We have reached the barrier of desire then, and, as I indicated last time, I will speak about the good. The good has always had to situate itself on that barrier. I shall be concerned today with the way in which psychoanalysis enables one to articulate that situation.
I will speak then about the good, and perhaps what I have to say will be bad in the sense that I don’t have all the goodness required to speak well of it. I won’t perhaps speak too well of it because I am myself not quite well enough to speak at that high level the subject requires. But the idea of nature that I have told you about means that I will not be stopped by such an accidental contingency. I simply ask you to excuse the presentation if at the end you are not completely satisfied.
The question of the good is as close as possible to our sphere of action. All exchanges between men and especially interventions of the type we engage in are usually placed under the tutelage and authority of the good – the perspective is a sublime one, indeed a sublimated one. Now sublimation could be defined from a certain point of view as an opinion in the Platonic sense of the term, an opinion arranged in such a way as to reach something that might be the object of science, but that science doesn’t manage to reach where it is to be found. A sublimation of any kind, even including that universal, the good itself, may be momentarily in this brief parenthesis considered to be a phony science.
Everything in your analytical experience suggests that the notion and finality of the good are problematic for you. Which good are you pursuing precisely as far as your passion is concerned? That question concerning our behavior is always on the agenda. At every moment we need to know what our effective relationship is to the desire to do good, to the desire to cure. We have to deal with that as if it were something that is likely to lead us astray, and in many cases to do so instantly. I will even add that one might be paradoxical or trenchant and designate our desire as a non-desire to cure. Such a phrase is meaningful only insofar as it constitutes a warning against the common approaches to the good that offer themselves with a seeming naturalness, against the benevolent fraud of wanting-to-do-one’s-best-for-the-subject.
But in that case what do you want to cure the subject of? There is no doubt that this is central to our experience, to our approach, to our inspiration-wanting to cure him from the illusions that keep him on the path of his desire. But how far can we go in this direction? Moreover, even if these illusions are not respectable in themselves, the subject still has to want to give them up. Is the limit of resistance here simply individual?
Here the question of different goods1 is raised in their relation to desire. All kinds of tempting goods offer themselves to the subject; and you know how imprudent it would be for us to put ourselves in a position of promising the subject access to them all, to follow “the American way.” It is nevertheless the possibility of having access to the goods of this world that determines a certain way of approaching psychoanalysis – what I have called “the American way.” It also determines a certain way of arriving at the psychoanalyst’s and making one’s demand.
Before entering into the problem of different goods, I would like to sketch out the illusions on the path of desire. Breaking these illusions is a question of specialized knowledge – knowledge of good and evil indeed – that is located in this central field whose irreducible, ineradicable character in our experience I have attempted to show you. It is bound up with that prohibition, that reservation, that we explored specifically last year when I spoke to you about desire and its interpretation. I pointed to its essential character in the notion of “he didn’t know,” which is in the imperfect tense in French and which remains centrally within the field of enunciation, or in other words within the deepest relationship of the subject to signifying practice. That is to say, the subject is not the agent but the support, given that he couldn’t even calculate the consequences. It is through his relationship to signifying practice that, as a consequence, he emerges as subject.
Moreover, to refer to that fantasmic experience that I chose to produce before you so as to exemplify the central field involved in desire, don’t forget the moments of fantasmic creation in Sade, moments in which one finds expressed directly – in diabolically jubilatory terms that make it intolerable to read – the idea that the greatest cruelty is that the subject’s fate is displayed before his eyes with his full awareness of it. The plot against the victim is openly hatched in front of him. The value of this fantasm is that it confronts the subject with the most radical kind of interrogation, with a final “he didn’t know,” insofar as expressed thus in the imperfect tense, the question asked is too much for him. I just ask you to recall the ambiguity revealed by linguistic experience in connection with the French imperfect. When one says “a moment later and the bomb exploded (éclatait),” that may mean two contradictory things in French, namely, either the bomb did, in fact, explode or something happened which caused it not to explode.
We have now reached the subject of the good. The subject is in no sense new, and one has to admit that thinkers from earlier periods, whose concerns may for one reason or another seem dated to us, nonetheless sometimes formulate the issues in interesting ways. I have nothing against bringing them to your attention, however strange they may seem when presented here out of context in an apparendy abstract form that doesn’t seem designed to arouse our interest. Thus, when Saint Augustine writes the following in Book VII, Chapter XII, of his Confessions, I think it deserves far more than an indulgent smile.
That everything that is, is good, because it is the work of God.
I understood that all corruptible things are good, and that they wouldn’t be corruptible if they were sovereignly good; no corruption would occur if they were not good. For if they were of sovereign good, they would be incorruptible, and if they had no good in them, there would be nothing in them capable of being corrupted, since corruption injures that which it corrupts, and it can only injure it if diminishes good.
And now we come to the core of the argument in the French version of the Garnier edition.
Thus either corruption causes no damage, which cannot be upheld, or all things that are corrupted lose some good, which is undeniable. That if they had lost everything that was good, they would no longer exist at all. Or in other words, if they continued to live without being susceptible to corruption any longer, they would be in a more perfect state than they were before having lost all that was good about them, since they would remain forever in an incorruptible state.
I assume that you grasp the core and indeed the irony of this argument, and moreover that it is precisely the question that interests us. If it is unbearable to realize that everything that is good is extracted from the heart of all things, what can we say of that which remains, which is, after all, something, something different? The question goes echoing down through the centuries and down through human experience. We find it again in The Story of Juliette, with the difference that it is attached, as it should be, to the question of the Law, and in a no less odd way. I would like to draw your attention to this oddness because it is the oddness of a structure that is at issue. Sade writes as follows:
Tyrants are never born out of anarchy. One only ever sees them rise up in the shadow of laws; they derive their authority from laws. The reign of law is, therefore, evil; it is inferior to anarchy. The greatest proof of this position is the obligation of any government to plunge back into anarchy whenever it wants to remake its constitution. In order to abrogate its ancient laws, it is obliged to establish a revolutionary regime in which there are no laws. Under this regime new laws are eventually born, but the second is less pure than the first since it derives from it, since the first good, anarchy, had to occur, if one wanted to achieve the second good, the State’s constitution.
I give you this as a fundamental example. The same kind of argument, formulated by minds that were certainly very remote from one another in their concerns, clearly shows that some form of necessity must exist there that gives rise to this sort of logical stumbling along a certain path.
As far as we are concerned, the question of the good is articulated first of all in its relationship to the Law. On the other hand, nothing is more tempting than to evade the question of the good behind the implication of some natural law, of some harmony to be found on the way to the elucidation of desire. Yet our daily experience proves to us that beneath what we call the subject’s defenses, the paths leading to the pursuit of the good only reveal themselves to us constantly, and I would add, in their original form, in the guise of some alibi on the part of the subject. The whole analytical experience is no more than an invitation to the revelation of his desire; and it changes the primitiveness of the relationship of the subject to the good compared to everything which up to that point had been articulated by the philosophers. One has undoubtedly to look closely, for it seems at first that nothing is changed, and that with Freud the compass still points toward the register of pleasure.
I have emphasized this since the beginning of the year: from the origin of moral philosophy, from the moment when the term ethics acquired the meaning of man’s reflection on his condition and calculation of the proper paths to follow, all meditation on man’s good has taken place as a function of the index of pleasure. And I mean all, since Plato, certainly since Aristotle, and down through the Stoics, the Epicureans, and even through Christian thought itself in Saint Thomas Aquinas. As far as the determination of different goods is concerned, things have clearly developed along the paths of an essentially hedonist problematic. It is only too evident that all that has involved the greatest of difficulties, and that these difficulties are those of experience. And in order to resolve them, all the philosophers have been led to discern not true pleasures from false, for such a distinction is impossible to make, but the true and false goods that pleasure points to.
Doesn’t Freud’s articulation of the pleasure principle give us an advantage, a reward in terms of knowledge and clarity?
Isn’t it in a definitive way profoundly different from the meaning previously given to pleasure by anyone else?
Let me just draw your attention to the fact that the conception of the pleasure principle is inseparable from the reality principle, that it is in a dialectical relationship with it. But one has to begin, and I would simply like to begin by pointing out what Freud articulates exactly.
Notice how the pleasure principle is articulated from the Entwurf, where we began this year, right up to the end in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The end illuminates the beginning, and one can already see in the Entwurf the nerve center to which I want to draw your attention for a moment.
Apparently there is no doubt that the pleasure principle organizes the final reactions for the human psyche, there is no doubt that pleasure is articulated in relation to the presupposition of a satisfaction, and it is driven by a lack in the order of need that the subject becomes caught up in its toils, until a perception occurs that is identical to that which first gave satisfaction. The crudest of references to the reality principle indicates that one finds satisfaction along paths that have already procured it. But look a little closer: is that all Freud has to say? Certainly not. The originality of the Entwurf resides in the notion of facilitations that control the distribution of libidinal investments in such a way that a certain level beyond which the degree of excitation is unbearable for the subject is never exceeded.
The introduction of the function of facilitations opens on to a theme that will become increasingly important as Freud’s thought develops, in light of the fact that Freud’s thought is his experience.
I have been criticized for having said that, from the point of view of ethics, our experience derives its exemplary value from the fact that it doesn’t recognize the dimension of habit, in terms of which human behavior has customarily been assumed to be a process of improvement, of training. In this connection, the notion of facilitation has been used against me. I reject this opposition. The recourse to facilitation in Freud has nothing at all to do with the function of habit as it is defined when one thinks of a learning process. With Freud, it is not a question of creative imprinting but of the pleasure engendered by the functioning of the facilitations. Now the core of the pleasure principle is situated at the level of subjectivity. Facilitation is not a mechanical effect; it is invoked as the pleasure of a facility, and it will be taken up again as the pleasure of a repetition or, more precisely, as repetition compulsion. The core of Freudian thought as it is deployed by us as analysts, whether we attend this seminar or not, is that the function of memory, remembering, is at the very least a rival of the satisfactions it is charged with effecting. It has its own dimension whose reach goes beyond that of a satisfying finality. The tyranny of memory is that which is elaborated in what we call structure.
Such is the originality, the breakthrough, one cannot avoid emphasizing, if one wants to see clearly what is new in the conception of human behavior introduced by Freudian thought and experience. No doubt if someone wants to fill that fault line, he can always claim that nature involves cycles and returns. Faced with that objection, I won’t affirm that he’s mad; I will just suggest the terms you may use to respond.
A natural cycle is perhaps immanent in everything that exists. Moreover, it is highly diverse in its registers and levels. But I ask you to consider the break that, in the order of the manifestation of the real embodied in the cycle, is introduced by the simple fact that man is the bearer of language.
His relation to a couple of signifiers is all it takes, such as, for example, to make a traditional reference in the sketchiest of modes, yin and yang, that is to say, two signifiers, one of which is assumed to be eclipsed by the rise and return of the other – I don’t care particularly for yin and yang; you can choose sine and cosine instead if you like. In other words, the structure engendered by memory must not in our experience mask the structure of memory itself insofar as it is made of a signifying articulation. If you omit it, you absolutely cannot maintain the register that is essential in the articulation of our experience, namely, the autonomy, the dominance, the agency of remembering as such, and not at the level of the real, but of the functioning of the pleasure principle.
This is not a Byzantine discussion. Thus if we create a fault line and an abyss, alternatively we fill in elsewhere something that also had the appearance of a fault line and an abyss. And it is here that one can see that the subject as such is born, a subject, moreover, whose emergence is unjustified by anything else.
As I have already pointed out, the finality of the evolution of matter toward consciousness is a mystical, elusive notion, and one that is properly speaking historically indeterminable. There is no homogeneity between the order of the apparition of phenomena, whether they be premonitory, preliminary, partial, or preparatory to consciousness, and any kind of natural order, because it is through its current state that consciousness manifests itself as a phenomenon whose activity is completely erratic and, I would even say, fragmented. It is at levels that are very different from our relationship to our own real that the mark or the touch of consciousness appears, but in the absence of any continuity or homogeneiety of consciousness. Freud came up against this fact more than once in his investigations, and he always emphasized the fact that consciousness cannot be functionalized.
With relation to the functioning of the signifying chain, on the other hand, our subject has a place in history that is quite solid and almost locatable. The function of the subject on its emergence, of the original subject, of the subject that may be traced in the chain of phenomena, we have a completely new formula for him, one that is capable of objective localization. A subject originally represents nothing more than the following fact: he can forget. Strike out that “he”; the subject is literally at his beginning the elision of a signifier as such, the missing signifier in the chain.
Such is the first place, the first person. Here the appearance of the subject is manifested as such; and it makes us directly aware of why and in what way the notion of the unconscious is central in our experience.
If you start at that point, you will see the explanation of a great many things, including that strange phenomenon that can be pinpointed in history that we call rites. I mean those rites by which man in so-called primitive civilizations believes he must accompany one of the most natural things in the world, namely, the return of natural cycles themselves. If the Emperor of China doesn’t start the ploughing at a given day in spring, the rhythm of the seasons will be spoiled. If order is not preserved in the Royal House, the domain of the sea will advance upon the domain of the land. We still find echoes of this at the beginning of the sixteenth century in Shakespeare. What is this, if it isn’t the essential relation, the one which binds the subject to the production of meaning and which makes him from the beginning responsible for forgetting? What relation can there be between man and the return of the sunrise, if it is not the case that as a speaking man he is sustained in a direct relation to the signifier? To refer to myth, the original position of man in relation to nature is that of Chantecler – which is a theme to be found in a minor poet, who might be approached more sympathetically, if I hadn’t started another seminar by denouncing the figure of Cyrano de Bergerac by reducing him to a grotesque lucubration that had nothing to do with the monumental structure of the character.
We have now reached the point where we must raise the question of the good at this level.
The question of the good is situated athwart the pleasure principle and the reality principle. There’s no possibility that from such a point of view we can escape conflict, given that we have regularly shifted the center.
It is impossible at this point not to bear witness to the following fact, one that is too little articulated in the Freudian conception itself, namely, that reality is not the simple dialectical correlative of the pleasure principle. Or more exactly, that reality isn’t just there so that we bump our heads up against the false paths along which the functioning of the pleasure principle leads us. In truth, we make reality out of pleasure.
This is an essential notion. It is wholly summed up in the notion of praxis in the two senses that that word has acquired historically. On the one hand, in the domain of ethics, it concerns action, insofar as action has not just an ἕργοv as its goal, but is also inscribed in an έvέργεια; on the other hand, it has to do with making, with the production ex nihilo I spoke to you about last time. It is no accident if these two meanings are subsumed under the same term.
We must see right away how crude it is to accept the idea that, in the ethical order itself, everything can be reduced to social constraint, as is so often the case in the theoretical writings of certain analysts – as if the fashion in which that constraint develops doesn’t in itself raise a question for people who live within the realms of our experience. In the name of what is social constraint exercised? Of a collective tendency? Why in all this time hasn’t such social constraint managed to focus on the most appropriate paths to the satisfaction of individuals’ desires? Do I need to say anymore to an audience of analysts to make clear the distance that exists between the organization of desires and the organization of needs?
But who knows? Perhaps I need to insist after all.
Perhaps I would get a stronger reaction from an audience of school boys. They at least would realize right away that the order imposed in their school is not designed to enable them to jerk off under the best possible conditions. I nevertheless assume that the eyes of an analyst are made to interpret that which runs through a certain dream world, which we call, significantly enough, utopia. Take Fourier, for example, since reading him is by the way such fun. The farcical effect his work generates is instructive. He shows how distant what is called social progress is from whatever is done in the expectation, not so much of opening up the flood gates, as of merely thinking through a given collective order in terms of the satisfaction of desires. For the moment we just want to know if we can see a little more clearly here than others.
We are not the first to have gone along this road. As for myself, there is among those assembled here an audience of Marxists, and I assume that those who are part of it can recall the intimate, profound relationship, a relationship woven into the lines of the text, between what I am proposing here and Marx’s fundamental discussions concerning the relations between man and the object of his production. To hurry things along, that brings us back to that point at which I left you in a digression of my lecture before last, namely, with Saint Martin cutting in two with his sword the large piece of cloth in which he was enveloped for his journey to Cavalla.
Let’s take up the point as it stands, at the level of different goods, and let’s ask ourselves the question of what that piece of cloth is.
Given that with it one can make a piece of clothing, the piece of cloth has a use value with which others before me have been concerned. You would be wrong to think that the relation of man to the object of his production at its fundamental level has been completely elucidated – even by Marx, who took things very far in this respect.
I am not going to offer here a critique of economic structures. Something very interesting did happen to me, however, one of those things I enjoy because their meaning is to be found at a level that is within our grasp but that is always more or less mystifying. It seems that in my last seminar I am supposed to have made an allusion to a given chapter of the latest book of Sartre, to his Critique of Dialectical Reason. I like the idea, since I am about to refer to it; the only problem is that the point in question has to do with thirty pages that I read for the first time last Sunday.
I don’t know what to say about the work as a whole because I have only read these thirty pages, but I must say that they are pretty good. They concern precisely the original relations of man to the object of his needs. It seems to me that it is in this particular register that Sartre intends to take things to their final term, and if that is his purpose, if he does manage to be exhaustive, the work will certainly prove useful.
This fundamental relationship is defined starting from the notion of scarcity as that which founds man’s condition, as that which makes him man in his relation to his needs. For a body of thought that aims for total dialectical transparency, such a final term is certainly rather obscure, whereas we have managed to introduce into this cloth, whether rare or not, a little breath of air which sets it floating and enables us to describe it in less opaque terms.
Psychoanalysts have given themselves plenty of room in the effort to see what this cloth symbolizes; they tell us what it both shows and hides, that the symbolism of clothes is a valid symbolism, without our knowing whether at any given moment what is being done with this cloth-phallus concerns disclosure or concealment. The profound bivalence of the whole of analytical theory on the subject of the symbolism of clothes enables us to evaluate the impasse reached with the notion of the symbol as handled up till now in psychoanalysis. If you are able to find the large volume of the InternationalJournal of Psychoanalysis that was produced for Jones’s fiftieth birthday, you will see an article by Flügel on the symbolism of clothes in which you will find the same impasses I pointed to, in the last issue of our journal, in Jones’s own articulation of symbolism, but in an even more striking and almost caricatural form.
In any case, all the absurd things that have been said about symbolism do nevertheless lead us somewhere. There is something hidden there, and it is always, we are told, that damned phallus. We are brought back to something that one might have expected would have been thought of right off, that is to say, to the relationship of the cloth to the missing hair – but it’s not missing everywhere on our body. At this point we do find a psychoanalytic writer who tells us that all the cloth we are concerned with is nothing more than the extrapolation or development of woman’s fleece, the famous fleece that hides the fact that she doesn’t have what it takes. These apparent revelations of the unconscious always have their comic side. But it’s not completely screwy; I even think that it’s a nice little fable.
Perhaps it might even contain an element of phenomenology relative to the function of nudity. Is nudity purely and simply a natural phenomenon? The whole of psychoanalytic thought is designed to prove it isn’t. The thing that is particularly exalting about it and significant in its own right is that there is a beyond of nudity that nudity hides. But we don’t need to engage in phenomenology; I prefer fables.
The fable on this occasion concerns Adam and Eve, with the proviso that the dimension of the signifier also be present, the signifier as introduced by the father in the benevolent directions he gives: “Adam, you must give names to everything around you.” Here is Adam, then, and here is the famous hair of an Eve that we hope is worthy of the beauty that this first gesture evokes. Adam pulls out one of her hairs. Everything I am trying to show you here turns on a hair, a frog’s hair.2 Adam pulls out a hair from the woman who is given to him as his wife, who has been expected for the whole of eternity, and the next day she comes back with a mink coat over her shoulders.
Therein lies the power of the nature of cloth. It’s not because man has less hair than other animals that we have to check out everything that down the ages will burst forth from his industry. If we are to believe the linguists, the problem of different goods is raised within a structure. At the beginning everything is structured as a signifier, even if only a chain of hairs is involved.
Textile is first of all a text. There is cloth, and – let me invoke the driest of minds, Marx, for example – it is impossible to posit as primary some producers’ cooperative or other, unless, of course, one wants to make a psychological fable. In the beginning there is the producer’s inventiveness, namely, the fact that man – and why he alone? – begins to weave something, something that isn’t in the form of a covering or cocoon for his own body, but something that as cloth is going to take off on its own in the world, is going to move around. Why? Because this cloth has time value.
That’s what distinguishes it from any form of natural production. One can come close to it in the creations of the animal world, but it is originated only when it is fabricated, when it is open to the world, to age and to newness; it is use value, time value; it is a reservoir of needs; it is there whether one needs it or not; and it is around this cloth that a whole dialectic of rivalry and of sharing is organized, wherein needs will be constituted.
In order to grasp this, simply set in the distance in opposition to this function, the word of the Messiah according to the Gospel when he shows men what happens to those who trust in the Father’s Providence: “They weave not neither do they spin; they offer men an imitation of the robe of the lilies and the plumage of birds.” This is a stupefying abolition of the text by the word. As I pointed out last time, the chief characteristic of this world is that one has to uproot it from its text if one is to have faith in it. But the history of humanity takes place in the text and it is in the text that we have the cloth.
Saint Martin’s gesture means in the beginning that man as such, man with his rights, begins to be individualized as soon as one begins to make holes in this cloth through which his head and his arms can emerge, through which, in effect, he begins to organize himself as clothed, that is to say, as having needs that have been satisfied. What can there be behind this? What in spite of that can he continue to desire? – I say “in spite of that” because from that moment on we know less and less about it.
We have now reached the crossroads of utilitarianism.
Jeremy Bentham’s thought is not the simple continuation of that gnoseology to which a whole tradition tirelessly devoted itself in order to reduce the transcendental or supernatural dimension of the progress of knowledge that supposedly needed elucidating. Bentham, as that work of his which has recently drawn some attention, The Theory of Fictions, shows, is the man who approaches the question at the level of the signifier.
With relation to institutions in their fictive or, in other words, fundamentally verbal dimension, his search has involved not attempting to reduce to nothing all the multiple, incoherent, contradictory rights of which English jurisprudence furnishes an example, but, on the contrary, observing on the basis of the symbolic artifice of these terms, which are themselves also creators of texts, what there is there that may be used to some purpose, that is to say, become, in effect, the object of a division. The long historical development of the problem of the good is in the end centered on the notion of how goods are created, insofar as they are organized not on the basis of so-called natural and predetermined needs, but insofar as they furnish the material of a distribution; and it is in relation to this that the dialectic of the good is articulated to the degree that it takes on effective meaning for man.
Man’s needs find their home on the level of utility, which involves that portion of the symbolic text that may be of some use. At this stage there is no problem; the greatest utility for the greatest number – such indeed is the law in the light of which the problem of the function of goods is organized. At this level we find ourselves, in effect, prior to the moment when the subject puts his head through the holes in the cloth. The cloth is so made that the greatest number of subjects possible may put their heads and their limbs through it.
Yet all this talk wouldn’t mean anything if things didn’t start functioning differently. Now in this thing, whether it be rare or not, but in any case a made thing, in all this wealth finally – whatever its correlative in poverty – there is from the beginning something other than use value. There is its jouissance use.
As a result, the good is articulated in a wholly different way. The good is not at the level of the use of the cloth. The good is at the level where a subject may have it at his disposal.
The domain of the good is the birth of power. The notion of control of the good is essential, and if one foregrounds this, everything is revealed concerning the meaning of the claim made by man, at a certain point in his history, once he has managed to achieve control of himself.
It was Freud, not me, who took upon himself the task of unmasking what this has effectively meant historically. To exercise control over one’s goods, as everyone knows, entails a certain disorder, that reveals its true nature, i.e., to exercise control over one’s goods is to have the right to deprive others of them.
There is, I think, no point in making you sense the fact that historical destiny is played out around such a situation. The whole question concerns the moment when one can consider that this process has come to an end. For this function of the good engenders, of course, a dialectic. I mean that the power to deprive others is a very solid link from which will emerge the other as such.
Remember what I once told you concerning privation, which has subsequently caused a problem for some of you. You will see clearly in this connection that I don’t say anything by chance.
Opposing privation to frustration and castration, I said that it was a function instituted as such in the symbolic order, to the extent that nothing is deprived of nothing – which doesn’t prevent the good one is deprived of from being wholly real. The important thing is to recognize that the depriving agent is an imaginary function. It is the little other, one’s fellow man, he who is given in the relationship that is half rooted in naturalness of the mirror stage, but such as he appears to us there where things are articulated at the level of the symbolic. There is a fact observed in experience that one always has to remember in analysis, namely, what is meant by defending one’s goods is one and the same thing as forbidding3 oneself from enjoying them.
The sphere of the good erects a strong wall across the path of our desire. It is, in fact, at every moment and always, the first barrier that we have to deal with.
How can we conceive crossing over it? That is a problem I will take up next time, when I point out that a radical repudiation of a certain ideal of the good is necessary, if one is to grasp the direction in which our experience is leading.
May 11, 1960.
1 See note 2 above, p. 216.
2 The pun in the French – “poil de grenouille” – turns on the fact that as well as connoting something that does not exist, the phrase also reminds the listener of the slang meaning of “grenouille” as a pejorative term for a woman, e.g., “grenouille de bénitier.”
3 The play on words in French depends on using “défendre” both in the sense of “defend” – “défendre ses biens” – and “forbid” – “se défendre à soi-même d’en jouir.”