If I wanted you to be acquainted with Sperber’s article, it is because it is coupled to our sublimation train.
I will not engage in a serious critique of the text, for I hope that after several years of following my teaching here, most of you have found something irritating in the way in which Sperber proceeds. Though his goal is undoubtedly interesting, his mode of demonstration has its weaknesses. To refer to the fact that words with an original sexual meaning started to take on a series of meanings increasingly remote from their primitive meaning, as a way of proving the common sexual origin in a sublimated form of fundamental human activities, is to adopt an approach whose demonstrable value seems to me to be eminently refutable from the point of view of common sense.
That words whose meaning was originally sexual spread out so as to overlay meanings that are very remote doesn’t mean as a consequence that the whole field of meaning is overlaid in that way. That doesn’t mean that all the language we use is in the end reducible to the key words it contains, words whose valorization is considerably facilitated by the fact that one accepts as proven what is, in fact, most questionable, namely, the notion of a root or radical, and what in human language would be its constitutive link to sense.
This emphasis placed on roots and radicals in languages making use of inflections raises particular problems that are far from being applicable to human language universally. What would be the case with Chinese, for example, where all the signifying units are monosyllabic? The notion of a root is highly tenuous. In fact, what is involved is an illusion that is linked to the development of language, of the use of the language system, which can only seem very suspect to us.
That doesn’t mean that Sperber’s remarks concerning the use of words with what might be called sexual roots in Indo-European languages are of no interest. But they can hardly satisfy us from the perspective in which I believe you have been trained and formed by me, a perspective which involves distinguishing properly the function of the signifier or the creation of signification through the metonymic and metaphoric use of signifiers.
That’s where the trouble begins. Why are those zones in which sexual signification spreads outward, why are those rivers through which it ordinarily flows – and, as you have seen, in a direction that isn’t just random – specially chosen, so that in order to reach them one uses words that already have a given usage in the sexual sphere? Why is it precisely in connection with a half-failed act of pruning, with an act of cutting that is blocked, thwarted, messed up, that one should evoke the presumed origin of the word and find it in the hole drilling activities of work in its most primitive of forms, with the meaning of sexual operation, of phallic penetration? Why does one resurrect the metaphor “fuck” in connection with something that is “fucked up?” Why is it the image of the vulva that surfaces to express a number of different acts, including those of escaping, of fleeing, of cutting and running (se tailler), as the German term in the text has often been translated?
I have, in fact, tried to find confirmation of the historical moment when that nice little expression, se tailler (to cut and run), in the sense of “to flee” or “to escape,” first appeared. I haven’t had time to find out, and I didn’t discover it in the dictionaries and other sources that I have at my disposal. It is true that I don’t have in Paris the dictionaries that give the popular meanings of words. I would like someone to do some research on the topic.
Thus, why in our everyday life do we find that in our metaphors a certain type of meaning is involved, certain signifiers that are marked by their primitive use in connection with the sexual relation? Why, for example, do we use some slang expression that had originally a sexual significance in order to evoke metaphorically situations that have nothing to do with sex? The metaphorical usage involved is employed to obtain a certain modification.
But if it were only a question of showing how in the normal diachronic development of linguistic usage sexual references are used in a certain metaphorical sense – that is, if I were only concerned with providing another example of certain aberrations of psychoanalytic speculation – I wouldn’t have presented you with the Sperber text. If it is still interesting, it is because of what is to be found on its horizon, something that isn’t demonstrated there, but which in its intention it strives for, and that is the radical relationship that exists between the first instrumental relations, the earliest techniques, the principal actions of agriculture, such as that of opening the belly of the earth, or again the principal actions in the making of a vase that I have previously emphasized, and something very precise, namely, not so much the sexual act as the female sexual organ.
It is insofar as the female sexual organ or, more precisely, the form of an opening and an emptiness, is at the center of all the metaphors concerned, that the article is of interest and is valuable in focusing our thought, for it is obvious that there is a gap in the text, a leap beyond the supposed reference.
One takes note of the fact that the use of a term that originally meant “coitus” is capable of being extended virtually infinitely, that the use of a term that originally meant “vulva” is capable of generating all kinds of metaphorical uses. And it is in this way that it began to be supposed that the vocalization presumed to accompany the sexual act gave men the idea of using the signifier to designate either the organ, and especially the female organ, in a noun form, or the act of coitus in a verbal form. The priority of the vocal use of the signifier among men is thus supposed to find its origin in the chanted calls that are assumed to be those of primitive sexual relations among humans, in the same way that they are among animals and especially birds.
The idea is very interesting. But you can sense right away the difference that exists between the more-or-less standardized cry that accompanies an activity and the use of a signifier that detaches a given articulatory element, that is to say, either the act or the organ. We don’t find the signifying structure as such here; nothing implies that the oppositional element which forms the structure of the use of signifiers – and is already fully developed in the Fort-Da from which we took our original example – is given in the natural sexual call. If the sexual call can be derived from a temporal modulation of the act whose repetition may involve the fixation of certain elements of vocal activity, it still cannot give us even the most primitive structuring element of language. There is a gap there.
Nevertheless, the interest of the article is in making us see the way in which what is essential in the development of our experience and in Freud’s doctrine may be conceived, that is to say, that sexual symbolism in the ordinary sense of the word may polarize at its point of origin the metaphorical play of the signifier.
That’s all I have to say on the subject today, with the understanding that I may return to it later.
I wondered how I should take up the thread of our discussions, how I should start out again today.
As the result of conversations I have had with some of you, I said to myself that there would be some value in my giving you an idea of the lectures, comments, and conversations in which I engaged in Brussels. The fact is, when I have something to communicate to you, it is always related to the line of thought I am pursuing, and even when I take it out into the world, I do little more than take it up more or less at the point I have reached.
But to suppose that you already know implicitly what I said up there, which isn’t the case, would be to take too great a leap forward. It is, in fact, important that the issues raised not be ignored.
That may seem to you to be an unconventional way of proceeding, but given the distance we still have to go, I don’t have time to indulge in professorial scruples. Mine is not a professor’s role. I don’t even like to put myself in the teaching situation, since a psychoanalyst who speaks to an initiated audience is in the position of a propagandist. If I agreed to talk at the Catholic University of Brussels, I did so in a spirit of mutual assistance; it was in order to support the presence and the activities of those who are our friends and colleagues in Belgium. This concern is not for me the primary one, of course, but it is a secondary one.
I thus found myself in front of an audience that was very large and of which I had a very good impression, summoned there by the Catholic University. And that alone is enough to explain my motivation for speaking to them of what Freud has to say about the function of the Father.
As you might expect from me, I didn’t mince my words or censor my language. I didn’t attempt to attenuate Freud’s position on religion. Moreover, you know what my position is concerning the so-called religious truths.
It is perhaps worthwhile to be more precise on the subject for once, although I believe I have made it clear enough. Whether from personal conviction or in the name of a methodological point of view, the so-called scientific point of view – a point of view that is by the way reached by people who otherwise consider themselves to be believers, but who in a certain sphere assume they are required to put aside their religious point of view – there is a paradox involved in practically excluding from the debate and from analysis things, terms, and doctrines that have been articulated in the field of faith, on the pretext that they belong to a domain that is reserved for believers.
You once heard me make a series of remarks on a passage from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans in connection with the theme that it is the Law which causes sin. And you saw that, thanks to an artifice I could have done without, namely, the substitution of the term the Thing for what the text calls sin, I was able to achieve a very precise formulation of what I had to say at the time on the subject of the knot of the Law and desire. Well, that particular example was not chosen by chance – it belonged to a certain order of effectiveness in relation to a special case, and by means of a kind of sleight of hand it was unusually helpful in leading to something I needed at the time to bring to your attention.
We analysts, who claim to go beyond certain conceptions of prepsychology relative to the phenomena of our own field or who approach human realities without prejudice, do not have to believe in these religious truths in any way, given that such belief may extend as far as what is called faith, in order to be interested in what is articulated in its own terms in religious experience – in the terms of the conflict between freedom and grace, for example.
A notion as precise and articulate as grace is irreplaceable where the psychology of the act is concerned, and we don’t find anything equivalent in classic academic psychology. Not only doctrines, but also the history of choices, that is, of heresies that have been attested to in this sphere, and the succession of emotional outbursts that have motivated a certain number of directions taken in the concrete ethics of generations, all belong to our sphere of inquiry; they, so to speak, demand all of our attention in their own register and mode of expression.
It is not enough that certain themes be raised only by those who believe they believe – after all, how can we know? – for the whole field to be reserved for them alone. If we accept that they truly believe, then they are not beliefs for them but truths. What they believe in, whether they believe they believe in it or they don’t – nothing is more ambiguous than belief – one thing is certain, they believe they know. The knowledge in question is like any other, and for this reason it falls into the field of inquiry that we should conduct on all forms of knowledge; and such is the case, because as analysts we believe that there is no knowledge which doesn’t emerge against a background of ignorance.
That is the reason why we accept as such the idea of other forms of knowledge than the kind that is founded scientifically.
It was not useless, then, for me to confront an audience that represents an important sector of the public. Whether or not I may have caused an ear or two to prick up is problematic; the future alone will reveal that. Moreover, it won’t have the same impact on a very different audience, like you.
Freud himself took an unequivocal position on the subject of religious experience. He said that everything of that kind that implied a sentimental approach meant nothing to him; it was literally a dead letter for him. Yet if we in this assembly have the position on the letter that we do, that doesn’t solve a thing; however dead it might be, that letter was nevertheless definitely articulated. Well now, faced with people who are supposed not to be able to dissociate themselves from a certain message concerning the function of the Father – given that it is at the heart of the experience defined as religious-I had no discomfort in affirming that as far as that matter was concerned, “Freud had what it took,” as I put it in a subtitle that was found a little startling.
You only have to open the little book entitled Moses and Monotheism that Freud cogitated over for some ten years, for after Totem and Taboo he thought of nothing but that, of Moses and the religion of his fathers. And if it weren’t for the article on the Spaltung of the ego, one might say that the pen fell from his hands at the end of Moses and Monotheism. Contrary to what has been suggested to me over the last few weeks in connection with Freud’s intellectual production toward the end of his life, I don’t at all think that there was a decline. Nothing seems to me to be more firmly articulated in any case and more in conformity with all Freud’s previous thought than this work.
It bears on the monotheistic message as such; and for him there is no doubt that it contains an uncontestable weight of superior value over any other. The fact that Freud was an atheist doesn’t make any difference. For the atheist that Freud was, if not necessarily for all atheists, the goal of the radical core of this message was of decisive value. On the left of this message, there are some things that are henceforth outdated, obsolete; they no longer hold beyond the manifestation of the message. On the right, things are quite different.
The situation is quite clear from the spirit of Freud’s argument. That doesn’t mean that there is nothing at all outside of monotheism, far from it. He doesn’t give us a theory of the gods, but enough is said concerning the ambiance that is usually connoted by “pagan,” a late connotation linked to its retreat to the milieu of the peasantry. In that pagan ambiance at the time when it was flourishing, the numen rises up at every step, at the corner of every road, in grottoes, at crossroads; it weaves human experience together, and we can still see traces of it in a great many fields. That is something that contrasts greatly with the monotheistic profession of faith.
The numinous rises up at every step and, conversely, every step of the numinous leaves a trace, engenders a memorial. It didn’t take much for a new temple to be erected, for a new religion to be established. The numinous proliferates and intervenes on all sides in human experience; it is, moreover, so abundant that something in the end must be manifested through man; its power cannot be overcome.
It is to this immense envelopment and at the same time to a degradation that the genre of the fable bears witness. Ancient fables are full of meanings that remain richly rewarding, but we have trouble realizing that they could have been compatible with something like a faith in the gods, because, whether they are heroic or vulgar, they are shot through with a kind of riotousness, drunkenness, and anarchy born of divine passions. The laughter of the Olympians in the Iliad sufficiently illustrates this on the heroic plane. There’s a lot to be said about this laughter. From the pen of the philosophers, on the other hand, we have the other side of this laughter, of the derisory character of the adventures of the gods. It is difficult for us to conceive this.
In opposition to this we have the monotheistic message. How is it possible? How did it rise to this level? The way in which Freud articulates it is crucial if we are to appreciate the level at which its progress is to be situated.
For him everything is founded on the notion of Moses the Egyptian and of Moses the Midianite. I believe that an audience of people like you, eighty per cent of whom are psychoanalysts, should know this book by heart.
Moses the Egyptian is the Great Man, the legislator, the politician, the rationalist, the one whose path Freud claims to discover with the historical appearance in the fourteenth century B.C. of the religion of Akhenaton-something that has been attested by recent discoveries. This religion promotes a unitarianism of energy, symbolized by the sun from which it radiates and spreads out across the earth. This first attempt at a rationalist vision of the world, which is presupposed in the unitarianism of the real, in the substantive unification of the world centered on the sun, failed. Hardly had Akhenaton disappeared, when religious ideas of all kinds begin to multiply again, especially in Egypt; the pandemonium of the gods returns to take charge once more and utterly wipes out the reform. One man keeps the flame of this rationalist cause alight, Moses the Egyptian; it is he who chooses a small group of men and leads them through the test that will make them worthy to found a community based on his principles. In other words, someone wanted to create socialism in a single country, except, of course, there was in addition no country but just a bunch of men to carry the project through.
That’s Freud conception of the true Moses, the Great Man; and what we need to know is how his message has come down to us.
You will perhaps respond that this Moses was after all a bit of a magician. How otherwise did he produce the swarms of locusts and frogs? But that was his business. It’s not an essential question from the point of view that concerns us here, that of his place in religion. Let’s leave the question of magic aside, although it doesn’t seem to have hurt him with anyone.
On the other hand, there is Moses the Midianite, the son-in-law of Jethro, whom Freud also calls the one from Sinai, from Horeb, and Freud teaches us that this one was confused with the other. It is this one who claims to have heard the decisive word emerge from the burning bush, the word that cannot be eluded, as Freud eludes it: “I am,” not as the whole Christian gnosis has attempted to interpret it, “he who is” – thereby exposing us to difficulties relative to the concept of being that are far from being over, and which have perhaps contributed to compromising exegesis – but “I am what I am.” Or, in other words, a God who introduces himself as an essentially hidden God.
This hidden god is a jealous God. He seems to be very difficult to dissociate from the one who, according to the Bible, proclaims in that same ambiance of fire which makes him inaccessible the famous ten commandments to the assembled people, who are required to remain at a certain distance. Given that these commandments turn out to be proof against anything – and by that I mean that whether or not we obey them, we still cannot help hearing them – in their indestructible character they prove to be the very laws of speech, as I tried to show you.
Moses the Midianite seems to pose a problem of his own – I would like to know whom or what he faced on Sinai and on Horeb. But after all, since he couldn’t bear the brilliance of the face of him who said “I am what I am,” we will simply say at this point that the burning bush was Moses’s Thing, and leave it there. In any case, we still have to calculate the consequences of that revelation.
By what means is the problem resolved for Freud? He considers that Moses the Egyptian was assassinated by his little people, who were less docile than ours relative to socialism in a single country. And then these people went on to devote themselves to all kinds of paralyzing observances at the same time that they caused trouble for countless neighbors – for we shouldn’t overlook what is, in effect, the history of the Jews. One only has to read a little into these ancient works to realize that they knew all about colonial ambition in Canaan. They even managed to induce neighboring populations to have themselves circumcised on the quiet, and then they profited from the paralysis that that operation between your legs causes for a time, in order to wipe them out. But I don’t mention that simply to record grievances about a stage of the religion that is now far behind us.
Having said that, however, it’s clear that Freud doesn’t for a moment doubt that the major interest of Jewish history is that of being the bearer of the message of one God.
And that’s where things stand. We have the dissociation between the rationalist Moses and the inspired, obscurantist Moses, who is scarcely ever discussed. But basing his argument on the examination of historical evidence, Freud finds no other path adapted to the transmission of the rationalist Moses’ message than that of darkness; in other words, this message is linked through repression to the murder of the Great Man. And it is precisely in this way, Freud tells us, that it could be transmitted and maintained in a state of efficacy that can be historically measured. It’s so close to the Christian tradition that it’s really remarkable; it is because the primordial murder of the Great Man reemerges in a second murder that in a sense translates and brings it to light, the murder of Christ, that the monotheistic message is completed. It is because the secret malediction of the murder of the Great Man – which itself only draws its power from the fact that it echoes the inaugural murder of humanity, that of the primitive father – it is because this event emerges into the light of day, that what, in the light of Freud’s text, we are obliged to call Christian redemption may be accomplished.
That tradition alone pursues to the end the task of revealing what is involved in the primitive crime of the primordial law.
How after that can one avoid taking note of the originality of Freud’s position relative to all that is to be found in the field of the history of religions? The history of religions consists essentially of establishing the common denominator of religiosity. We stake out the religious region in man within which we are required to include religions as different as one from Borneo, Confucianism, Taoism, and the Christian religion. It’s not without its difficulties, although, when one sets out to produce typologies, there’s no reason why one shouldn’t end up with something. And this time, one ends up with a classification of the imaginary, which is in opposition to that which characterizes the origin of monotheism, and which is integrated into the primordial commandments insofar as they are the laws of speech: “Thou shalt not make a carved image of me,” and so as to avoid that risk altogether, “Thou shalt not make any image at all.”
And since I have happened to talk to you about the primitive sublimation of architecture, let me say that the problem of the temple that was destroyed without trace remains. To which symbolic order, to which set of precautions, to which exceptional circumstances did it appeal for everything to be destroyed, everything down to the remotest corner that might have made possible the reappearance, on the sides of a vase – and it wouldn’t have been difficult – of images of animals, plants, and all those forms that were outlined on the walls of the cave? This temple was, in effect, only supposed to be the cover of what was at its center, of the Ark of union, that is the pure symbol of the pact, of the tie that bound him who said “I am what I am,” and gave the commandments, to the people who received them, so that among all peoples it might be distinguished as the one that had wise and intelligent laws. How was this temple to be constructed so as to avoid all the traps of art?
It’s a question that cannot be answered by any document, by any material image. I simply leave it open.
What is involved here is discussed by Freud in Moses and Monotheism in connection with the business of the moral law. He thoroughly integrates it there into the adventure which, as he writes in his text, only found its further development and its fulfillment in the Judeo-Christian story.
As far as other religions are concerned – he vaguely defines these as Oriental, thereby alluding apparently to a whole range that includes Buddhism, Lao-Tseu, and others – he affirms, with a boldness that one can only wonder at, that they are all nothing more than the religion of the Great Man. Thus things there remained stuck halfway, more or less aborted, without reaching the point of the primitive murder of this Great Man.
I am far from agreeing with all that. Yet in the history of the avatars of Buddhism, one can find a great many things which, legitimately or not, can be made to illustrate Freud’s theory; in other words, it is because they did not push the development of the drama through to the end that they stayed where they are. But it is, needless to say, odd to find this strange Christo-centrism in Freud’s writings. There must have been a reason for him to have slipped into it almost without realizing it.
In any case, we find ourselves brought back to following the path to the end.
So that something like the order of the law may be transmitted, it has to pass along the path traced by the primordial drama articulated in Totem and Taboo, that is to say, the murder of the father and its consequences, the murder at the origin of culture of the figure about whom one can say nothing, a fearful and feared as well as dubious figure, an all-powerful, half-animal creature of the primal horde, who was killed by his sons. As a result of which – and the articulation here is important – an inaugural pact is established that is essential for a time to the institution of that law, which Freud does his best to tie to the murder of the father and to identify with the ambivalence that is thus at the basis of the relations between son and father or, in other words, involves the return of love once the act is accomplished.
All the mystery is in that act. It is designed to hide something, namely, that not only does the murder of the father not open the path to jouissancethat the presence of the father was supposed to prohibit, but it, in fact, strengthens the prohibition. The whole problem is there; that’s where, in fact as well as in theory, the fault lies. Although the obstacle is removed as a result of the murder, jouissance is still prohibited; not only that, but the prohibition is reinforced.
This fault that denies is thus sustained, articulated, made visible by the myth, but at the same time it is also camouflaged by it. That is why the important feature of Totem and Taboo is that it is a myth, and, as has been said, perhaps the only myth that the modern age was capable of. And Freud created it.
It is important to grasp what is embodied in this fault. Everything that passes across it is turned into a debt in the Great Book of debts. Every act of jouissance gives rise to something that is inscribed in the Book of debts of the Law. Furthermore, something in this regulatory mechanism must either be a paradox or the site of some irregularity, for to pass across the fault in the other direction is not equivalent.
Freud writes in Civilization and Its Discontents that everything that is transferred from jouissance to prohibition gives rise to the increasing strengthening of prohibition. Whoever attempts to submit to the moral law sees the demands of his superego grow increasingly meticulous and increasingly cruel.
Why isn’t it the same in the other direction? It is a fact that it isn’t the case at all. Whoever enters the path of uninhibited jouissance, in the name of the rejection of the moral law in some form or other, encounters obstacles whose power is revealed to us every day in our experience in innumerable forms, forms that nevertheless perhaps may be traced back to a single root.
We are, in fact, led to the point where we accept the formula that without a transgression there is no access to jouissance, and, to return to Saint Paul, that that is precisely the function of the Law. Transgression in the direction of jouissance only takes place if it is supported by the oppositional principle, by the forms of the Law. If the paths to jouissance have something in them that dies out, that tends to make them impassable, prohibition, if I may say so, becomes its all-terrain vehicle, its half-track truck, that gets it out of the circuitous routes that lead man back in a roundabout way toward the rut of a short and well-trodden satisfaction.
That is the point that our experience leads us to, on condition that we are guided by Freud’s articulation of the problem. Sin needed the Law, Saint Paul said, so that he could become a great sinner – nothing, of course, affirms that he did, but so that he could conceive of the possibility.
Meanwhile, what we see here is the tight bond between desire and the Law. And it is in the light of this that Freud’s ideal is an ideal tempered with civility that might be called patriarchal civility, in the full idyllic sense. The father is as sentimental a figure as you can imagine, the kind of figure suggested by the humanitarian ideal that resonates in Diderot’s bourgeois dramas, or indeed in the figures that are the favorites of eighteenth-century engravings. That patriarchal civility is supposed to set us on the most reasonable path to temperate or normal desires.
Yet what Freud is proposing through his myth is, in spite of its novelty, not something that wasn’t from a certain point of view a response to a demand. The demand to which it was, in fact, a response is not difficult to see.
The myth of the origin of the Law is incarnated in the murder of the father; it is out of that that the prototypes emerged, which we call successively the animal totem, then a more-or-less powerful and jealous god, and, finally, the single God, God the Father. The myth of the murder of the father is the myth of a time for which God is dead.
But if for us God is dead, it is because he always has been dead, and that’s what Freud says. He has never been the father except in the mythology of the son, or, in other words, in that of the commandment which commands that he, the father, be loved, and in the drama of the passion which reveals that there is a resurrection after death. That is to say, the man who made incarnate the death of God still exists. He still exists with the commandment which orders him to love God. That’s the place where Freud stops, and he stops at the same time – the theme is developed in Civilization and Its Discontents – at the place that concerns the love of one’s neighbor, which is something that appears to be insurmountable for us, indeed incomprehensible.
I will attempt to explain why next time. I just wanted to emphasize the fact today that there is a certain atheistic message in Christianity itself, and I am not the first to have mentioned it. Hegel said that the destruction of the gods would be brought about by Christianity.
Man survives the death of God, which he assumes, but in doing so, he presents himself before us. The pagan legend tells us that at the moment when the veil of the temple was rent on the Aegean Sea, the message resounded that “The great Pan is dead.” Even if Freud moralizes in Civilization and Its Discontents, he stops short at the commandment to love thy neighbor. It is to the heart of this problem that his theory of the meaning of the instinct brings us back. The relationship of the great Pan to death was, then, a stumbling block for the psychologism of his current disciples.
That’s why my second lecture in Brussels turned on the question of love of one’s neighbor. It was another theme I had in common with my audience. What I did, in fact, come up with, I will allow you to judge next time.
March 16, 1960