Les Trumains [1]

I think I finally got done with editing what I have called Lacan’s very last teaching during this month when I did not see you at all. I must say, that takes a weight off me. To use a term from this very last teaching, I had been tangled up in it.

 

Turning in circles

Even now, I am quite étourdi (dizzied)[2] by it. I am not étourdi with the twists and turns of these words (dits). In any case, I am no longer so, precisely from having followed them, these twists and turns, these meanders, to the point of making of them – at least sometimes I dreamt of it – a Roman road (voie, not voix, the voice I push in order to make myself heard). The Roman road is the metaphor with which Lacan decorated the Name-of-the-Father in his third Seminar, this path that is transcendent in relation to the diverticula, the country roads, the side roads. Of course, I am exaggerating when I say that I have made it as far as the Roman road. Nevertheless, last night, while seeking out – for a few hours finally – what title to give to the first as well as to the last lesson of the last Seminar of Lacan, I had the fleeting sense that I was reconstructing the Roman road of this very last teaching, a Roman road among all these meanders.

Besides, the metaphor of the Roman road does not at all suit the Borromean knots, no more than it does what is called the torus (the inner tube) – the two mathematical objects that Lacan brings together in his very last teaching. These compasses that he makes use of do not exactly indicate the cardinal points, these points where the axes cross and that make it possible to orient oneself based on their position.

If compasses have become more complex and more precise with the development brought on by the GPS, they remain instruments to indicate the direction toward which to go. You must believe that this metaphor has always been dear to me, since I have titled this course, ever since its inception, The Lacanian Orientation.

Yet, in Lacan’s very last teaching, what constitutes direction is precisely a turning in circles, even a stomping around, getting nowhere. It’s a whole other register of metaphors. This VLT, nevertheless, explores what the turning in circles has of structure (to use this term that is carefully avoided there, for reasons which I am reconstructing and which I will specify shortly). The turning in circles has a structure. We see this in the Borromean knot, which brings together several turnings in circles according to an arrangement that seems surprising at first, but which shows that the turning in circles is disposed to an unexpected complexity. As for the torus, it brings together turning in circles and the hole. What’s more, rings of string can, on occasion, serve as tori. Tori, for example, are disposed to coming together in the Borromean manner.

Reconstructing and simplifying all of Lacan’s diagrams of course presents some difficulties. But, contrary to what you may think, it is not the principal difficulty, which is to edit what remains of speech. If you let yourself be carried away by the turning in circles, without doubt it will make you étourdi. Structure, on the other hand, is what allows you to get out of th’étourdissement (dizziness). So then, I think I did it. Yippee! However, what has got me étourdit (dizzied) today, this morning, right now, it’s getting out of this dialogue with Lacan that had so easily sucked me in, within which I had locked myself up – and this, all the more in as much as I had forgotten you – it’s getting out of this confinement so as to report to you about it. So then, what do I have to say by way of report?

I should let you know, for starters, that I have completed four Seminars of Lacan, the publisher will have to publish at his own pace. As encouragement for myself, I would add that I will have completed six of them, I hope, by next September. If I must reassure those who were worried about the completion of this task before I were to disappear and who believed me already a bit ill just like that, I will then have six more of these to edit before moving on to something else.

Lacan’s very last teaching is made up of two Seminars. Seminar XXIV, which follows The Sinthome, and Seminar XXV. I will have them published in one volume. When the entire set becomes available, it will consist of 25 Seminars in 24 volumes. After that, Lacan did not silence himself, he continued to speak. He handed over some files to me and what he could say in 1980 was already published at the time. But, I am letting you know about this, it is no longer the Seminar of Jacques Lacan.

I consider that Lacan set the bounds of his Seminar, strictly speaking, by giving to Seminar XXV of 1977-1978 the title The Moment of Concluding. Everything demonstrates that this must be taken to the letter. This title is evidently a reference to his temporal logic, developed, published, at the end of the Second World War, under the title of “Logical Time ...” From the exploration of this moment of concluding we can hope to shed some light on what preceded it. What’s more, this Moment of Concluding will therefore not be published at the end of the Seminar of Jacques Lacan, but in its course.

Time is certainly a concern for Lacan – when it comes to stopping, but not only. In the past, in his écrit “Radiophonie,” he had already set out this principle, that it takes time for analysis. Let us note that, following this, Lacan wished to speak under the title Topology and Time, which, incidentally, appears in an erroneous form on the inside cover of the Seminars. It was not me who put that down there, but someone from the Éditions du Seuil who was very keen to make sure everything would get published, thus adding a title there for each year. I left it as it is, but there won’t be any book XXVI, XXVII, or XXVIII of the Seminar. But at any rate, it is an indication that Lacan was concerned about the relationship of topology and time. This concern clocks in as early as his Seminar on The Sinthome. It is not a question of linear time, of the time it takes to go from A to B, in other words, of the Roman road, that of the trajectory when we hope that afterwards, it will be something else. The time associated with topology is first of all a circular time, it is the time of turning in circles, which is not the absence of time.

 

Condemned to the dream

The absence of time is eternity, about which Lacan says precisely in The Moment of Concluding that it is a thing that one dreams of. Being a thing that one dreams of is, for that matter, not specific to eternity. In the very last teaching, many things go marching about regarding which we believed ourselves to not be dreaming and regarding which we discover that there is at least one among us who thinks they are dreams, or – what is slightly out of sync – fantasies.

The dream of eternity (which Lacan already censures in The Sinthome) consists in imagining that one wakes up, he says here. In accordance with what appears in the écrit which puts a full stop to the Seminar on The Sinthome, in accordance with “th’esp of a lapse,” the very last teaching of Lacan unfolds in a space where there is no such thing as awakening, where awakening, I quote, is unthinkable, where awakening itself is a dream. Let’s face it, it’s realistic, realistic in the sense of the real. Have we ever seen that the pass constitutes an awakening for anyone?

That there would be no such thing as awakening means that we do not get out of it. Perhaps that is precisely what lends itself to laughter, it is the new accent that Lacan puts on this – life is comical. Ah! He had already said that comedy in truth prevails over tragedy. He had said it in the name of the phallus, in the name of the sexual value still hidden, including in the depths of the lament hidden in the impasse, in the gap of the relationship with the Other. But comedy is in keeping with the vain turning in circles. The sinthome itself receives this value from being, let’s say, the unconscious as that which one does not get out of.

This is why, on occasion, but not always, Lacan formulates in his very last teaching that there is no such thing as liberation, no dissolution of the sinthome. At other moments, he may speak of undoing the sinthome. But, I believe, he is targeting there only the diverticula of the sinthome and not the sinthome as the Roman road, that is to say, the sinthome as this new Roman road of the turning in circles. No liberation from the sinthome; it only matters, he says, that one knows why one is tangled up in it.

This problematic proposition establishes a connection between analysis and knowledge that is very dubious, suspect – an adjective that Lacan uses in his very last teaching, shaker of fantasies. We can speak of a connection between analysis and knowledge, where we imagine ourselves progressing by clarifying what analysis is through what we believe to be knowledge, through what we believe we know. This is well and truly the open question in the very last teaching: what is knowledge? At this level of the very last teaching, we can at least say that knowledge is not an awakening and that, if one had to choose, it would rather be a dream. This is where Lacan makes a clearing for his turning in circles. The human being (l’être humain), as he wrote at the time, les trumains, the human being is condemned to the dream.

Les trumains

Ah! There is something to be said about les trumains, in relation to what Lacan called the parlêtre.

The parlêtre

The first difference is to privilege the plural. What emerges for me from reading and editing is that Lacan emphasizes the fact that the human being is essentially social. The topology, so apparent in its Borromean and toric splendor, is incessantly lined by a sociology. Lacan rediscovers the loves of his youth: specifically, he had approached the theme of the family by mobilizing references to sociology and ethnology, which had continued to accompany him. To be precise, Lacan’s sociology collaborates in pulling the pin out of, in the suspicion brought to bear on, the omnipresent fantasy.

See for example this remark, which one could have neglected, in the penultimate lesson of the Seminar of Lacan: Why does desire pass over to love? The facts don’t explain it. Note, in order to distinguish the levels, his reference to the factual, which keeps to what must be spoken. Lacan does not fail to oppose facts to fantasy. Of course, at another level, the assignment of facts can itself also be suspect.

Yes, Lacan says the facts, in the same way that what is spoken in this last teaching most of the time uses the most common terms of the tongue. The stripping down of the tongue is precisely in keeping with the evisceration of fantasies. While editing, it’s quite necessary that I delete the quotation marks, otherwise it would no longer be readable, but I leave enough of them for you to grasp that the technical terms, especially those of psychoanalysis, are all taken with a pinch of salt, held at a distance. There is a constant contrast between the use of the most familiar tongue and the apparent hyper technicality, very much in evidence, of the topological figures.

Why then does desire pass over to love? The facts do not allow us to say why. There are undoubtedly effects of prestige. It is difficult to go further in the discreet depreciation of love life. By thus including the operation of the semblant in love, Lacan slips this notion into the register of sociology. He does the same, in my opinion, when he dares to say regarding interpretation – our holy interpretation, interpretation which is all we have got to operate with, in our lexical tradition, semantic at least – that it depends on the weight of the analyst. Once again, effect of prestige. On occasion, this movement goes so far as to reduce interpretation to suggestion, horresco referens.

 

On a murmur

Lacan’s very last teaching is the fairground shooting gallery. That’s why, contrary to appearances, it is so amusing, it wins hands down against all the Black Books of psychoanalysis. The shooting game goes so far as to pose that analysis is magic – you bet! That with the means at hand – and the only means at hand are essentially speech relying on the effects of prestige – we do our best to move a thing that is veiled, we imagine we can do it. It already works better if there be two to imagine it, but this does not, for all that, disprove the reduction of psychoanalysis to magic. Add to this Lacan’s proposition, to which a Pierre Bourdieu would not have objected, that analysis is a social fact. Do not believe that this would mean that analysis is, among other things, a social fact. It is, on the contrary, a definition of its essence.

These evocations suffice to back up the following thesis: while Lacan does his utmost for psychoanalysis until almost his last breath, testifying thereby as a kind of martyr of psychoanalysis, well at the same time, Lacan’s very last teaching constitutes a deflation of analysis – it’s a question of knowing whether this movement is salutary. A deflation of analysis and, it goes without saying, of psychoanalysts, but on this point, Lacan had undertaken, let us say, a deflation, a diminishment, much earlier.

I can share with you the lines that came to mind while editing this Moment of Concluding, while putting the finishing touches to it. It is from a poem by T. S. Eliot, who is one of those whom Lacan reads right across the Seminar. It’s also with T. S. Eliot that Lacan had chosen to conclude his Rome discourse, “Function and Field of Speech and Language…,” the passage on what the god of thunder said – bang bang! This reference came from the Upanishads – Da da da! said the god of thunder – it’s a passage from T. S. Eliot’s great poem called The Waste Land. As for the verse that came to me, they are perhaps Eliot’s most quoted lines in the Anglo-American field, the last lines of the poem called “The Hollow Men.” The hollow men, this term lends itself to many interpretations that don’t go badly with the toric man, also hollow, proposed by Lacan. There are several theses regarding the origin of the expression hollow men in T. S. Eliot. He claimed to have borrowed hollow from one side, and men from elsewhere. The expression has, however, been found in the mouth of the conspirator Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In T. S. Eliot, it probably has more of a Pascalian value: the heart of man is hollow and full of litter. The beginning of the poem is replete with resonances as to the description of the human being, of the last men, of the end of civilizations. I read it in French for you to follow me, in the translation by Pierre Leyris. These are not the lines that came to me, which were the very last ones, but they give the atmosphere.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion […]

Well then, this poem ends with two lines, the first being repeated three times:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

That’s the verse that I remembered in the heat of the moment: This is how the world ends, not on a Bang, not on a Boom, in P. Leyris’ rendering; it does not end with thunder like the Rome discourse, it ends with a whimper. Or, as P. Leyris translates, “on a murmur.” A murmur is also a moan and, for me, it’s the noise of the inner tube as it is deflating. In my opinion, Lacan chose to finish his Seminar not on something that thunder would say – that is the height of fantasy – which comes down to the human voice; he finishes it on the deflation of the psychoanalytic torus. It ends in tiny steps; it ends on rats’ feet.

Nevertheless, that says a lot. The references to this verse, as I have been able to verify them thanks to Google, are innumerable; rap groups and films have taken their names from it, scientific articles put it in their titles or in their epigraphs, it appears everywhere in Anglo-American culture. This seems to me to translate the value to be given to the deflation of psychoanalysis with which Lacan chose to proceed.

His “sociology,” as I called it – you see, I too adopt, under duress, the style of “taking the words with a pinch of salt” – the sociology of Lacan is in keeping, as much in Seminar XXIV as in Seminar XXV, with learning the tongue (l’apprentissage de la langue).

We grasp the distance that Lacan takes from the fantasy of structure. The fantasy of structure explicitly brings with it the assumption that language is already there, rather than the emphasis on learning, on apprenticeship. Here, on the contrary, the emphasis is on the weaving (tissage) of the apprentice, if I may say so. It’s to be taken in the simplest manner possible: one learns to speak, Lacan says; it leaves traces, it has consequences. These consequences are what we call the sinthome. One learns to speak; it comes to you from close relatives. It is the face of the big Other in learning the tongue.

Such is the immediate sociology of the parlêtre, that’s why the parlêtre is les trumains. I am getting to the justification! I told myself that I should do it, not let les trumains pass unnoticed. Les trumains, it’s screwed down, Lacan’s sociology is screwed down onto this.

As a result, Lacan can formulate that there is no such thing as sexual rapport, that the whole set of what could be sexual rapport is an empty set, and at the same time that there is sexual rapport between parents and children, or that there is sexual rapport between three generations; by which we must undoubtedly understand those who have taught you the tongue, those from whom you have learnt the tongue, plus the superego which they have thus conveyed to you, the stock of culture, the culture broth they made you drink. On the one hand, indeed, there is no such thing as sexual rapport, but on the other, there is nevertheless the Oedipus, that is to say an object – the mother – with whom there is sexual rapport, even though someone, something, hinders it all the same.

 

To read otherwise

I asked what would be the knowledge fundamentally associated with psychoanalysis? The answer that can be retained from what Lacan says about it in The Moment of Concluding is the definition according to which knowledge consists in the readable. And this, whatever be the suspicion he casts upon The Interpretation of Dreams, regarding which he can say it is impossible to understand what Freud wanted to say – that’s how he signifies that what’s in question is a delusion; but why would he deny himself this, since he accuses himself of having been delusional (deliré) in his Seminar?

We can nevertheless admit that the dream, the lapsus, the joke, they are read. What we call interpreting, it’s to read otherwise. When, once again, he raises the question – the subject supposed to know what? he can give this answer – the subject supposed to know how to read otherwise, on condition that the otherwise is linked to the siglum S(Ⱥ).

S(Ⱥ)

This means that this to read otherwise cannot be fobbed off on anyone. To read otherwise is not to read the Great Book of creation, the creation of the unconscious, for example. There is something arbitrary about it. It is not “scientific,” using the word within quotes, since we have lost confidence in that knowledge as well. To read otherwise is not automatic. Nor is it any longer the truth, even if it can be decorated in the latter’s name, to have it be believed through prestige. There is something aleatory about it. Let’s simply say that interpretation as reading otherwise requires the support of writing, that is to say the reference to the fact that the sounds emitted can be written otherwise than they were intended. Lacan says it in a way that carries the marks of a draft-sketch – there is surely something of writing in the unconscious. Yes, the other reading that’s at stake leans on the intention to say something. The other reading, which is that of analysis, leans on the analysand’s intention to say something. It is this intention that we attribute to the conscious, to the ego; it is even by this intention that we define consciousness, hence the value that Lacan attaches to the blunder, when words do not serve your intention.

In short, what Lacan calls the symbolic turns out to be essentially inadequate. Lacan’s very last teaching is grappling with the inadequation of the symbolic, without which it would have no raison d’être. The symbolic is a factor of confusion. It is the signifier that results in our not finding ourselves again there. The signifier is responsible for sexual non-rapport in the human being. Sexual non-rapport is already to say too much; what emerges from The Moment of Concluding is a confused sexual rapport.

Love is confusion. We know very well that it is made of odds and ends, of bits and pieces that are... well, there is a moment at which the passage from desire to love occurs. Love is confusion, involving something of prestige, of semblant, of mistaken identity... In Lacan’s very last teaching, we have to get used to the depreciation of the symbolic. This was certainly not the case earlier; it was not so at the time with regards to which Lacan stigmatizes himself by saying – I have been delusional with linguistics.

How had he been delusional with linguistics? His delusion with linguistics consisted precisely in emphasizing the primacy of the word over the thing, to attribute to words the power to make things. That’s how he accounts for the Freudian Thing, by saying that it would signify things’ being molded upon words. Psychoanalysis would thus entail that linguistic structure prevails in all cases. The word structure was in its place and in the foreground.

In his very last teaching, without saying so explicitly, a completely different definition of structure is at work. That’s how I read the first sentence of his very last lesson of 8 May 1978: Things can legitimately be said to know how to behave. The adverb legitimately is amusing, it comes in place of truthfully; it’s not that we are right (vrai), but that we have the right (droit). Legitimacy is already a term which falls within the ambit, if I may say so, of sociology.

Things can be said to know how to behave – if there is anything of structure in this case, it is not a matter of linguistic structure, but, if I may say so, of a thingly structure. This supposes a knowing how to behave, knowing how to behave better than we can know it ourselves, as demonstrated by the surprises produced by mathematical objects, the things that Lacan handles. I take out mathematics, since he occasionally makes of them objects that can be manipulated with the hands, by way of preemption. Things know how to behave, precisely unlike les trumains who do not know how to behave, “by reason of,” within quotes, the symbolic structure – the school of confusion, the school of perdition – that language constitutes. Because les trumains do not know how to behave, we have just invented techniques for them to learn for their benefit.

The emergence and flowering of our CBT [cognitive behavioral therapies] relies on the confusion of the symbolic: whereas things can do without it, there is analysis so as to try to get a trumain to know how to behave with the sinthome.

 

To imagine the real

In other words, the problem that could not be formulated in the Lacanian linguistic delusion is the inadequation of words to things, which means, by abstraction, the inadequation of the symbolic to the real. If I remember correctly, we see Lacan, in his very last lesson, figuring what the adequation would be through the interlacing of two rings, that of the symbolic and the real. This interlacing would mean – well, that it holds together, and that the imaginary is elsewhere. It is not far from what Lacan formulated at the beginning of his écrit on “The Purloined Letter.” On the other hand, this is what Lacan’s very last teaching rejects, by positing that the adequation of the symbolic to the real makes things only fantasmatically. Fantasy as to believing that the word makes the thing, fantasy as to believing the symbolic would be adequate to the real. By fantasy, which is a keyword of The Moment of Concluding, Lacan does not exactly intend a dream; fantasy is distinguished from dream by being an aspiration, a suggestion of the imaginary by the symbolic, he says.

This calls into question the definition of analysis by way of knowledge. Why? Because knowledge is only fantasy, an aspiration of the symbolic suggesting the imaginary. As early as in the first lesson of The Moment of Concluding, Lacan formulates that Euclidean geometry has all the characteristics of fantasy. And this, particularly the idea of ​​the straight line, which he had already critiqued, which he had already done away with in his Seminar on The Sinthome, as I have pointed out.

We understand that with topology, Lacan tries to get out of the geometric fantasy. This attempt, I did not find a better clamp for it than by fishing out from the last lesson of this Moment of Concluding the expression which appears almost in passing in a sentence: there is nothing more difficult than to imagine the real. Well, all things considered, that has served for me as the title of this very last lesson of Lacan, and as the watchword of this Moment of Concluding, of this effort which, in its time, left all those perplexed who were not the workers helping Lacan in this task.

The attempt is to imagine the real, precisely because the symbolic is not adequate to the real, because the symbolic is associated to the real only through fantasy as suggestion of the imaginary. Let’s try to associate the real to the imaginary, to imagine the real. That, it seems to me, is the key to these manipulations by Lacan in his very last teaching. To imagine the real goes through this strange materialization constituted by these figures, which are figures of objects. This materialization, Lacan specifies, is a materialization of the thread of thought. I connect this statement with what he formulates elsewhere – analysis is a social fact which is founded on thought. It seems to me that Lacan is attempting a materialization of thought here. It is also to imagine the knowledge of things with, as he says, oratorical, that is to say, spoken, precautions. Such is the rhythm of this Seminar – what is said there is of the order of oratorical precaution, so as to show that there are things which know how to behave and that we run after them, after the manner in which they, among themselves, return, reverse, knot, etc.

This materialization is especially noticeable when we proceed to what constitutes the major act in Lacan’s last teaching, the act of cutting, which renders it discernible that we are dealing with fabric, with tissue. This refers, he claims, to the stuff from which a psychoanalysis is made.

To begin The Moment of Concluding Seminar by saying that analysis is a practice of chatter constitutes a depreciation of speech, but it is precisely because it is a practice of chatter that everything rests on this – does the analyst know how to behave? In this chattering, an opposition emerges: the analysand speaks, Lacan says – it must be surprising – that he makes poetry; in other words, it is not interpretation that falls within the ambit of poetry in The Moment of Concluding. This is a step forward in relation to what I mentioned earlier.

 

Surgery

The analysand speaks while the analyst slices. Lacan’s topological attempts multiply the figurations of the fact that the analyst slices, they are figurations by means of the cut, in so far as the cut has the power to change the structure of things.

It is no longer the word which makes the thing, but the cut that changes the structure of the represented objects. With one major difficulty – if the symbolic is inadequate to the real, there remains, nevertheless, what Lacan calls a gap between the imaginary and the real, a gap which lodges our inhibition to imagine how the things that are in question behave – Lacan gives the example of the stomping around, getting nowhere, necessary to overcome this inhibition.

This detracts not one bit from the word’s seriousness in psychoanalysis. If words do not have the power that we believed them to possess when we were delusional, that does not prevent them from having consequences. It is a question of realizing these consequences, of evaluating them. It’s a matter, Lacan says, of the analyst’s realizing the scope of words for his analysand.

The model of the analytic act in Lacan’s very last teaching, and in his very last practice, is the cut. Acting through the intermediary of thought verges on mental debility, he says. That’s why he attempts to work out an act that would not partake of debility, an act that would not partake of mental debility, according to his terms. Such as it appears from what remains of The Moment of Concluding, this act which would not partake of mental debility, which would not go through thought, is the cut.

That’s why I take seriously this aspiration that Lacan attests to, and in a form that deserves to be retained – raising psychoanalysis to the dignity of surgery. You will have noted the syntactic form which takes up again that which he had used with regard to sublimation – to raise the object to the dignity of the Thing. That then is Lacan’s fantasy that is expressed in this aspiration: that it would be a matter of sublimation. To raise psychoanalytic debility to the sovereign assurance of the surgical stroke of cutting: that would be the safeguard of psychoanalysis.

 

Les Trumains

Turning in circles
Condemned to the dream
On a murmur
To read otherwise
To imagine the real
Surgery