We are progressing this year around an axis that I take to be essential, namely, that Ding, which is not without causing problems, indeed, not without causing some doubts to emerge as to its Freudian legitimacy, at least among those who reflect and who retain their critical intelligence, as they should, in the presence of what I formulate here before you.
I take full responsibility for das Ding, whose exact importance you can imagine to the extent that it has proved to be necessary if we are to make any progress. You will be able to appreciate its merits in the use made of it. But I will also be talking about it specifically again.
Some might say or think that I have only taken up a small detail of Freud’s text in the Entwurf.
But experience tells us precisely that in texts like those of Freud nothing is outdated, in the sense that it is simply borrowed from somewhere, the product of scholarly parroting; nothing goes unmarked by that powerful articulatory necessity that distinguishes his discourse. That’s what makes it so significant when one notices places where his discourse remains open, gaping, but nevertheless implying a necessity that I think I have made you sense on a number of occasions.
And that’s not all. This Ding, whose place and significance I have tried to make you feel, is absolutely essential as far as Freud’s thought is concerned; and as we go forward, you will see why.
What is involved is that excluded interior which, in the terminology of the Entwurf, is thus excluded in the interior. In the interior of what then? Of something that is precisely articulated at that moment as the Real-Ich, which means then the final real of the psychic organization, a real conceived of as hypothetical, to the extent that it necessarily presupposes the Lust-Ich. It is in the latter that one finds the first sketches of the psychic organization, that is to say, of the organism whose development shows us that it is dominated by the function of Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen. And these are not only representations but the representatives of representation – something that corresponds very precisely to the path taken by so-called psychological knowledge before Freud, insofar as it first took its form from atomism. That ideational elementarity is in brief the truth of the atomism involved.
Through a kind of essential need, the whole effort of psychology has been to try to free itself from that. But it can only free itself or rebel against atomism by failing to recognize that flocculation which submits its material – and the material here is psychic – to the texture on which thought is founded, in other words, the texture of discourse as signifying chain. It is the very web on which logic rises up, with both the surplus and the essential it brings with it, which is the negation, the “splitting,” the Spaltung, the division, the rending, that the inmixing of the subject introduces there. Psychology is subjected to the atomic condition of having to use Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen because it is in them that psychic material if flocculated. Doubtless psychology attempts to free itself from this necessity, but its efforts to achieve it have thus far been crude.
I don’t need to do more than remind you of the confused nature of the recourse to affectivity; it reaches a point where, even when the reference is made within analysis, it always leads us toward an impasse, toward something that we feel is not the direction in which our research can really make progress.
Of course, it is not a matter of denying the importance of affects. But it is important not to confuse them with the substance of that which we are seeking in the Real-Ich, beyond signifying articulation of the kind we artists of analytical speech are capable of handling.
As far as the psychology of affects is concerned, Freud always manages to give in passing significant and suggestive hints. He always insists on their conventional and artificial character, on their character not as signifiers but as signals, to which in the last analysis they may be reduced. This character also explains their displaceable significance, and, from the economic point of view, presents a certain number of necessities, such as irreducibility. But affects do not throw light on the economic or even dynamic essence which is sought at the horizon or limit from an analytical perspective. That is something more opaque, more obscure, namely, analytical metaphysics’s notions concerning energy.
It is true that this metapsychology has come nowadays to be organized in strangely qualitative categories. One only has to remember the function recently advanced of the term desexualized libido. That reference to a qualitative notion is increasingly difficult to maintain on the basis of any experience, and even less on the basis of an experience that could be called affective.
We will perhaps look into the psychology of affects together someday. In order to impress upon you the inadequacy of what has so far been done on the subject, especially in psychoanalysis, I should simply like to propose to you a few incidental subjects to reflect on – an affect such as anger, for example. I am giving you there a few practical little exercises in passing. The use of precise categories that I invite you to refer to might perhaps explain why there has been so much interest in anger in the history of psychology and of ethics, and why we have been so little interested in it in psychoanalysis.
Does, for example, what Descartes says about anger satisfy you fully? The working hypothesis that I am suggesting, and we will have to see whether it does the trick or not, is that anger is no doubt a passion which is manifested by means of an organic or physiological correlative, by a given more or less hypertonic or even elated feeling, but that it requires perhaps something like the reaction of a subject to a disappointment, to the failure of an expected correlation between a symbolic order and the response of the real. In other words, anger is essentially linked to something expressed in a formulation of Charles Péguy’s, who was speaking in a humorous context – it’s when the little pegs refuse to go into the little holes.
Think about that and see if you find it useful. It has all kinds of possible applications, up to and including offering a clue as to the possible outline of a symbolic organization of the world among the rare animal species where one can, in fact, observe something that resembles anger. It is, after all, surprising that anger is remarkably absent throughout the animal realm as a whole.
The direction taken by Freudian thought has involved locating affect under the heading of a signal. A sufficient indication of this is that, by the end, Freud came to evaluate anxiety itself as a signal. What we are looking for, however, is beyond the organization of the Lust-Ich insofar as it is entirely linked in a phenomenal way to the greater or lesser investment of the system of the Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen, or, in other words, of the signifying elements in the psyche. This is something that is calculated to allow us to define the field of das Ding at least operationally, as we attempt to advance on the terrain of ethics. And since Freud’s thought progressed from a therapeutic starting point, we can try to define the field of the subject insofar as it is not simply the field of the intersubjective subject, the subject subjected to the mediation of the signifier, but what is behind this subject.
With this field that I call the field of das Ding, we are projected into something that is far beyond the domain of affectivity, something moving, obscure and without reference points owing to the lack of a sufficient organization of its register, something much more primitive that I have already tried to describe to you in our previous discussion this year. It isn’t just the register of the Wille in Schopenhauer’s sense of the word, insofar as, in opposition to representation, it is the essence of life whose support it is. It is a register where there is both good and bad will, that volens nolens, which is the true meaning of the ambivalence one fails to grasp, when one approaches it on the level of love and hate.
It is on the level of good and bad will, indeed of the preference for the bad at the level of negative therapeutic reaction, that Freud at the end of his thinking discovers once again the field of das Ding, and points out to us the space beyond the pleasure principle. It is an ethical paradox that the field of das Ding is rediscovered at the end, and that Freud suggests there that which in life might prefer death. And it is along this path that he comes closer than anyone else to the problem of evil or, more precisely, to the project of evil as such.
This is pointed to in everything that we have seen at the beginning of this year’s seminar. Is it to be found in a corner of Freud’s work where one might overlook it, might consider it as merely contingent or even outmoded? I believe that everything in Freud’s thought proves that that is by no means the case. And in the end Freud refers to this field as that around which the field of the pleasure principle gravitates, in the sense that the field of the pleasure principle is beyond the pleasure principle. Neither pleasure nor the organizing, unifying, erotic instincts of life suffice in any way to make of the living organism, of the necessities and needs of life, the center of psychic development.
Clearly, the term “operational” has its value on this occasion as it does in all thought processes. This Ding is not fully elucidated, even if we make use of it. The label “operational” may leave you with a certain comic dissatisfaction, since what we are trying to point to there is precisely that which each and every one of us has to deal with in the least operational of ways.
I don’t want to indulge in overdramatization. All ages have thought they had reached the most extreme point of vision in a confrontation with something terminal, some extra-worldly force that threatened the world. But our world and society now bring news of the shadow of a certain incredible, absolute weapon that is waved in our faces in a way that is indeed worthy of the muses. Don’t imagine that the end will occur tomorrow; even in Leibnitz’s time, people believed in less specific terms that the end of the world was at hand. Nevertheless, that weapon suspended over our heads which is one hundred thousand times more destructive than that which was already hundreds of thousands of times more destructive than those which came before – just imagine that rushing toward us on a rocket from outer space. It’s not something I invented, since we are bombarded everyday with the news of a weapon that threatens the planet itself as a habitat for mankind.
Put yourself in that spot, which has perhaps been made more present for us by the progress of knowledge than it was before in men’s imagination – although that faculty never ceased to toy with the idea; confront that moment when a man or a group of men can act in such a way that the question of existence is posed for the whole of the human species, and you will then see inside yourself that das Ding is next to the subject.
You will see that you will beg the subject of knowledge who has given birth to the thing in question – the other thing, the absolute weapon – to take stock, and you will also wish either that the true Thing be at that moment within him (in other words that he not let the other go or, in common parlance, “let it all blow up”) or that we know why.
Well now, after that short digression that was suggested to me by the word “operational,” and from a less dramatic point of view – one no longer dares say eschathological, given the very precise materialization of things – I will take up our discussion again where we are in effect concerned with the essence of das Ding. Or, more exactly, in what way are we concerned with it in the domain of ethics?
It is not just a matter of drawing close to das Ding, but also to its effects, to its presence at the core of human activity, namely, in that precarious existence in the midst of the forest of desires and compromises that these very desires achieve with a certain reality, which is certainly not as confused as one might imagine.
The demands of reality, in effect, present themselves readily in the form of social demands. Freud cannot not consider them seriously, but one has to indicate immediately the special approach he adopts; it permits him to transcend the simple opposition between individual and society, in which the individual is straightway posited as the eventual site of disorder.
Note right off that it is quite unthinkable nowadays to speak abstractly of society. It is unthinkable historically, and it is unthinkable philosophically, too, for the reason that a certain Hegel revealed to us the modern function of the state, and the link between a whole phenomenology of mind and the necessity which renders a legal system perfectly coherent. A whole philosophy of law, derived from the state, encloses human existence, up to and including the monogamous couple that is its point of departure.
I am concerned with the ethics of psychoanalysis, and I can’t at the same time discuss Hegelian ethics. But I do want to point out that they are not the same. At the end of a certain phenomenology, the opposition between the individual and the city, between the individual and the state, is obvious. In Plato, too, the disorders of the soul are also referred to the same dimension – it’s a matter of the reproduction of the disorders of the city at the level of the psyche. All of that is related to a problematic that is not at all Freudian. The sick individual whom Freud is concerned with reveals another dimension than that of the disorders of the state and of hierarchical disturbances. Freud addresses the sick individual as such, the neurotic, the psychotic; he addresses directly the powers of life insofar as they open onto the powers of death; he addresses directly the powers that derive from the knowledge of good and evil.
Here we are then in the company of das Ding, trying to get along with it.
What I am saying should in no way surprise, for I am only trying to point out to you what is going on in the psychoanalytical community. The analysts are so preoccupied with the field of das Ding, which responds so well to the internal necessity of their experience, that the development of analytic theory is dominated by the existence of the so-called Kleinian school. And it is striking to note that whatever reservations or even scorn another branch of the analytic community may express for that school, it is the latter that polarizes and orients the whole development of analytic thought, including the contribution of our group.
Let me suggest then that you reconsider the whole of Kleinian theory with the following key, namely, Kleinian theory depends on its having situated the mythic body of the mother at the central place of das Ding.
To begin with, it is in relation to that mythic body that the aggressive, transgressive, and most primordial of instincts is manifested, the primal aggressions and inverted aggressions. Also in that register which currently interests us, namely, the notion of sublimation in the Freudian economy, the Kleinian school is full of interesting ideas – not only Melanie Klein herself but also Ella Sharpe, insofar as on this point she follows Klein completely. Recently, an American author, who isn’t at all Kleinian, has written on sublimation as the principle of creation in the fine arts. In an article that I shall come back to later, entitled “A Theory Concerning Creation in the Free Arts,” after a more or less exhaustive critical examination of Freudian formulations on sublimation and of Kleinian attempts to explain its full meaning, the author, M. Lee, ends up attributing to it a restitutive function. In other words, she finds there more or less of an attempt at symbolic repair of the imaginary lesions that have occurred to the fundamental image of the maternal body.
I will bring the texts involved, if you don’t know them. But I can tell you right away that the reduction of the notion of sublimation to a restitutive effort of the subject relative to the injured body of the mother is certainly not the best solution to the problem of sublimation, nor to the topological, metapsychological problem itself. There is nevertheless there an attempt to approach the relations of the subject to something primordial, its attachment to the fundamental, most archaic of objects, for which my field of das Ding, defined operationally, establishes the framework. It allows us to conceive of the conditions that opened onto the blossoming of what one might call the Kleinian myth, allows us also to situate it, and, as far as sublimation is concerned, to reestablish a broader function than that which one necessarily arrives at if one accepts Kleinian categories.
The clinicians who do on the whole accept them end up – I will tell you so now and explain why later – with a rather limited and puerile notion of what might be called an atherapy. All of that which is included under the heading fine arts, namely, a number of gymnastic, dance and other exercises, is supposed to give the subject satisfactions, a measure of solution to his problems, a state of equilibrium. That is noted in a number of observations that are still rewarding. I am thinking especially of Ella Sharpe’s articles, which I am far from depreciating – “Certain Aspects of Sublimation and Delirium” or “Similar and Divergent Unconscious Determinants, which Subtend the Sublimations of Pure Art and Pure Science.”
To read these papers is to realize how such an orientation reduces the problem of sublimation and yields somewhat puerile results. The approach involves valorizing activities that seem to be located in the register of a more or less transitory explosion of supposedly artistic gifts, gifts which appear in the cases described to be highly doubtful. Completely left out is something that must always be emphasized in artistic production and something that Freud paradoxically insisted on, to the surprise of many writers, namely, social recognition. These objects play an essential role in a question that Freud doesn’t perhaps take as far as one would like, but which is clearly linked to the championship of a certain progress – and God knows that such a notion is far from being unilinear in Freud – to the celebration of something that achieves social recognition. I won’t go any further for the moment. It is enough to note that Freud articulates it in a way that may seem completely foreign to the metapsychological register.
Note that no correct evaluation of sublimation in art is possible if we overlook the fact that all artistic production, including especially that of the fine arts, is historically situated. You don’t paint in Picasso’s time as you painted in Velazquez’s; you don’t write a novel in 1930 as you did in Stendhal’s time. This is an absolutely essential fact that does not for the time being need to be located under the rubric of the collectivity or the individual – let’s place it under the rubric of culture. What does society find there that is so satisfying? That’s the question we need to answer.
The problem of sublimation is there, of sublimation insofar as it creates a certain number of forms, among which art is not alone – and we will concentrate on one art in particular, literary art, which is so close to the domain of ethics. It is after all as a function of the problem of ethics that we have to judge sublimation; it creates socially recognized values.
In order to refocus our discussion onto the level of ethics, one could hardly do better than to refer to that which, however paradoxical it may seem, has proved to be pivotal, namely, the Kantian perspective on the field.
Alongside das Ding, however much we may hope that its weight will be felt on the good side, we find in opposition the Kantian formula of duty. That is another way of making one’s weight felt. Kant invokes the universally applicable rule of conduct or, in other words, the weight of reason. Of course, one still has to prove how reason may make its weight felt.
There is always an advantage to reading authors in the original. The other day I brought to your attention the passage on the theme of Schmerz, of pain, as a correlative of the ethical act. I observed then that even some of you to whom these texts were once familiar didn’t pick up on the reference. Well now, if you open up The Critique of Pure Reason, you will see that in order to impress upon us the influence of the weight of reason, Kant invents for his didactic purposes an example which is magnificent in its freshness. A double fable is involved that is designed to make us feel the weight of the ethical principle pure and simple, the potential dominance of duty as such against all, against all that is conceived as vitally desirable.
The key to the proof lies in a comparison between two situations. Suppose, says Kant, that in order to control the excesses of a sensualist, one produces the following situation. There is in a bedroom the woman he currently lusts after. He is granted the freedom to enter that room to satisfy his desire or his need, but next to the door through which he will leave there stands the gallows on which he will be hanged. But that’s nothing, and is certainly not the basis of Kant’s moral; you will see in a moment where the key to the proof is. As far as Kant is concerned, it goes without saying that the gallows will be a sufficient deterrent; there’s no question of an individual going to screw a woman when he knows he’s to be hanged on the way out. Next comes a situation that is similar as far as the tragic outcome is concerned, but here it is a question of a tyrant who offers someone the choice between the gallows and his favor, on the condition that he bear false witness against his friend. Kant quite rightly emphasizes here that one can conceive of someone weighing his own life against that of bearing false witness, especially if in this case the false witness is without fatal consequences for the person bearing it.
The striking point is that the power of proof is here left to reality – to the real behavior of the individual, I mean. It is in the real that Kant asks us to examine the impact of the weight of reality, which he identifies here with the weight of duty.
To follow him onto this ground is to discover that he misses something. It is after all not impossible that under certain conditions the subject of the first scenario will not so much offer himself up to be executed – at no point is the fable taken to this point – but will at least consider doing so.
Our philosopher from Königsberg was a nice person, and I don’t intend to imply that he was someone of limited stature or feeble passions, but he doesn’t seem to have considered that under certain conditions of what Freud would call Uberschätzung or overevaluation of the object – and that I will henceforth call object sublimation – under conditions in which the object of a loving passion takes on a certain significance (and, as you will see, it is in this direction that I intend to introduce the dialectic through which I propose to teach you how to identify what sublimation really is), under certain conditions of sublimation of the feminine object or, in other words, the exaltation we call love – a form of exaltation that is historically specific, and to which Freud gives us the clue, in the short note I spoke to you about the other day, in which he says that in the modern period the emphasis of the libido is on the object rather than on the instinct (which is in itself something that poses an important question, one that, with your permission, I will be introducing you to, one that requires you to spend a few sessions on something in German history whose form I referred to the other day in connection with Hamlet, namely, the Minne, or, in other words, a certain theory and practice of courtly love – and why wouldn’t we spend some time on that given the time we give to ethnographic research? – especially if I assure you that it concerns certain traces within us of the object relation that are unthinkable without these historical antecedents), under certain conditions of sublimation, then, it is conceivable for such a step to be taken. After all, a whole corpus of tales stands for something from a fantasmic, if not from a strictly historical point of view; moreover, there are a great many stories in the newspapers that are relevant. All of which leads to the conclusion that it is not impossible for a man to sleep with a woman knowing full well that he is to be bumped off on his way out, by the gallows or anything else (all this, of course, is located under the rubric of passionate excesses, a rubric that raises a lot of other questions); it is not impossible that this man coolly accepts such an eventuality on his leaving – for the pleasure of cutting up the lady concerned in small pieces, for example.
The latter is the other case that one can envisage, and the annals of criminology furnish a great many cases of the type. It is something that obviously changes the facts of the situation, and at the very least the demonstrative value of Kant’s example.
I have outlined then two cases that Kant doesn’t envisage, two forms of transgression beyond the limits normally assigned to the pleasure principle in opposition to the reality principle given as a criterion, namely, excessive object sublimation and what is commonly known as perversion. Sublimation and perversion are both a certain relationship of desire that attracts our attention to the possibility of formulating, in the form of a question, a different criterion of another, or even of the same, morality, in opposition to the reality principle. For there is another register of morality that takes its direction from that which is to be found on the level of das Ding; it is the register that makes the subject hesitate when he is on the point of bearing false witness against das Ding, that is to say, the place of desire, whether it be perverse or sublimated.
We are only stumbling along here, following the paths of analytical good sense, which isn’t, in fact, a very different good sense of the common or garden kind. What one finds at the level of das Ding once it is revealed is the place of the Triebe, the drives. And I mean by that the drives that, as Freud showed, have nothing at all to do with something that may be satisfied by moderation – that moderation which soberly regulates a human being’s relations with his fellow man at the different hierarchical levels of society in a harmonious order, from the couple to the State with a capital S.
We must return now to the meaning of sublimation as Freud attempts to define it for us.
He attaches sublimation to the Triebe as such, and that’s what makes its theorization difficult for psychoanalysts.
Please forgive me if I don’t today read given passages of Freud that might perhaps bore you and that I will take up at the right moment, when you will understand the value of going in one direction or another, of confirming if we are really aligned with Freudian theory. But I don’t believe I can hold the interest of most of you here without explaining what my aim is or where I’m taking you.
Sublimation, Freud tells us, involves a certain form of satisfaction of the Triebe, a word that is improperly translated as “instincts,” but that one should translate strictly as “drives” (pulsions) – or as “drifts” (dérives), so as to mark the fact that the Trieb is deflected from what he calls its Ziel, its aim.
Sublimation is represented as distinct from that economy of substitution in which the repressed drive is usually satisfied. A symptom is the return by means of signifying substitution of that which is at the end of the drive in the form of an aim. It is here that the function of the signifier takes on its full meaning, for it is impossible without reference to that function to distinguish the return of the repressed from sublimation as a potential mode of satisfaction of the drive. It is a paradoxical fact that the drive is able to find its aim elsewhere than in that which is its aim – without its being a question of the signifying substitution that constitutes the overdetermined structure, the ambiguity, and the double causality, of the symptom as compromise formation.
The latter notion has never failed to cause problems for theoreticians and analysts alike. What can this change of aim mean? It is a matter of aim and not strictly speaking of object, although, as I emphasized last time, the latter soon enters into consideration. Don’t let us forget that Freud points out early on that it is important not to confuse the notion of aim with that of object. And there is a special passage that I will read you at the appropriate moment, but I will give you the reference right away. If I remember correctly, in Einführung des Narzissmus Freud emphasizes the difference that exists between sublimation and idealization as far as the object is concerned. The fact is that idealization involves an identification of the subject with the object, whereas sublimation is something quite different.
To those who know German I suggest you read a little article by Richard Sterba that appeared in Internationale Zeitschrift in 1930, “Zur Problematik der Sublimierungslehre” [“On the Problematic of the Doctrine of Sublimation”]; it summarizes the difficulties that analysts found in the notion at the time – that is after an essential article by Bernfeld on the subject and also one by Glover in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis of 1931, “Sublimation, Substitution and Social Anxiety.”
This article in English will cause you much more difficulty. It’s very long and difficult to follow because it literally parades the standard of sublimation across all the notions known to analysis at that time in order to see how one might apply it to this or that level of the theory. The result of this survey is surprising. It gives rise to a review of the whole of psychoanalytic theory from one end to the other, but it clearly shows, at least, the extraordinary difficulty that exists in using the notion of sublimation in practice without giving rise to contradictions, and this text is riddled with them.
I would like to try now to show you in what way we are going to posit sublimation, if only so as to be able to allow you to appreciate its functioning and value.
The satisfaction of the Trieb is, then, paradoxical, since it seems to occur elsewhere than where its aim is. Are we going to be satisfied with saying, like Sterba for example, that, in effect, the aim has changed, that it was sexual before and that now it is no longer? That is, by the way, how Freud describes it. Whence one has to conclude that the sexual libido has become desexualized. And that’s why your daughter is dumb.
Are we going to be satisfied with the Kleinian register, which seems to me to contain a certain though partial truth, and speak of the imaginary solution of a need for substitution, for repair work with relation to the mother’s body?
These formulae will provoke anyone who is not content with verbal solutions – that is, solutions without real meaning – into questioning more closely what sublimation is all about.
You should sense immediately which direction I intend to take. The sublimation that provides the Trieb with a satisfaction different from its aim – an aim that is still defined as its natural aim – is precisely that which reveals the true nature of the Trieb insofar as it is not simply instinct, but has a relationship to das Ding as such, to the Thing insofar as it is distinct from the object.
We have to guide us the Freudian theory of the narcissistic foundations of the object, of its insertion in the imaginary register. The object that specifies directions or poles of attraction to man in his openness, in his world, and that interests him because it is more or less his image, his reflection – precisely that object is not the Thing to the extent that the latter is at the heart of the libidinal economy. Thus, the most general formula that I can give you of sublimation is the following: it raises an object – and I don’t mind the suggestion of a play on words in the term I use – to the dignity of the Thing.
That is significant, for example, in relation to something that I alluded to at the limit of our discussion, something I will get to next time, the sublimation of the feminine object. The whole theory of the Minne or of courtly love has, in effect, been decisive. Although it has completely disappeared nowadays from the sociological sphere, courtly love has nevertheless left traces in an unconscious that has no need to be called “collective,” in a traditional unconscious that is sustained by a whole literature, a whole imagery, that we continue to inhabit as far as our relations with women are concerned.
This mode was created deliberately. It was by no means a creation of the popular soul, of that famous great soul of the blessed Middle Ages, as Gustave Cohen used to say. The rules of polite conduct were articulated deliberately in a small literary circle and, as a result, the celebration of the object was made possible – the absurdity of which I will show you in detail; a German writer who is a specialist of this medieval German literature has used the expression “absurd Minne” This moral code instituted an object at the heart of a given society, an object that is nevertheless completely natural. Don’t imagine they made love in those days any less than we do.
The object is elevated to the dignity of the Thing as we define it in our Freudian topology, insofar as it is not slipped into but surrounded by the network of Ziele. It is to the degree that this new object is raised to the function of the Thing at a certain historical moment that one is able to explain a phenomenon which, from a sociological point of view, has always struck those who considered it as frankly paradoxical. We will certainly not be able to exhaust the totality of signs, rites, themes and exchange of themes, especially of literary themes, that have constituted the substance and effective influence of this human relation, which has been defined in different terms according to the times and places of its occurrence – courtly love, Minne, and all the other forms. Just remember that the circle of male and female précieuxat the beginning of the seventeenth century is the last manifestation of the phenomenon in our own cycle.
That is nevertheless not the last word on the subject, for it is not enough to say, “They did that” or “That’s how it is,” for the matter to be solved, for the object to come and play the required role. I am not concerned only with giving you the key to that historical event; what I seek in the end, thanks to that distant affair, is both to get a better grasp of something that has happened to us, relative to the Thing, as the result of a collective education that remains to be defined and is called art, and to understand how we behave on the level of sublimation.
The definition I gave you doesn’t close the debate, first, because I must confirm and illustrate it for you, and, second, because I have to show you that, if the object is to become available in that way, something must have occurred at the level of the relation of the object to desire; it is quite impossible to explain it correctly without reference to what I had to say last year on the subject of desire and its behavior.
I will end today with a little fable in which I would like you just to see an example, albeit a paradoxical and demeaning one, that is yet significant for what goes on in sublimation. Since we have remained today on the level of the object and the Thing, I wanted to show you what it means to invent an object for a special purpose that society may esteem, valorize, and approve.
I draw on my memories for this fable, that you can, if you like, place in the psychological category of collecting. Someone who recently published a work on collectors and those sales thanks to which collectors are presumed to get rich, has long asked me to give him some ideas on the meaning of collecting. I didn’t do it because I would have had to tell him to come to my seminar for five or six years.
There’s a lot to say on the psychology of collecting. I am something of a collector myself. And if some of you like to think that it is in imitation of Freud, so be it. I believe my reasons are very different from his. I have seen the remains of Freud’s collections on Anna Freud’s shelves. They seemed to me to have to do with the fascination that the coexistence of […]1 and of Egyptian civilization exercised over him at the level of the signifier rather than for the enlightened taste of what is called an object.
What is called an object in the domain of collecting should be strictly distinguished from the meaning of object in psychoanalysis. In analysis the object is a point of imaginary fixation which gives satisfaction to a drive in any register whatsoever. The object in collecting is something entirely different, as I will show in the following example, which reduces collecting to its most rudimentary form. For one usually imagines that a collection is composed of a diversity of elements, but it is not necessarily true at all.
During that great period of penitence that our country went through under Pétain, in the time of “Work, Family, Homeland” and of belt-tightening, I once went to visit my friend Jacques Prévert in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. And I saw there a collection of match boxes. Why the image has suddenly resurfaced in my memory, I cannot tell.
It was the kind of collection that it was easy to afford at that time; it was perhaps the only kind of collection possible. Only the match boxes appeared as follows: they were all the same and were laid out in an extremely agreeable way that involved each one being so close to the one next to it that the little drawer was slightly displaced. As a result, they were all threaded together so as to form a continuous ribbon that ran along the mantlepiece, climbed the wall, extended to the molding, and climbed down again next to a door. I don’t say that it went on to infinity, but it was extremely satisfying from an ornamental point of view.
Yet I don’t think that that was the be all and end all of what was surprising in this “collectionism,” nor the source of the satisfaction that the collector himself found there. I believe that the shock of novelty of the effect realized by this collection of empty match boxes – and this is the essential point – was to reveal something that we do not perhaps pay enough attention to, namely, that a box of matches is not simply an object, but that, in the form of an Erscheinung, as it appeared in its truly imposing multiplicity, it may be a Thing.
In other words, this arrangement demonstrated that a match box isn’t simply something that has a certain utility, that it isn’t even a type in the Platonic sense, an abstract match box, that the match box all by itself is a thing with all its coherence of being. The wholly gratuitous, proliferating, superfluous, and quasi absurd character of this collection pointed to its thingness as match box. Thus the collector found his motive in this form of apprehension that concerns less the match box than the Thing that subsists in a match box.
Whatever you do, however, you don’t find that in a random way in any object whatsoever. For if you think about it, the match box appears to be a mutant form of something that has so much importance for us that it can occasionally take on a moral meaning; it is what we call a drawer. In this case, the drawer was liberated and no longer fixed in the rounded fullness of a chest, thus presenting itself with a copulatory force that the picture drawn by Prévert’s composition was designed to make us perceive.
So now, that little fable of the revelation of the Thing beyond the object shows you one of the most innocent forms of sublimation. Perhaps you can even see something emerge in it that, goodness knows, society is able to find satisfaction in.
If it is a satisfaction, it is in this case one that doesn’t ask anything of anyone.
January 20, 1960
1 This ellipsis is there in the French edition.