t forget that we are dealing with the system of the Wahrnehmnungszeichen, signs of perception, or, in other words, the first system of signifers, the original synchrony of the signifying system. Everything begins when several signifers can present themselves to the subject at the same time, in a Gleichzeitigkeit. It is at this level that Fort is the correlative of Da. Fort can only be expressed as an alternative derived from a basic synchrony. It is on the basis of this synchrony that something comes to be organized, something that the mere play of Fort and Da could not produce by itself.
I have already asked the question here as to what the critical conceivable minimum is for a signifying scale, if the register of the signifier is to begin to organize itself. There cannot be a two without a three, and that, I think, must certainly include a four, the quadripartite, the Geviert, to which Heidegger refers somewhere. As we will see, the whole psychology of the psychotic develops insofar as a term may be refused, a term that maintains the basic system of words at a certain distance or relational dimension. something is missing and his real effort at substitution and “significization” is directed in desperation at that. Let us hope that we will have the opportunity to return to the problem, along with the remarkable analysis that Laplanche has given of a poetic experience which displays and which unveils it, and makes it apparent in a way that is especially revealing, namely, the case of Hölderlin.
The function of this place is to contain words, in the sense in which contain means to keep – as a result of which an original distance and articulation are possible, through which synchrony is introduced, and it is on the foundation of synchrony that the essential dialect is then erected, that in which the Other may discover itself as the Other of the Other.
The Other of the Other only exists as a place. It finds its place even if we cannot find it anywhere in the real, even if all we can find to occupy this place in the real is simply valid insofar as it occupies this place, but cannot give it any other guarantee than that it is in its place.
It is in this way that another typology is established, the typology which institutes the relation to the real. And now we can define this relation to the real, and realize what the reality principle means.
The whole function of that which Freud articulates in the term superego, Uberich, is tied to the reality principle. And this would be no more than a banal play of words, if it were merely an alternative way of designating what has been called the moral conscience or something similar.
Freud gives us a completely new theory by showing us the root or psychological operation of something that in the human constitution weighs so heavily on all those forms of which there is no reason why we should misunderstand any, including the simplest, namely, that of the commandments and, I would even say, the ten commandments.
I will not avoid discussing these ten commandments that we might assume we know all about. It is clear that we see them functioning, if not in ourselves, at least in things in a singularly lively way. It will, therefore, perhaps be appropriate to look again at what Freud articulates here.
What that is, I will put in the following terms, terms that all the commentaries seem designed merely to make us forget. As far as the formation of morality is concerned, Freud contributes what some call the discovery and others the affirmation, and I believe is the affirmation of the discovery, that the fundamental or primordial law, the one where culture begins in opposition to nature, is the law of the prohibition of incest – nature and culture being precisely distinguished in Freud in a modern sense, that is to say, in the way in which Lévi-Strauss might articulate them today.
The whole development of psychoanalysis confirms it in an increasingly weighty manner, while at the same time it emphasizes it less and less. I mean that the whole development at the level of the mother/child interpsychology – and that is badly expressed in the so-called categories of frustration, satisfaction, and dependence – is nothing more than an immense development of the essential character of the maternal thing, of the mother, insofar as she occupies the place of that thing, of das Ding.
Everyone knows that its correlative is the desire for incest, which is Freud’s discovery. There is no point in affirming that it is to be found somewhere in Plato, or that Diderot spoke of it in Rameau’s Nephew or The Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage. That is of no interest to me. What is important is that there was a man who at a given historical moment stood up to affirm: “That’s the fundamental desire.”
And we must grasp this thought firmly in our hand. Freud designates the prohibition of incest as the underlying principle of the primordial law, the law of which all other cultural developments are no more than the consequences and ramifications. And at the same time he identifies incest as the fundamental desire.
Claude Lévi-Strauss in his magisterial work no doubt confirms the primordial character of the Law as such, namely, the introduction of the signifer and its combinatoire into human nature through the intermediary of the marriage laws, which are regulated by a system of exchanges that he defines as elementary structures – this is the case to the extent that guidance is given concerning the choice of a proper partner or, in other words, order is introduced into marriage, which produces a new dimension alongside that of heredity. But even when Lévi-Strauss explains all that, and spends a lot of time discussing incest in order to show what makes its prohibition necessary, he does not go beyond suggesting why the father does not marry a daughter – because the daughters must be exchanged. But why doesn’t a son sleep with his mother? There is something mysterious there.
He, of course, dismisses justifications based on the supposedly dangerous biological effects of inbreeding. He proves that, far from producing results involving the resurgence of a recessive gene that risks introducing degenerative effects, a form of endogamy is commonly used in all fields of breeding of domestic animals, so as to improve a strain, whether animal or vegetable. The law only operates in the realm of culture. And the result of the law is always to exclude incest in its fundamental form, son / mother incest, which is the kind Freud emphasizes.
If everything else around it may find a justification, this central point nevertheless remains. If one reads Lévi-Strauss’s text closely, one can see that it is the most enigmatic and the most stubborn point separating nature from culture.
And I want to make you stop there. What we find in the incest law is located as such at the level of the unconscious in relation to das Ding, the Thing. The desire for the mother cannot be satisfied because it is the end, the terminal point, the abolition of the whole world of demand, which is the one that at its deepest level structures man’s unconscious. It is to the extent that the function of the pleasure principle is to make man always search for what he has to find again, but which he never will attain, that one reaches the essence, namely, that sphere or relationship which is known as the law of the prohibition of incest.
This metaphysical analysis is not worthy of our interest, however, if it cannot be confirmed at the level of the effective discourse which manages to put itself at the disposition of man’s knowledge, that preconscious or unconscious discourse or, in other words, the effective law, or, in other words again, the famous ten commandments I was speaking about just now.
But are there ten commandments? My goodness, perhaps there are. I tried to add them up by going back to the source. I took down my copy of Silvestre de Sacy’s Bible. It is the closest thing we have in French to those versions of the Bible that have exercised such a decisive influence on the thought and history of other peoples – in one case, inaugurating Slav culture with Saint Cyril and, in another, that of the authorized version of the English; one can say that, if one does not know it by heart, one finds oneself an outsider among them. We do not have the equivalent of that. But I nevertheless advise you to take a look at the seventeenth-century version, in spite of its inaccuracies and mistakes, since it was the version people read, and on the basis of which generations of clergymen have written and fought over the interpretation of a given prohibition, both past and present, that is inscribed in its pages.
I thus took down the text of that Decalogue that God dictated before Moses on the third day of the third month after the flight from Egypt, in the dark cloud on Mount Sinai, accompanied by flashes of lightning and the command to the people not to come near. I must say I would like one day to have someone more qualified than I to analyze for us the diverse forms that the interpretation of these ten commandments have undergone – from the Hebrew texts to the one in which it appears as the quiet droning of the rhythmic lines of the catechism.
However negative the ten commandments may seem, I will not linger long over their character as prohibitions – we are always being told that morality doesn’t only have a negative side, it also has a positive side – but I will note, as I have before in this place, that they are perhaps only the commandments of speech. By that I mean they clarify that without which no speech is possible – notice that I did not say discourse.
I just gave you an indication there, since I could hardly go any further, and I pick up the trail again here. This is what I want to point out. In the ten commandments, which constitute almost everything that, against all odds, is accepted as commandments by the whole of the civilized community – civilized or not, or almost civilized, but since we only know the other, uncivilized part by means of a number of cryptograms, let us limit ourselves to the so-called civilized portions – in the ten commandments, it is nowhere specified that one must not sleep with one’s mother. I do not think that the command “to honor” her should be considered as the least suggestive of this, either negatively or positively – in spite of what in the Provençal tales of Marius and Olive is known as “performing honorable service.”4
Couldn’t we next time try to interpret the ten commandments as something very close to that which effectively goes on in repression in the unconscious? The ten commandments may be interpreted as intended to prevent the subject from engaging in any form of incest on one condition, and on one condition only, namely, that we recognize that the prohibition of incest is nothing other than the condition sine qua non of speech.
This brings us back to questioning the meaning of the ten commandments insofar as they are tied in the deepest of ways to that which regulates the distance between the subject and das Ding – insofar as that distance is precisely the condition of speech, insofar as the ten commandments are the condition of the existence of speech as such.
I am simply on the point of broaching this topic, but I beg you right away not to stop at the idea that the ten commandments are, so to speak, the condition of all social life. For from another point of view, how can one not in truth see, when one merely recites them, that they are in a way the chapter and verse of our transactions at every moment of our lives? They display the range of what are properly speaking our human actions. In other words, we spend our time breaking the ten commandments, and that is why society is possible.
I do not for all that have to push the paradox to its extreme, like Bernard de Mandeville in The Fable of the Bees, when he demonstrates that private vices constitute public wealth. It is not a question of that, but of seeing what kind of preconscious immanence the ten commandments correspond to. I will take up the question there next time – not, however, without making a detour through that fundamental reference I evoked when I spoke to you for the first time of what might be called the real.
The real, I have told you, is that which is always in the same place. You will see this in the history of science and thought. This detour is indispensable if we are to reach the great revolutionary crisis of morality, namely, the systematic questioning of principles there where they need to be questioned, that is, at the level of the imperative. That is the culminating point for both Kant and Sade with relation to the Thing; it is there that morality becomes, on the one hand, a pure and simple application of the universal maxim and, on the other, a pure and simple object.
This point is essential if one is to understand the step taken by Freud. By way of conclusion today I would just like to bring to your attention something that a poet, who happens to be a friend of mine, once wrote: “The problem of evil is only worth raising as long as one has not fixed on the idea of transcendence by some good that is able to dictate to man what his duties are. Till that moment the exalted representation of evil will continue to have the greatest revolutionary value.”
Well now, the step taken by Freud at the level of the pleasure principle is to show us that there is no Sovereign Good – that the Sovereign Good, which is das Ding, which is the mother, is also the object of incest, is a forbidden good, and that there is no other good. Such is the foundation of the moral law as turned on its head by Freud.
Now we have to consider where the positive moral law comes from that has remained quite intact, and that we are literally capable of “banging our heads against the wall for,” to borrow an expression made famous by a film, rather than see it overturned.5
What does this mean? It means, and this is where I am leading you, that what you were looking for in the place of the object that cannot be found again is the object that one always finds again in reality. In the place of the object impossible to find again at the level of the pleasure principle, something has happened that is nothing more than the following: something which is always found again, but which presents itself in a form that is completely sealed, blind and enigmatic, the world of modern physics.
You will see that it is in relation to this that the crisis of morality was played out at the end of the eighteenth century at the time of the French revolution. And it is to this that Freud’s doctrine constitutes an answer. It sheds a light on the subject that, I hope to be able to show you, has not yet yielded up all its implications.
December 16, 1959
1 The pun here involves a reference to the French proverb “Pierre qui roule n’amasse pas mousse.” – “A rolling stone gathers no moss.”
2 As Lacan’s example suggests, the pleonastic “ne” in French grammar is a kind of submerged negation used after verbs of fearing and certain conjunctions. My bracketed “not” is designed to suggest the effect, since it has no equivalent in English.
3 In the context of this discussion of forms of denial, it seems appropriate to remind the English-speaking reader of the pun contained in the spoken French of the Nom-du-Père.
4 The reference here is to the Provençal material of Marcel Pagnol’s trilogy of plays on Marseilles life, Marius, Fanny, and César.
5 The reference is to Georges Franju’s La Tête contre les Murs.