Today we are being asked—the times demand it—to reassess what is at stake in Freud’s intervention. We know more or less clearly that it did not arise from blending itself together with other bodies of recognized knowledge, nor did it add to them a new continent. Freud invented something other than knowledge—whether this is understood in the sense of a theoretical discipline or in that of a practical know-how. The very idea that practice (the clinic, as analysts say) should continue to bear responsibility for theory shows—even if at the risk of a certain pragmatist confusion—that here thinking proceeds from an opening to a thrust coming from depths that are ever more enigmatic, ever less available to “analysis,” whatever meaning this word takes on. For the “clinic” consists in beating a path, each time in a singular way, toward this: that there is no access to any unveiling or primal sense. This is why Freud’s invention is one of the most clearly and most resolutely non-religious of modern inventions. And also why it cannot believe in itself. It cannot avoid doing so insofar as it is an institution (not only the “schools,” but also the simple analyst’s practice, up to the disciplinary name of “psychoanalysis”), but as a way of thinking, its rule can only be to defer [différer] its own identity.
That analysis—and above all that of the “cure”—should be interminable, even when one declares it to be finished [terminée], is now clearly becoming an issue for what we call “Freudian psychoanalysis.” It endlessly interprets itself or invites us to interpret it—and is therefore always getting further away from supposing itself to be a “knowledge” or “knowhow.” It is endlessly inviting us, beyond any analysis, to what Derrida calls a “lysis without measure, without measure and without return.”1
In the final analysis—if you will—Freud is not looking for a knowledge. The evolution of his thinking demonstrates this: it endlessly displaces itself toward ever more expressly adventurous (“meta-psychological,” which is to say, metaphysical or speculative) hypotheses or conjectures, toward less modelizable or constructible models (“second-topic,” or rather a-topic), toward what Freud himself calls “speculation,” “representation,” or “myth” (the murder of the father, the death drive), and toward ever less clinical “objects”—such as religion, art, civilization, and war.
This is well known, but it merits reconsideration. We need more rigorously to take the measure of the gap that separates, for him, the positivity of the scientific and instrumental model (of which the “cure” is the main vehicle), on the one hand, from the narrative, imaginative, and creative thrust of a world on the other. For this is what Freud is looking for: to relate [raconter], to retrace the rise of being and the play of forces at work in it.
This does not mean that we should attempt to take the measure of this gap more accurately than has been done previously (for his part, Lacan was able to do so by inventing his own fiction of knowledge, which nonetheless remained under the instrumental imperatives of the institution and of its function, or of the profession).
What’s more, what is at stake cannot be measured with a pair of compasses. Doubtless the gap of which we have been speaking grew throughout Freud’s lifetime and thinking, but without reaching its full amplitude. But its essential motif or motive [mobile] runs all throughout his œuvre: the word unconscious does not designate a withdrawal of the soul, it is the soul itself, or, if you prefer, it is mankind. Freud does not discover mankind’s unconscious in the way that Descartes thought he had discovered a pineal gland that had never previously been brought to light. Freud puts the whole human being into play. This is a new narrative [récit] of mankind.
It is the most resolutely non-religious narrative—which is to say, also the least disposed to give itself over to any sort of belief whatsoever, even a belief in science. Science’s value for Freud is as a defense against religious illusion. But for him it does not have the reassuring qualities of an objective construction. It is only, at best, an index of firmness: namely, that we are not to give in to the illusions that attempt to transfigure us. As for the rest, Freud knows only too well that the desire for knowledge is part of the desire for power and mastery in general. Doubtless there is no “scholar” or “scientist” not only more modest than he but, above all, more sincerely open to uncertainties and to what is incomplete, even to the powerlessnesses of his knowledge.
Declarations of insufficiency, obscurity, or dissatisfaction pepper his œuvre. Whether he is discussing “identification,” “sublimation,” “art,” or “civilization,” among many other motifs, Freud demands that one accept the disappointment that his results create and that one proceed to other times and other resources. What he says about femininity, in concluding his paper on this topic, is valid in more than one way for the entirety of his work. Having admitted that his exposition is incomplete and fragmentary, he declares to his audience: “If you want to know more about it, enquire from your own experiences of life, turn to the poets, or wait until science can give you deeper and more coherent information.”2 Clearly, the last hypothesis is referring to a most uncertain future, if indeed it is not ironic, while the first two—which should be further linked to one another—clearly indicate, and in a way repeated many times in his œuvre, that this is a question less of knowing objects than of giving new expression to our existence as subjects.
Once we understand this situation, we can see that there is no Freudian “discovery,” and the “unconscious” is not an organ. But there is un-doubtably an invention: that of a narrative. Where man had been narrated as coming from a creator or from nature, where celestial life or survival as a species had been promised to him, Freud introduces a different provenance and destination. Man comes from an impetus or a thrust that surpasses it—that surpasses, in any case, what Freud designates as the “ego.”
He calls this impetus or this thrust Trieb. In English, this is translated as drive. In French, the language in which I am writing, pulsion [pulsion] has been chosen.3 Here the stakes of translation are particularly high. In two different ways, drive and pulsion put the accent on mechanical thrust, constraint. They are a traction that one undergoes rather than an attraction that one seeks. In French, the term compulsion accentuates this passive and almost automatic value of the movement that one undergoes, that is ordered from outside. But in Freud, compulsion is named Zwang, a word from a completely different family, referring to constraint, to the impossibility of resisting (particularly in the contexts of obsession and repetition). The two registers are quite distinct, even if they communicate at certain points.
In German, Trieb designates a thrust considered in its activity: the growth of a plant or the care that enables an animal to grow. It is of the order of impetus and desire. It carries itself forward, activates itself. A considerable, polymorphous activity is at work in the semantics of the verb treiben. Freud did not put this word forward by accident. He wants to hear in it at once more than an utterly programmed “instinct” and less than a programmatic “intention” or “aim.” In truth, he hears in it a thrust that one undergoes—when seen through the eyes of the little, conscious, voluntary “me”—but that is also cooriginary with the birth and growth of this singular “one” that we name the “subject”—a term to which Freud gives little space—and that easily surpasses all that can be represented by our models of the “person” or of the “individual.”
The Trieb—or the constellation of the Triebe—is a movement that comes from elsewhere, from the non-individuated, the buried, dispersed, proliferating, confused, archaic nature of our provenance—nature, the world, humanity behind us, and, behind it, all that makes it possible, the emergence of the sign and of the gesture, the call from one to the other and from all to the elements, the forces, the possible and the impossible, the sense of the infinite lying before, behind, and among us, the desire to respond to it and to expose ourselves to it. This movement, this impetus, this thrust, is our provenance; in the final analysis, it is in it and as it that we thrust [poussons], as we say in French of a plant: we rise up and become what we can be.
This thrust comes from elsewhere than from us. It makes us into a thrusted being, not a being “produced” by a network of causes, but dragged along, launched, projected, or even “thrown” (to take up Heidegger’s word). This “elsewhere” is not, however, a beyond; it is not a transcendence, in the sense understood by theologies, nor is it a simple immanence, in the sense understood by those theologies that have been inverted into atheisms. This “elsewhere” is in us: it forms within us the most originary and the most energetic motor of the impetus that we are. For it is nothing less than our being, or rather, it is being itself as it proves to be, once detached from its ontological bindings. It is being as the verb to be: motion, movement, emotion, shaking, rising up of desire and of fear, awaiting [attente] and attempt, essay, outbreak [accès], crisis and exaltation, exasperation and exhaustion, formation of forms, invention of signs, uncontrollable tension up to the unbearable, where it breaks or rather settles out [se dépose].
What I am calling here Freud’s “narrative” consists in this attempt to redraw mankind as the provenance and the coming of such a thrust: the growth of a sign traced out on an obscure background and infinitely opened to a being that no god, no nature, and no history can fill up with sense. It is the most powerful attempt that has been made since the end of the various metaphysics. It is able to escape the double trap of mankind’s self-production, on the one hand (in which Marx, particularly, is caught), and, on the other, a resurrection of some kind of divinity (as in Heidegger’s case).
This is also why its own greatness offers it to us suspended between dangers that threaten on either side: the positivity of a supposed science or technique (whose operatory properties cannot be denied, even if they are ever more visibly limited by the deep mutation of civilization and with it that of the “psyche”), and the belief in who knows what depths or phantasmatic powers, the entire imaginary of a “primitivity” that psychoanalysis consists precisely in calling into question.
But what it calls into question, whether as a supposed object or as a fabulous origin, is nothing less than its own consistency: this is what underpins what we are naming here the Freudian narrative. This narrative relates that—and how—mankind relates its provenance to itself in relation to an infinite surpassing of itself, to an excessive thrust that precedes and follows it, that sets it in the world and removes it from the world, even as this thrust demands that it give form in this world to this otherworldly force.
In Mass Psychology and Analysis of the Ego, Freud sets on stage the first storyteller [récitant], the first mythologian, who recounts to his tribe that he has killed the father: a tale of the impossible, since the father only comes about through the murder, in which one therefore will only ever have killed the prepaternal animal. Here Freud writes that myth is what allows the individual to escape mass psychology. In other words, myth is what allows the structure according to which an “ego” can detach itself from the backdrop of the “id” in order to appear—and this detachment takes place via the mythical production of the “hero,” which is to say, of “me.” Freud’s whole invention opens up here: the subject recounts himself, he comes about through his narrative. This is no tall tale [fabulation], as the “speaking subject” is not operating here, it is rather he who is placed in the world by word—word, or what could better be named significance, the opening of a possibility of sense.
Freud knew that one must not demand sense (or the meaning of life) [demander le sens (de la vie)]; he says that this demand is already pathological. But he knew that significance obliges us. To be obliged by sense is to have to posit oneself as being carried off by what one has the task of carrying. This is what speech as myth responds to: it does not tell tall tales, it does not confect [fictionne], it attempts to allow to speak what precedes speech, namely, significance in its perpetually nascent state. Trieb—thrust, impetus, beating, enthusiasm, fit of anger—is the name that Freud finds (expressly against “instinct”) to put into words this effort, this forcing of sense from before and after all signification: the force of a desire that carries mankind well beyond itself.
To the precise point where science stops and religion proves to be an illusion, where Freud reopens the mythical word. Where he gives a name, which is provisional, as are all mythical names (and perhaps therefore all names . . . ), to what thrusts in being. Was he not able to write: “The theory of the drives is, so to speak, our mythology. Drives are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness”?4
“So to speak” (sozusagen): but one always speaks “so,” by approximation, more or less, as closely as possible to and always infinitely far away from what will have driven us to speak.5