UNE LETTRE D'AMOUR

Today I am going to talk about knowledge.

A discourse such as analytic discourse aims at meaning. Clearly I can only deliver to each of you that part of meaning you are already on the way of absorbing. This has a limit, given by the meaning in which you are living. It is not saying too much to say that this meaning does not go very far. What analytic discourse brings out is precisely the idea that this meaning is mere semblance.

If analytic discourse indicates this meaning to be sexual, it can only do so by taking its limits into account. There is nowhere any last word unless in the sense in which word is not a word – as I  have already stressed. No reply's the word says la Fontaine somewhere of other. Meaning indicates the side on which it fails.

 

2-

All that remains is for me to speak to you about love. Which I will do in an instant, But what is the point of my ending up speaking to you about love, given that it scarcely follows the pretensions of analytic discourse to bring something of a science.

This something of a science – you are hardly aware of it. Of course you are aware, since I have pointed it out to you, that there was a moment when with soe justification we were able to boast that scientific discourse had been founded in the Galilean turning point. I have stressed this often enough to presume that some of you will have gone back to the sources, meaning to the work of Koyre.

In relation to scientific discourse, it is very difficult to hold equally present two terms which I will give to you now.

On the one hand, this discourse has given rise to all kinds of instruments which, from the point of view involved here, we must classify as gadgets. This makes you to a much greater extent you are aware, the subjects of instruments which, from the microscope to the radio television, become elements of your existence. At the present time, you cannot even measure their magnitude, but that doesn't make this any less part of what I call scientific discourse, a discourse being that which determines a form of social tie.

On the other hand, and this is where things don't jell, there is a subversion of knowledge. Up till now, in relation to knowledge nothing has ever been conceived of which did not share in the fantasy of inscribing a sexual tie, and we cannot even say that the subjects of the ancient theory of knowledge were not conscious of the fact.

For example, Simply take the terms active and passive which dominate everything which has ever been thought up on the relationship of form to matter, a relationship which is so fundamental and which Plato, and then Aristotle, refer to at every step they take regarding the nature of things. It is visibly palpably the case that these prepositions are only upheld by a fantasy of trying to make up for what there is no way of stating that is, the sexual relation.

The strange thing is that something, albeit something ambiguous, has none the less come out of this crude polarity, which makes matter passive and form the agency which brings to life, namely, that this bringing to life, this animation, is nothing other than the a whose agency animates what? – it animates nothing, it takes the other for its soul.

Look at the way that the idea of a God has progressed through the ages – not that of the Christian faith, but the God of Aristotle, the unmoved mover, the supreme sphere. The idea that there should be a being such that all lesser beings than he can have no basis of the idea of Good in Aristotle's Ethics, which I urged you to look look at so as to grasp its impasses. The supreme being, which is manifestly mythical in Aristotle, the immobile sphere from which originate all movements, whether situated in the place, the opaque place of the JOUISSANCE of the Other, that Other which, if she existed, the woman might be.

It is in so far as her Jouissance is radically Other that the woman has a relation to God greater than all that has been stated in ancient speculation according to a path which has manifestly been articulated only the good of mankind.

The objective of my teaching, insamuch as it aims at that part of analytic discourse which can be formulated, or put down, is to dissociate the a and the O, by reducing the former to what belongs to the imaginary and the latter to what belongs to the symbolic. That the symbolic is the support of that which was made into God, is beyond doubt. That the imaginary is supported by the reflection of like to like, is certain. And yet, a has come to be confused with the S(O) beneath which it is written on the board, and it has done so under pressure of the function of being. It is here that a rupture or severance is still needed. And it is in this precisely that psychoanalysis is something other than a psychology. For Psychology is the non-achieving of this rupture.

 

-3

At this point I am going to allow myself a break by a reading you something I wrote for you a while back – on what? – simply from where it might be possible to speak of love.

Speaking of love, in analytic discourse, basically one does nothing else. And how could it escape us that, as regards everything that the discovery of scientific discourse has made it possible to articulate, it has been one pure and simple waste of time. What analytic discourse brings to bear, which may after all be why it emerged at a certain point of scientific discourse, is that speaking of love is in itself a jouissance.

This is confirmed beyond any doubt by the wholly tangible effect that by saying anything, the very rule of the discourse of the analysand , you arrive at the pleasure principle and by the most direct route, without there being any need for the elevation to the higher spheres which is the basis of Aristotlian ethics.

For us, of coarse, the O is crossed through. Which doesn't mean that it is enough to cross it through for nothing of it to exist. If I am using this Crossing through to designate nothing other than the jouissance of the woman, it is undoubtedly because I am thereby registering that God has not made his exit.

This is roughly what I was writing . So, what was I writing you? The only thing one can do with a measure of seriousness, a love letter.

As far as the supposed psychologicists are concerned, thanks to whom all this has gone on for so long, I am one of those who don't do much for their reputation. And yet I fail to see why the fact of having a soul should be a scandal for thought, were it true. If it weren't true, the soul could only be spoken as whatever enables a being, the speaking being to call him by its name, to be alien to that world, that is to say, fantasmatic. In this world, the soul can only be contemplated through the courage and the patience with which it faces it. The proof is that up till now the soul has never had any other meaning.

At this point, lalangue, in French, must come to my aid – not , as is often the case, by providing me with homonym, such as d'eux (of them) with deu (two) or peut (can) with peu (little) or il peut peu (he little can) which must surely be there for a purpose – but simply by allowing me to say on ame (one souls) J'ame, tu ames, il ame. You can see that in this case we have to use writing, which even gives Jamais j' amais (never have I souled).

The soul's existence can, therefore, be placed in question (mise en cause) – cause being the appropriate term with which to ask if the soul be not love's effect. In effect, as long as soul souls for soul there is no sex in the affair. Sex does not count. The soul is conjured out of what is homosexual , as is perfectly legible from history.

What I said earlier about the courage and the patience of the soul in bearing the world, is what guarantees that someone like Aristotle, in his search for the Good, stumbles on the fact that each of the beings in the world can only tend towards the greatest being by confusing their own good with that same good which radiates from the supreme being. It is by their courage in bearing this intolerable relation to the supreme being that friends come to recognize and choose each other. The outsider sex of this ethic is so evident that I would like to give it the emphasis given somewhere by Maupassant in his coinage of the strange term, Horla. The outside sex, such is mankind in whom the soul did speculate.

But it can happen that women too are soulful in love, that is to say, that they soul for the soul. What on earth could this be other than this soul for which they soul in their partner, who is none the less homo right up to the hilt, from which they cannot escape? This can only bring them to the ultimate point of hysteria, as it is called in Greek, or of acting the man, as I call it, thereby becoming, they too, homosexual or outsidesex. For it is difficult for them not to sense from then on the impasse of their soully liking themselves in the Other, since after all in being Other there is no need to know that one is.

For the soul to come into being, she, the woman, is differentiated from it, and this has always been the case. Called woman and defamed. The most famous things that have been handed down in history about women have been strictly speaking the most defamatory that could be said of them. True, the woman has been left the honour of Cornelia, they will tell you that it won't be very good for her children, the Gracchi - they'll be crack liars till the end of their days.

That ws the beginning of my letter, an amusement.

Earlier I made an allusion to courtly love, which appeared at the point when homosexual amusement had fallen into supreme decadence, into that sort of impossible bad dream called feudalism. In such depths of political degeneracy, it must have become noticeable that on the side of the woman, there was something which really would no longer do.

The invention of courtly love is in no sense the fruit of what history usually symbolizes as the thesis, antithsis, synthesis. And of course afterwards, there was not the slightest synthesis – there never is. Courtly love blazed in history like a moteor and we have since witnessed the return of all its trappings in a so called renaissance of the old craze. Courtly love has remained an enigma.

A brief aside – when one is made into two, there is no going back on it. It can never revert to making one again, not even a new one. The Aufhebung (sublation) is one of those sweet dreams of philosophy.

After the blazing of courtly love, it was assigned once more to its original futility by something which sprang from an entirely different quarter. It took nothing less than scientific discourse, that is, something owing nothing to the suppositions of the ancient soul.

And only this could give rise to psychoanalysis, that is, the objectification of the fact that the speaking being still spends its time speaking to no purpose. It still spends time speaking for the briefest of purposes, the briefest, I say, because it simply keeps at it, that is, for as long as is needed for the thing finally to be resolved (which is what we've got coming to us) demographically.

No way could this sort out man's relationship to women, Freud's genius was to have seen that. Freud: the very name is a laugh. It is the most hilarious leap in the holy farce of history. Perhaps while this turning point still lasts, we might get a glimmer of something about the other, because this is what the woman has to deal with.

I would like to add now an essential complement to something which has already been very clearly seen, but which might gain further clarification by our looking at the paths which led to that insight.

What was seen, but only from the side of the man, was that what he relates to is the objet a, and that the whole of his relationship in the sexual relation comes down to fantasy. It was of course seen with regard to neurotics. How do neurotics make love? That was where the whole thing started. It was impossible not to notice that there was a correlation with perversions – which lends support to my objet a, since, whatever she said perversions, the a will be there as their cause.

The funny thing is that Freud originally attributed perversions to the woman – look at the three essays. Truly a confirmation that when one is a man, one sees in one's partner what can serve, narcissistically, to act as one's own support.

Except that what came after gave ample opportunity for realizing that perversions, such as one had thought to locate them in neurosis, were no such thing. Neurotics have none of the characteristics of the pervert. They simply dream that they have which is natural, since how else can they reach their partner?

It was then that one began to come across perberts – Aristotle having refused to recognize them at any price. There is in them a subversion of conduct, based on a know how, kinked to a knowledge, a knowledge of the nature of things, which leads directly from sexual conduct to its truth, namely, its amorality. Put some soul in from the start – soulmorality.

There is a morality, that is the inference of sexual conduct. The morality of sexual conduct is implicit in everything that has ever been said about the good.

Only, by having good to say, you end up with kant, where morality admits to what it is. This is something which I felt needed to be argued in an article (Kant with Sade) morality admits it is Sade.

You can write Sade how you like , with a capital, as a tribute to the poor fool who gave us endless writings on the subject, or with a small letter, which is finally a way of being agreeable, the meaning of the word in old French; or, even better, cade, since it has to be said that morality stops short at the level of the id. In other words, what it is all bout is the fact that love is impossible, and that the sexual relation founders in non-sense, not that this should in any way diminish the interest we feel for the other.

Ultimately, the question is to know, in whatever it is that constitutes feminine jouissance where it is not all taken up by the man – and I would even say that feminine jouissance as such is not taken up by him at all – the question is to know where her knowledge is at.

If the unconscious has taught us anything, it is firstly this, that somewhere, in the Other, it knows. It knows precisely because it is upheld by the signifiers through which the subject is constituted.

Now this us what makes the confusion, since it is difficult for anyone soulful not to believe that everyone in the world knows what they should be doing. If Aristotle upholds his God with that immobile sphere for all use in pursuit of their own good, it is because this sphere is assumed to know what that good is. This is what the break induced by scientific discourse compels us to do without.

There is no need to know why. We no longer need that knowledge which Aristotle originally started out from. In order to explain the effects of gravitation, we have no need to impute to the stone a knowledge of the place where it must land. By imputing a soul to an animal, we make knowledge the preeminent act nothing other than the body – note that Aristotle wasn't so wide of the mark – except that the body is made for an activity, and that somewhere the entelechy of the body is upheld by that substance it calls the soul.

Here analysis adds to the confusion by giving back to us the final cause and making us state that, at least for everything concerning the speaking being, reality is of one order, that is to say, fanatasmatic. How could this in any way be likely to satisfy scientific discourse?

There is, according to analytic discourse, an animal which finds himself speaking, and for whom it follows that, by inhabiting the signifier, he is its subject. From then on, everything is played out for him on the level of fantasy, but a fantasy which can perfectly will be taken apart so as to allow for the fact that he knows a great deal more than he thinks when he acts. But the fact that this is the case is not enough to give us the outlines of a cosmology.

That is the perpetual ambiguity of the term unconscious. Obviously, the unconscious presupposes that in the speaking subject there is something, somewhere, which knows more than he does, but this can hardly be allowed as a model for the world. To the extent that its possibility resides in the discourse of the science, psychoanalysis is not a cosmology, although man has only to dream to see re-emerging before him that vast jumble, that lumber room he has to get by with, which doubtless makes of him a soul, and one which can be lovable when something its willing to love it.

As I have said, the woman can love in the man only the way in which he faces the knowledge he souls for. But as for the knowledge by which he is, we can only ask this question if we grant that there is something, jouissance, which makes it impossible to tell whether the woman can say anything about it – whether she can say what she can say what she knows of it.

At the end of today's lecture, I therefore arrive, as always, at the edge of what polarized my subject, that is, whether the question can be asked as to what she knows of it. It is no difference from the question of knowing whether this end point from which she comes, which she enjoys beyond the whole game which makes up her relationship with the man. Whether this point, which I call the Other signifying it with the Capital O, itself knows anything. For in this she is herself subjected to the Other just as much as the man.

….

 

 

 

 

God and the jouissance of the Woman

 

Today I will be elaborating the consequences of the fact that in the case of the speaking being the relation between the sexes does not take place, since it is only on this basis that what makes up for that relation can be stated.

For a long time now I have laid down with a certain THERE IS SOMETHING OF ONE the first step of this undertaking. This THERE IS SOMETHING OF ONE is not simple – to say the least. In psychoanalysis, or more precisely in the discourse of Freud, it is set forth in the concept of Eros, defined as a fusion making one out of two, that is, of Eros seen as the gradual tendency to make one out of a  vast multitude. But, just as it is clear that even all of you, while undoubtedly you are here a multitude, not only do not make one but have no chance of so doing – as is shown only too clearly, and that every day, if only by communicating in my speech – so Freud had to raise up another factor as obstacle to this universal Eros, in the shape of Thantos, which is the reduction to dust.

Clearly this is a metaphor allowed to Freud by the fortunate discovery of the two units of the germen, the ova and the spermatozoa, whose fusion, crudely speaking, engenders – what? A new being. With this qualification, that the thing does not come about without meisosis, a quite manifest subtraction for at least one of the two just before the conjunction is effected, a subtraction of certain elements which are not without their place in the final operation.

We can, however, comfort ourselves that there is unquestionably much less of the biological metaphor here than elsewhere. If the unconscious is indeed what I say it is, as being structured like a language, then it is on the level of language that we must interrogate this One. This One has resounded endlessly across the centuries. Need I bother to evoke here the neo-platonists? Perhaps I should very briefly mention that whole saga, but late, since my task today is to make clear exactly how this issue not only can, but must be addressed from within our discourse, and from the new perspective which our experience opens up in the domain of Eros.

We must start on the basis that this THERE IS SOMETHING OF ONE is to be taken with the stress that there is One alone. Only this can we grasp the nerve of the thing called love, since we too must call it by the name under which it has echoed across the centuries. In analysis we are dealing only with this thing, and it comes into play through no other path. It is a strange path which in itself enabled me to isolate something I felt myself bound to uphold in the transference, inasmuch as this is indistinguishable from love, by means of the formula, THE SUBJECT SUPPOSED TO KNOW.

I cannot avoid stressing the new resonance which this term, to know, might take on for you. He whom I suppose to know, I love. Earlier you saw me wavering, drawing back, hesitating to come down on the one side of one meaning or the other, on the side of love or of what is called hate, when I urged you to share in a reading whose express objective is discredit me – which should hardly deter someone  who speaks of nothing but dis-abusement, and who aims at nothing less. The point is that what makes this objective seem tenable for the authors is a de – supposition of my knowledge. When I say that they hate me, what I mean is that they de- suppose me of my knowledge.

And why not indeed? Why not, if it transpires that this is the precondition of what I call a reading? After all, what can I presume of what Aristotle knew? Possibly I might read him better the less of this knowledge I suppose him to have. Such is the condition of a strict test of reading, and it is the one condition which I do not let myself off.

We cannot ignore what is there for us to read in that part of language which exists – namely, what turns out to form a weave by way of its precipitous ups and downs (which is how I define writing). It would, therefore, be disdainful not to give some echo at least to what has been elaborated through the ages on the subject of love, by a thinking which has been termed – incorrectly I might say – philosophical.

This is not the place for a general review of the question. Given the kind of facts which I see blurred before me, I would judge you to have heard that within philosophy the love of God has held a certain place. This is a fact of great import which, if only indirectly, psychoanalytic discourse cannot afford to ignore.

Which reminds me of something which was said when I was excluded, as they put it in this little book, from Saint Anne. As it happens, I was not excluded, I withdrew, which is very different, not that it matters, since that is hardly the issue, especially as the term "excluded" has its own importance in my own typology. Some well meaning people always worse than those who mean badly – were surprised to have it reach them that I placed between man and woman a certain Other who seemed remarkably like the good old God of all times. They only heard it indirectly and became the willing bearers of the tidings. And these people belonged to the pure philosophical tradition, free among those who lay claim to materialism – which is precisely why I call it pure, since there is nothing more philosophical than materialism. Materialism feels itself obliged, God knows why, we can appropriately say, to be on guard against this God whom I have said to have dominated in philosophy the whole debate about love. Hence these people, to whose warm intervention I owned a replenished audience, were somewhat put out.

For my part, it seems plain that the Other, put forward at the time of "The Agency of the Letter" as the place of speech, was a way, I can't say of laicizing, but of exorcising our good old God. After all, there are many people who compliment me for having managed to establish in one of my last seminars that God does not exist. Obviously they hear, but unfortunately, they understand, and what they understand is a little hasty.

Today, however, my objective is rather to show you precisely in what he exists. The mode in which he exists may well not please everyone, especially not the theologians who, as I have been saying for a long time, are far more capable than I am of doing without his existence. Unfortunately, I am not quite in the same position because I am dealing with the Other. This Other, while it may be one alone, must have some relations to what appears of the other sex.

In this context, during the year of the "Ethics of psychoanalysis" which I referred to last time, I did not desist from referring to courtly love. What is it?

It is an altogether refined way of making up for the absence of sexual relation by pretending that it is we who put an obstacle of sexual relation by pretending that it is we wo put an obstacle to it. It is truly the most staggering thing tat has ever been tried. But how can we expose its fraud?

Instead of wavering over the paradox that courtly love appeared in the age of feudalism, the materialists should see this as a magnificent opportunity for showing how, on the contrary, it is rooted in the discourse of fealty, of fidelity to the person. In the last resort, the person is always the discourse of the master.

For the man, whose lady was entirely, in the most servile sense of the term, his female subject, courtly love is the only way of coming off elegantly from the absence of sexual relation.

It is along these lines that later I will be dealing with the notion of the obstacle – later, since today I have a certain area to work on – the area which in Aristotle (for all that, I do prefer Aristotle to Geoffrey Rudel) is precisely called the obstacle.

 

If you consult Aristotle, everything will be clear to you when I finally take up this issue of the obstacle. You could then go on to read the piece from the Rhetoric and the two pieces  from the Topics which will enable you to grasp exactly what I am getting at when I try to reintegrate into Aristotle my four formulas.

Finally, as last point on the subject, why should the materialists, as we call them, be indignant that I place God as third party, and why not, even to materialists, to know something about the ménage a trios?

So let us try to proceed. Proceed on the basis of this fact that there is no evidence that I do not know what I am meant to be saying when I am speaking to you here. I am speaking to you here. What puts this book on the wrong track from start to finish is that they suppose me – after which anything is possible – they suppose me to have an ontology, or, what amounts to the same thing, a system.

 

And yet it is, surely, unequivocal that, as against the being upheld by philosophical tradition, that is, the being residing in thought and taken to be its correlate, I argue that we are played by jouissacne.

Thought is jouissance. What analytic discourse brings out is this fact, which was already intimated in the philosophy of being – that there is a jouissance of being.

If I spoke to you about te Nicomachean Ethics, it was precisely because a hint of this is there. Aristotle's endeavor, and it opened the path to everything that followed in his train, was to discover what is jouissance of being. Someone like Saint Thomas then had no difficulty in forging out of this physical theory of love as it was called by Abbot Rousselot – which is that, all things considered, the first being of which we are aware is that of our own being, and everything which is for our own good will, by dint of the fact, be jouissance of the supreme being, that is, of God. In short, in loving God, it is ourselves we love, and by first loving ourselves – a convenient charity as they say – we render to God te appropriate homage.

The being – If I absolutely must use the term – the being I set against this is the being of significance. And I fail to see how it can be construed as a betrayal of the ideals because it falls outside the limits of its conceptual design – to recognize that the motive of this being of significance lies in jouissance, jouissance of the body.

But then, you see, ever since Democritus, a body has not seemed sufficiently materialist. You have to see atoms, and the whole works, sight and smell and everything that follows. It all absolutely hangs together.

It is not fortuitous that at times Aristotle quotes Democritus, even if he feigns disgust, since he based himself on him. In point of fact, the atom is simply a floating element of significance. Except that you get into real trouble if you only retain what makes the element elementary, that is, the fact that it is unique, when what we need to bring in a little is the other, that is, difference.

Now, then, this jouissance of the body. If there is no sexual relation, we need to see, in that relation, what purpose it might serve.

3-

Let's start on the side of the man.

On the whole one takes up this side by choice –women being free to do so if they so choose. Everyone knows that there are phallic women and that the phallic function does not prevent men from being homosexual. But at the same time it is this function which enables them to situate themselves as men, and to take on the women. I will deal briefly with man, because what I want to talk about today is the woman and I presume I have sufficiently drummed it into you that, short of castration, that is, short of something which says no to the phallic function, man has no chance of enjoying the body of the woman, of making love.

That is the conclusion of analytic experience. It does not stop hum from desiring the woman in any number of ways, even when this condition is not fulfilled. Not only does he desire her but he does all kinds of things to her which bear a remarkable resemblance to love.

Contrary to what Freud argues, it is the man, by which I mean he who finds himself male without knowing what to do about it, for all that he is a speaking being, who takes on the woman, or who can believe he takes her on, since on this question convictions, those I referred to to last time as con-victions, are not wanting.

Except that what he takes on is the cause of his desire, the cause I have designated as the objet a. That is the act of love. To make love, as the term indicates, is poetry. Only there is a world between poetry and the act. The act of love is the polymorphous perversion of the male, in the case of the speaking being. There is nothing more emphatic, more coherent or more strict as far as Freudian discourse is concerned.

I have half an hour left to try to introduce you, if I dare so express myself, to what is involved on the side of the woman – either what I write has no meaning, or    ,  this hitherto unstated function in which the negation bears on the quantifier to be read as not all, it means that when any speaking being constituted as not all that they are placed within the phallic function. It is this that defines the woman precisely, except that the woman can only be written with THE crossed through. There is no such thing as The woman since of her essence – having already risked the term, why think twice about it? -  of her essence, she is not all.

More than one of my pupils have got into a a mess about the lack of the signifier, the signifier of the lack of the signifier, and other muddles regarding the phallus, whereas what I am pointing to with this "the" is the signifier, which is after all common and even indispensable. The proof is that earlier on I was already talking about man and the woman. This the is a signifier. It is by means of this the that I symbolize the signifier whose place must be marked. This the is a signifier. It is by means of this the that I symbolize the signifier whose place must be marked and which cannot be left empty. This the is a signifier characterized by being the only signifier which cannot signify anything, but which merely constitutes the status of the woman as being not all. Which forbids our speaking of the woman.

There is woman only as excluded by the nature of things which is the nature of words, and it has to be said that if there is one thing they themselves are complaining about enough at the moment, it is well and truly that.

It none the less remains that if she is excluded by the nature of things, it is precisely that in being not all, she has, in relation to what the phallic function designates of joiussance, a supplementary jouissance.

Note that I said supplementary. Had I said complementary, where would we be! We'd fall right back into the all.

Women hold to the jouissance in question – none of them hold to being not all, and my God, it would be wrong not to recognize that, contrary to what is said, it is none the less they who, for the most part, possess the man.

The common man, who is not necessarily present here although I do know quite a few, calls woman the Bourgeoise. That is what it means. That is is he who is at heel, and not her. Ever since Rebelais we have known tht the phallus, her man as she calls it, is not a matter of indifference to her. Only, and this is the whole issue, she has various ways of taking it on, this phallus, and of keeping it for herself. Her being bot all in the phallic function does not mean that she is not in it at all. She is in it not not at all. She is right in it. But there is something more.

This something more, mind, be careful not to sound it out too fast. There is a jouissance of the body which is beyond the phallus.

Occasionally it can happen that there is something which shakes the women up, or helps them out. There is a jouissance proper to her, to this her which does not exist and which signifies nothing. There is a jouissance proper to her and of which she herself may know nothing, except that she experiences it – that much she does know. She knows it of course when it happens. It does not happen to all of them.

I don't want to end up on the issue of so called frigidity, although we have to take fashion into account as regards relationships between men and women. It's very important. Unfortunately, in Freud's discourse, as in courtly love, the whole thing is covered over with petty considerations which have caused havoc. Petty considerations about clitoral orgasm or the jouissance designated as best one can, the other one precisely, which I am trying to get you to along the path of logic, since, to date, there is no other.

What gives some likelihood to what I am arguing, that is, that the woman knows nothing of this jouissance, is that, that the woman knows nothing of this jouissance, is that ever since we've been begging them to tell us about it, well, not a word. We have never managed to get anything out of them. So as best we can, we designate this jouissance, vaginal, and talk about the rear opening of the uterus and other suchlike idiocies. If it was simply that she experiences it and knows nothing of it, then we would be to cast considerable doubt on this notorious frigidity.

This is in itself  whole theme, a literary theme, which is well worth stopping at. Ever since I was twenty, I 've been doing nothing other than explore philosophers on the subject of love. Naturally I didn't immediately focus on the question of love but it gradually dawned on me, precisely with Abbot Rousselot about whom I was talking earlier, and then with the whole debate about physical and spiritual love, as they are called. I gather that Gilson did not think much of that opposition. He thought that Abbot Rousselor had made a discovery which was no discovery, since the opposition was part of the problem, and love is as spiritual in Aristotle as in Saint Bernard provided one reads properly the chapters on friendship. Some of you here must surely know what a literary outpouring there has been on the subject, have a look at Love and the Western World, by Denise de Rougement, they're all at it!-  and then another one, with no less talent for this than the rest. Eros and Agape, by a protestant called Niegarens. Naturally we ended up in Christianity by inventing a God. Such that it is he who comes!

All the same there is a bit of a link when you read certain genuine people who might just happen to be women. I will however give you a hint. It's Hadewijch d' Anvers, a Benguine, what we quaintly refer to as a mystic.

I am not myself using the word mystic in the same way s Peguy. The mystical is by no means that which is not political. It is something serious, which a few people teach us about, and most often women or highly gifted people like Saint john of the Cross – since, when you are male, you can also put yourself on the Side of the not – all. There are men who are just as good as women. It does happen. And who therefore feel just as good. Despite, I won't say their phallus, despite what encumbers them on that score, they get the idea, they sense that there must be a jouissance which goes beyond. That is what we call a mystic.

I have already spoken about other people who felt all right on the side of the mystics, but who preferred to situate themselves on the side of the phallic function, such as Angeleus Silesius. To confuse this contemplative eye with the eye with which God is looking at him must surely partake of perverse Jouissance. As regards the Hadwijch in question. It is the same as for Saint Theresa – you only have to go and look at Bernini's Statue in Rome to understanding immediately that she's coming, there's no doubt about it. And what is her jouissance, her coming from? It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics is that they are experiencing it but know nothing about it.

These mystical ejaculations are neither idle gossip not mere verbiage, in fact they are the best thing you can read – note right at the bottom of the page , Add the Ecrits of Jaques Lacan, which is of the same order. Given which, naturally, you are all going to be convinced that I believe in God. I believe in the jouissance of the woman in so far as it is something more, on condition that you screen off that something more until I have properly explained it.

What was tried at the end of the last century, at the same time of Freud, by all kinds of worthy people in the circle of Charcot and the rest, was an attempt to reduce the mystical to question of fucking. If you look carefully, that is not what it is all about. Might not this be jouissance, which one experiences and knows nothing of, be that which puts us on the path of ex-istence? And why not interpret one face of the other, as supported by feminine jouissance?

Since all this comes about thanks to the being of significance, and since this being has no place other than the place of the Other which I designate with a Capital O, one can see the clockeyedness of what happens. And since it is there too that the function of the father is inscribed in so far as this is the function to which castration refers, one can see that while this may not make for two Gods, nor does it make for one alone.

In other words, it is not by chance that Kirkegaard discovered existence in a little tale of seduction. It is by being castrated, by renouncing love that he believes he accedes to it. But then after all, why shouldn't REgine also have existed? This desire for a good at one remove,  good not caused by a petit a, perhaps it was through the intermediary of Regine that he came to it.

 

Source: Feminine Sexuality, Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne.

Ed. Juliet Mitchelle and Jacqueline Rose.

New York

Norton. 1983.

 

 

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