I am not this morning in the state of readiness I consider necessary for me to conduct my seminar in the usual manner. And this is especially the case, given the point we have reached, when I particularly want to be able to present you with some very precise formulas. You will thus allow me to put it off until next time.
The break caused by my absence of two weeks comes at a bad time, since I would have liked to go beyond what I announced last time that I would be dealing with – after having dealt with it, of course.
Courtly love is, in effect, an exemplary form, a paradigm, of sublimation. We only have essentially the documentary testimony of art, but we still feel today the ethical ramifications.
If on the subject of courtly love, apart from the lively archaeological interest in the matter, we still only have the documentary testimony of art in a form that is almost dead, it is obvious that its ethical ramifications are still felt in the relations between the sexes.
The long-lasting influence of the effects of a phenomenon that one might think is little more than an issue of aesthetics is thus of a kind to make us aware of the importance of sublimation – something that psychoanalysis has specifically foregrounded.
I would like to be at the top of my form in order to show you how the question has been posed historically, and how it is posed from the point of view of method, for I believe that there again we are in a position to throw some light on admitted difficulties that historians, Romance scholars, philologists, and various specialists who have approached the problem have encountered. They apparently recognize that they have in no way managed to reduce the phenomenon of courtly love in its historical emergence to an identifiable form of conditioning.
The recognition of the fact is common, and I would say almost uniform. One encounters a paradoxical phenomenon, one that is almost taken for granted; in every example of this kind scholars have often been led to examine influences – something that in many cases is only a way of displacing the problem. They tell us that the origin of the problem is to be found in the transmission of something that happened somewhere else. Yet we still need to know how that happened somewhere else. But in the event that is precisely what gets lost.
In this case, the recourse to influences is far from having illuminated the problem. We will try to approach the problem at its very center, and we will see that Freudian theory is of a kind to shed a certain light there. Thus in this way I take up the problem not only for its value as example but also for its value relative to method.
To start out from this very specific point doesn’t mean that everything that concerns sublimation is to be considered from the perspective developed here, namely, from the point of view of the man / woman relation, of the couple. I do not claim to reduce sublimation to that, nor even to center it on that. I believe on the contrary that to start out from this example is essential in order to arrive at a general formula, whose beginnings we can find in Freud, if we know where to look for it – and I don’t mean search for this or that detail.
If I proceed sometimes by emphasizing one of Freud’s sentences, an isolated formula, or, I was about to say, some gnomic proposition, then I am very conscious of making that gnomic proposition work for me. When I give you a formula such as “The desire of man is the desire of the Other,” it is a gnomic formula, although Freud didn’t seek to present it as such. But he does so from time to time without doing it on purpose. Thus I once quoted a very short formula which brought together the respective mechanisms of hysteria, obsessional neurosis and paranoia with three forms of sublimation, art, religion and science. At another point he relates paranoia to scientific discourse. These clues will help us articulate in all its generality the formula in which we will in the end order the function of sublimation with reference to the Thing.
This Thing is accessible in very elementary examples, which are almost of the type of the classic philosophical demonstration, including a blackboard and a piece of chalk. I referred last time to the schematic example of the vase, so as to allow you to grasp where the Thing is situated in the relationship that places man in the mediating function between the real and the signifier. This Thing, all forms of which created by man belong to the sphere of sublimation, this Thing will always be represented by emptiness, precisely because it cannot be represented by anything else – or, more exactly, because it can only be represented by something else. But in every form of sublimation, emptiness is determinative.
I will point out right away three different ways according to which art, religion and the discourse of science turn out to be related to that; I will point this out by means of three formulas that I don’t say I will retain at the end, when we have completed our journey together.
All art is characterized by a certain mode of organization around this emptiness. I don’t believe that that is a vain formula, in spite of its generality, in guiding those who are interested in explaining the problems of art; and I believe I have the means of illustrating that to you in a variety of striking ways.
Religion in all its forms consists of avoiding this emptiness. We can illustrate that in forcing the note of Freudian analysis for the good reason that Freud emphasized the obsessional traits of religious behavior. Yet although the whole ceremonial phase of the body of religious practices, in effect, enters into this framework, we can hardly be fully satisfied with this formula. A phrase like “respecting this emptiness” perhaps goes further. In any case, the emptiness remains in the center, and that is precisely why sublimation is involved.
As for our third term, the discourse of science, to the extent that it finds its origin in our tradition in the discourse of wisdom or of philosophy, the term Freud uses in connection with paranoia and its relation to psychic reality, the term, Unglauben, finds its full meaning there.
I emphasized this fact in passing in a recent Seminar; Unglauben is not the negation of the phenomenology of Glauben, of belief. Freud never returned to the subject in a comprehensive and definitive way, yet it nevertheless runs throughout his work, and he gives extreme importance to this function in the Entwurf. The phenomenology of belief remained for him an obsession to the end; thus Moses and Monotheism is constructed in its entirety in order to explain the fundamental phenomena of belief.
More profound and more dynamically significant for us is the phenomenon of unbelief. It is not the suppression of belief, but it has to do with man’s relationship to the world and to truth that is specific to man, a relationship he inhabits.
In this connection you would be wrong to trust in summary oppositions or to think that history has known sensational turning points, such as the supposed passage from the theocratic age to so-called humanist forms of liberation of the individual and of reality. The conception of the world is not decisive here. On this occasion, it has nothing to do with something resembling a Weltanschauung – and certainly not mine. I am only pointing the way here, I am only trying to help you orientate yourself in the bibliography of significant works on the subject, works by specialist who in their different fields are equipped with some talent for analysis. I advise you to look up the work of an historian, Lucien Febvre, who is the author of the widely accessible, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century. It is a work that enables you to see how the thoughtful use of historical methods allows us to pose more precisely the question of the forms of development of thinking on the subject of problems of faith.
If you have the time and you would like to read something amusing, you should read a little book by the same author that is supplementary but not secondary, not a little boat bobbing in the wake of a ship; it is called Concerning the Heptameron. The author of the Hep tamer on is Marguerite de Navarre, whom, I hope, you will not mix up with Queen Margot, the wife of Henry IV. She is not just a libertine author, but turns out to have written a treatise that is mystical in kind. But that is not something which excites the astonishment of the historian.
He tries to show us what the collections of tales that go under the title of the Heptameron might mean in the context of the time and of the psychology of their author. And he does it in such a way as to allow us to read that work with not so much a more informed eye as an eye that doesn’t censure the text or, in particular, the reflections of each of the characters after each of the tales that are supposed to be true, and that certainly are for the most part. The thoughts of the respondents that belong to the register of moral and even formal religious reflection are usually censured because one assumes at the beginning that they are no more than the accompanying sauce. But that is something it is important not to get wrong – in any dish it is the sauce that is the essential ingredient. Lucien Febvre teaches us how to read the Heptameron. Yet if we knew how to read, we wouldn’t need him.
As far as unbelief is concerned, it is from our point of view a place in discourse that is to be conceived precisely in relation to the Thing – the Thing is repudiated or foreclosed in the proper sense of Verwerfung.
In the same way that in art there is a Verdrängung, a repression of the Thing, and in religion there is probably a Verschiebung or displacement, it is strictly speaking Verwerfung that is involved in the discourse of science. The discourse of science repudiates the presence of the Thing insofar as from its point of view the ideal of absolute knowledge is glimpsed, that is, something that posits the Thing while it pays no attention to it. As everyone knows, this point of view has historically proved in the end to be a failure.
The discourse of science is determined by this Verwerfung, and, in the light of my formula that what is foreclosed in the symbolic reappears in the real, this is probably why it leads to a situation in which, at the end of physics, it is something as enigmatic as the Thing that is glimpsed.
I will postpone until next time a discussion of my paradigm of courtly love, an example of sublimation in art whose vital effects we still come across. We will take note of them after I come back from my trip; we will take a sampling of these traces, of the indisputable effects of the primary signifying construction that is determinative in the phenomenon of courtly love. And we will attempt to recognize in contemporary phenomena something that can only be explained through recourse to such an origin.
Since I am engaged in marginal commentary today, let me point out in passing that you would be wrong to think that this concept of the Thing to which I am giving a new development this year wasn’t, in fact, immanent in our discussions of previous years.
Moreover, since there are those who question certain characteristics of my style, let me remind you for example of the expression “The Freudian Thing” that was the title of something I wrote, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to look it up. That text and that title surprised because if one starts to analyze my intentions from a philosophical point of view, one comes to relate them to a concern that was very popular at one time, namely, the resistance to reification. Of course, I never said anything about reification. But intentions can always be wrapped around a discourse. It is clear that if I chose such a title, I did so deliberately. If you reread the text, you will see that I am essentially speaking of the Thing. And I speak about it in a way that was evidently the cause of the undoubted discomfort the text provoked at the time. The fact is I sometimes make the Thing itself speak.
I would like now to make sure that today’s meeting might be of some use to those who have travelled some distance to get here.
Given the point we have reached in my Seminar, it seems likely that some of you may have questions to ask me or answers to give, so as to suggest the meaning for them of some element or other in my argument.
I know that it is never easy to break the silence in a crowd, to ring one’s little bell, so to speak. I will, therefore, give you the opportunity to ask me a written question. The only disadvantage there is that I am free to read it as I see fit.
At the same time we are going to do something unexpected that strikes me as a good idea. Some of you attended the scientific meeting of our Society yesterday. I don’t know how it ended because I had to leave after having responded at some length to the lecturers, people for whom I have the greatest affection, and after I had expressed my deep interest in their work. They are here today and I would like to ask Smirnov for some clarification on the subject of Spitz’s “No and Yes.”1
Why did you not tackle the “Yes”? [Mr. Smirnov’s answer.]
Let me explain to those who do not know the text that it is a book belonging to a series of investigations founded on the direct observation of newborn babies or more precisely of infants, that is to say, up to the point of the appearance of articulated language as such. Within this dimension, Spitz claims to find the “No” as a “pattern,” as a semantic form in a certain number of gestures and expressions, and primarily in “rooting” – that is to say, in the oscillating gesture of the head that the infant makes in its approach to the breast. The word is very difficult to translate into French, but there is a correlative in the English text in the word “snout,” which clearly indicates what is involved,
I am far from being critical of Spitz. I intend rather to defend him. I don’t mean he is right, but the work is good and sharply articulated. And I would fault you with failing to have brought out the fact that the phenomenon is analogous to what occurs in traumatic neurosis – it is, he says, the last memory before the emergence of the catastrophic reaction.
I embarrassed you by asking you to comment on Spitz’s other works, namely, his fiction on The Primal Cavity or at the very least his references to the screen of the dream.
Spitz doesn’t on the whole elaborate on the fact that a form of reaction deriving from an earlier stage may be used in a critical situation. That seems to be a very useful idea, however, something that should always be emphasized. I think you made the point, unless it was Laplanche.
Spitz is reduced to having a mechanism as passive as that of traumatic neurosis intervene. He thus implies some preceding frustration of the infant. He considers the act of “rooting” to be a trace which remains inscribed after something like the refusal or withdrawal of the breast that immediately precedes it. It is surprising that he expresses it in an isolated form, on the basis of a given case, and not in general.
[Statements by Mr. Smirnov and Laplanche; a question from Mr. Audouard: “Why do you speak to us about the Thing instead of simply speaking about mediation?”]
To answer you briefly right away, I note that you have always been attentive to the note of what one might call Hegelian reinterpretations of analytical experience. We are concerned here with the Freudian experience as an ethics, which is to say, at its most essential level, since it directs us towards a therapeutic form of action that, whether we like it or not, is included in the register or in the terms of an ethics. And the more we deny this, the more it is the case. Experience demonstrates this: a form of analysis that boasts of its highly scientific distinctiveness gives rise to normative notions that I characterize by evoking the curse Saint Matthew utters on those who make the bundles heavier when they are to be carried by others. Strengthening the categories of affective normativity produces disturbing results.
It is clear that we put the accent on the irreducible element in the instinct, on that which appears at the limit of a mediation and that reification is unable to encompass. But in encircling that something whose limits we explore, we are encircling the empty image.
The deliberate intention to emphasize this notion has never been absent from what I have said thus far. If you look up the texts I referred you to on this subject, you will see that there is no ambiguity. That Hegelian radicalism that was rashly attributed to me somewhere by a contributor to Les Temps Modernes should in no way be imputed to me. The whole dialectic of desire that I developed here, and that I was beginning at the very moment the rash individual was writing that particular sentence, is sharply distinguished from such Hegelianism. It is even more marked this year. The inevitable character seems to me to be especially marked in the effect of sublimation.
Mr. X: The formula for sublimation that you have given us is to raise the object to the dignity of the Thing. This Thing doesn’t exist to start with, because sublimation is going to bring us to it. The question I have is, therefore, isn’t this Thing not really a thing, but on the contrary a Non-Thing, and isn’t it through sublimation that one comes to see it as being the Thing (…)?
What you are saying strikes me as on the right track; it’s obvious you follow my presentation of these questions without difficulty. Something is offered to us as analysts, if we follow the sum of our experience and if we know how to evaluate it. You state that the attempt at sublimation tends in the end to realize the Thing or to save it. It’s true and it’s not true. There’s an illusion there.
Neither science nor religion is of a kind to save the Thing or to give it to us, because the magic circle that separates us from it is imposed by our relation to the signifier. As I have told you, the Thing is that which in the real suffers from this fundamental, initial relation, which commits man to the ways of the signifier by reason of the fact that he is subjected to what Freud calls the pleasure principle, and which, I hope it is clear in your minds, is nothing else than the dominance of the signifier – I, of course, mean the true pleasure principle as it functions in Freud.
In brief, it is the effect of the influence of the signifier on the psychic real that is involved, and it is for this reason that the activity of sublimation is not purely and simply senseless in all its forms – one responds with whatever is at hand.
I wanted to have here today, so as to be able to show it to you at the end of the Seminar, an object that to be understood, if not to be described, demands a long commentary on the history of art. That one managed to construct such an object and to find pleasure in it requires that we make a significant detour.
I will describe it to you. It is an object that embodies an anamorphosis. I assume that many of you know what that is. It is any kind of construction that is made in such a way that by means of an optical transposition a certain form that wasn’t visible at first sight transforms itself into a readable image. The pleasure is found in seeing its emergence from an indecipherable form.
Such a thing is extremely widespread in the history of art. Just go to the Louvre; you will see Holbein’s painting of The Ambassadors and at the feet of one of the two men, who is just as well built as you or I, you will see an enigmatic form stretched out on the ground. It looks roughly like fried eggs. If you place yourself at a certain angle from which the painting itself disappears in all its relief by reason of the converging lines of its perspective, you will see a death’s head appear, the sign of the classic theme of vanitas. And this is found in a proper painting, a painting commissioned by the ambassadors in England, who must have been very pleased with his work; and what was at the bottom must have amused them a lot, too.
This phenomenon is datable. It was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that things reached this point of heightened interest and even of fascination. In a chapel built by order of the Jesuits in Descartes’s time, there existed a whole wall some eighteen meters long that represented a scene from the life of the saints or a nativity scene, and that was completely unreadable from any point in the room, but if one entered by a certain corridor, you can see for a brief moment the extraordinarily dispersed lines come together and perceive the body of the scene.
The anamorphosis I wanted to bring here is much less voluminous. It belongs to the collector I have already referred to. It is formed of a polished cylinder that has the function of a mirror, and around it you put a kind of bib or flat surface on which there are also indecipherable lines. When you stand at a certain angle, you see the image concerned emerge in the cylindrical mirror; in this case it is a beautiful anamorphosis of a painting of the crucifixion copied from Rubens.
This object could never have been produced, never have had a necessary meaning without a whole preceding development. There is behind it the whole history of architecture as well as that of painting, their combination and the history of this combination.
To put it briefly, primitive architecture can be defined as something organized around emptiness. That is also the authentic impression that the forms of a cathedral like Saint Mark’s give us, and it is the true meaning of all architecture. Then subsequently, for economic reasons, one is satisfied with painting images of that architecture, one learns to paint architecture on the walls of architecture; and painting, too, is first of all something that is organized around emptiness. Since it is a matter of finding once more the sacred emptiness of architecture in the less marked medium of painting, the attempt is made to create something that resembles it more and more closely, that is to say, perspective is discovered.
The following stage is paradoxical and quite amusing; it shows how one strangles oneself with one’s own knots.
From the moment when perspective was discovered in painting, a form of architecture appears that adopts the perspectivism of painting. Palladio’s art, for example, makes this very obvious. Go and see Palladio’s theater in Vicenze, a little masterpiece of its kind that is in any case instructive and exemplary. Neoclassical architecture submits itself to the laws of perspective, plays with them, and makes them its own. That is, it places them inside of something that was done in painting in order to find once again the emptiness of primitive architecture.
From that point on one is entangled in a knot which seems to flee increasingly from the meaning of this emptiness. And I believe that the Baroque return to the play of forms, to all manner of devices, including anamorphosis, is an effort to restore the true meaning of artistic inquiry; artists use the discovery of the property of lines to make something emerge that is precisely there where one has lost one’s bearings or, strictly speaking, nowhere.
Rubens’ painting that suddenly appears in the place of the unintelligible image reveals what is at issue here. At issue, in an analogical or anamorphic form, is the effort to point once again to the fact that what we seek in the illusion is something in which the illusion as such in some way transcends itself, destroys itself, by demonstrating that it is only there as a signifier.
And it is this which lends primacy to the domain of language above all, since with language we only ever have to do with the signifier in all cases. That is why in raising the problems of the relationship of art to sublimation, I will begin with courtly love. One finds there texts which show in an exemplary way its conventional side, in the sense that language always involves artifice relative to anything intuitive, material or lived.
This phenomenon is all the more striking since we see it develop at a period of uninhibited fucking. I mean that they didn’t attempt to hide it, didn’t mince their words.
The coexistence of two styles on the subject is the remarkable thing.
You introduce the idea of the Thing and the Non-Thing. It is, if you like, true that the Thing is also the Non-Thing. In reality, the Non-as such is certainly not individualized in a significant way. Exactly the same problem is posed by the Freudian notion of Todestrieb, whereas Freud tells us at the same time that there is no negation in the unconscious.
We don’t make a philosophy out of it. I remind you of the notion that I modified the other day, so as not to give the impression that I don’t accept my responsibilities: when I talk about the Thing, I am certainly talking about something. But I am, of course, talking operationally, with reference to the place that it occupies in a certain logical stage of our thought and of our conceptualization, with reference to its function in what concerns us.
Yesterday evening I referred to and denounced the substitution for Freud’s whole classic topology of the term “ego” – something that is particularly regrettable in someone as deeply immersed in analytical thought as Spitz.
It is indeed difficult to recognize in that concept the essential function with which analytical experience began, that was its shock value as well as its echo and suite. Let us not forget that Freud, in effect, immediately countered it with the invention of the term das Es. That primacy of the Es is now completely forgotten.
To some extent, the Es is not sufficiently emphasized by the way it is presented in the texts of the second topic. It is to remind us of the primordial and primary character of this intuition in our experience at the level of ethics that this year I am calling a certain zone of reference “the Thing.”
Mr. Laplanche: I would like to ask a further question on the relationship of the pleasure principle to the play of the signifier.
This relationship is founded on the fact that the pleasure principle basically involves the sphere of investment, Besetzung, and its Bahnungen, and it is facilitated by the Vorstellungen and even more by what Freud calls the Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen – a term that appears very early, before the article on the Unconscious. Each time a state of need arises, the pleasure principle tends to provoke a reinvestment in its content – in inverted commas, that is, since at this metapsychological level clinical practice is not involved – an hallucinated reinvestment of what had previously been a satisfying hallucination.
The diffuse energy of the pleasure principle tends toward this reinvestment of representation. The intervention of the reality principle can only therefore be a radical one; it is never a second stage. Naturally, there is no adaptation to reality that doesn’t involve a phenomenon of tasting, of sampling, by means of which the subject manages to monitor, one might almost say with his tongue, that which enables him to be sure that he isn’t dreaming.
This is what constitutes the originality of Freud’s thought and no one, moreover, has been mistaken about that. It is both paradoxical and provocative. Before Freud no one has ever dared articulate the functioning of the psychic apparatus in that way. He describes it on the basis of his experience of the irreducible element he saw emerge at the core of hysterical substitutions; the first thing that poor, defenseless man can do when he is tortured by need is to begin to hallucinate his satisfaction, and after that he can only monitor the situation. Fortunately, he more or less makes at the same time the gestures required to attach himself to the zone in which this hallucination coincides with the real in an approximative form.
If the basic texts are to be respected, that’s the miserable beginning from which the whole dialectic of experience is articulated in Freudian terms. That’s what I told you when I discussed the relationship between the pleasure principle and the signifier.
Thus the Vorstellungen have right from the beginning the character of a signifying structure.
February 3, 1960
1 The words in quotation marks here and in the following paragraph are in English in the original.