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[[Lacan]], Jacques. Introduction to the Names-of-the-[[Father ]] [[Seminar]]. Jeffrey Mehlman. ''October''. Vol. 40. [[Television]]. Spring. 1987. pp. 81-95
I don't intend to engage in anything in the [[order ]] of a theatrical ploy. I
shall not wait until the eng of this seminar to tell you that this will be the last
that I shall conduct.
For some, apprised of things that have been occurring, that will not be a
surprise. It is for the [[others]], outof respect for their [[presence]], that I am making
this declaration.
I [[request ]] that absolute [[silence ]] be maintained during the [[session]].
Up until sometime quite late last night, when a certain bit of news was
delivered to me, it was my [[belief ]] thgt would be giving you this year what Ihave been dispensing for ten years now.<ref>1. On the night of November 19, 1963, Serge Leclaire informed Lacan that the [[S.F.P]]. had voted, in a complicated procedure, to refuse not to ratify the motion striking Lacan's [[name ]] from the [[list ]] of [[training ]] [[analysts]].</ref> My seminar for today was prepared with the same care as I have always d ed to it, every week, for the last tenyears. I don't [[think ]] I can do any betted an offer it to you as it is, with my
apologies for the fact that it will have no sequel.
==I==
I announced that I would [[speak ]] this year of the Names-of-the-Father. It
will not be possible for me, in the course of this single presentation, to convey
to you the [[reason ]] for the plural. At the least, you will perceive the beginning ofan advancement I intended to introduce on a [[notion ]] aÏfeady initiated in the[[third ]] year of my seminar, when I dealt with the [[Schreber ]] [[case]].
I will perhaps be more careful than ever before-since today it has been
decided that I shall stop here-in punctuating for you, in my [[past ]] teaching, the
coordinates which allow the lineaments of this year's seminar to find their
grounding. I wanted to link together the [[seminars ]] of January 15, 22, 29 andFebruary 5, 1958, concerning what I have called the paternal [[metaphor]], and
those following it, the seminars of December 20, 1961 and those following it,
concerning the function of the proper name, the seminars of May 1960 con-
cerning everything bearing on the drama of the father in [[Claudel]]'s trilogy, and
finally the seminar of December 20, 1961, followed by the seminars of January
1962.
One finds there a direction which has already advanced quite far in its
[[structuration]], which would have allowed me this year to take the next step.That next step follows from my seminar of last year on [[anxiety]], and that is why
I intend to show you wherein the relief it brought was necessary.
In the course of that seminar on anxiety, I was able to accord their [[full]]weight to [[formulae ]] such as the following: anxiety is an afect of the [[subject]]- a for-
mula which I did not put forward without subordinating it to the functions that
I have long established in the [[structure ]] of the subject, defined as the subjectthat speaks and is determined through an effect of the [[signifier]].
At what [[time]]-if I may say time, let us say that that infernal term, for thewhile, refers only to the [[synchronic ]] level- at what time is the subject affected
with anxiety? That is what the framed diagram I put on the blackboard is in-
tended to [[recall ]] for you. In anxiety, the subject is affected by the [[desire ]] of the[[Other]]. He is affected by it in a nondialectizable manner, and it is for thatreason that anxiety, within the [[affectivity ]] of the subject, is what does notdeceive. In that what does not deceive you can see in [[outline ]] at just how radical alevel-more radical than anything hitEerto designated thereby in [[Freud]]'s dis-
course-its function as a signalis inscribed. That characterization is in confor-
mity with the first formulations Freud gave concerning anxiety as a direct
transformation of the [[libido]].
Moreover, I have opposed the psychologizing [[tradition ]] that distinguishes[[fear ]] from anxiety by virtue of its correlates in [[reality]]. In this I have changedthings, maintaining of anxiety-it is not without an [[object]].
What is that object?: the object [[petit a]], whose fitndamental forms you haveperceived sketched out as far as I have been able to take [[them]]. The object petit a
is what falls from the subject in anxiety. It is precisely the same object that I
delineated as the [[cause ]] of desire. For the subject, there is substituted, for anxiety
which does not deceive, what is to function by way of the dbject petit a. There-
upon hinges the function of the act.
This [[development ]] was reserved for the [[future]]. And yet, I give you my[[word]], it will not be totally lost for you, since, as of this [[moment]], I have in-
troduced it into the-written-part of a book I have promised for six months
from now.<ref>2. This book was never published.</ref>
Last year, I restricted myself to the function of the petit a in [[fantasy]]. Thereit takes on its function as support of [[desire, ]] in so far as desire is the most intense of what the subject can attain in his realization as subject at the level of con-sciousness. It is by way of that [[chain ]] that, once again, the dependencies of
desire in relation to the desire of the Other are affirmed. These conceptions of
the subject and the object have a radical, restructuring [[character ]] which, as I
leave you, I am tempted to recall for you.
that would make of the subject a pure function of intelligence, correlative of the
intelligible, such as the voüs of antiquity. At this juncture, anxiety is revealed
as crucial. Not that nyovía is not in [[Aristotle]], but for ancient [[thought]], it couldonly be a question of a local Trá0os pacified within the passibility of the [[whole]].Of that passibility or susceptibility to [[suffering ]] of antiquity, there remainssomething even in what seems farthest from it-so-called [[psychological ]] [[science]]
or thought.
There is assuredly something well-founded in the correspondence be-
tween intelligence and the intelligible. [[Psychology ]] shows us without [[doubt ]] that[[human ]] intelligence is none other in its foundation than [[animal ]] intelligence,and this is not without reason. From that [[dimension ]] of the intelligible, assumedto be a given and a fact, we can, using evolution as a [[guide]], deduce the prog-ress of intelligence, or its [[adaptation]], indeed even imagine that such [[progress ]] isreproduced in each [[individual]]. This is all fine-except that a hypothesis has
gone unacknowledged, which is precisely that facts are intelligible.
From the positivist perspective, intelligence is no more than one [[affect]]
among others, based on the hypothesis of intelligibility-and that justifies that
psychology for fortune-tellers which is capable of developing in what are seem-
ingly the most liberated spheres, from the height of academic chairs.<ref>The attack on academic psychology seems aimed particularly at Lagache, who abandoned Lacan in 1963. In an unsent [[letter ]] of June 27, 1963, Lacan wrote to Paula Heimann: "A [[society ]] of neo-Lacanians beneath the banner of that stuffed dolly from the Sorbonne will live as a [[body ]] of the IPA at the cost of my [[social ]] and [[moral ]] ruin." Quoted in Elisabeth Roudinesco, La [[bataille ]] de cent ans: Histoire de la [[psychanalyse ]] en [[France]], [[Paris]], Seuil, 1986, p. 724.</ref> Affect, inversely, is then no more than obscure intelligence. What nevertheless escapes whoever is receiving such teaching is the obscurantist effect to which he is [[being ]] submitted. One [[knows]], however, where it leads: to the increasingly intentional undertakings of a technocracy, the psychological standardization of unemployed [[subjects]], the entering into the framework of existent society, head bowed beneath the [[psychologist]]'s standard.
I say that the [[meaning ]] of Freud's discovery is in radical opposition to all
that. It was in order to make you feel this that the first steps of my teaching trod
the paths of [[Hegelian ]] [[dialectic]]. When pondered in its basis, that dialectic has[[logical ]] roots, and may be reduced to the intrinsic deficit of the [[logic ]] of predica-tion. Namely that the [[universal]], once examined-and this has not escaped thecontemporary [[school ]] oflogic-may be grounded only by way ofaggregation,and that the [[particular]], alone in finding its [[existence ]] therein, thereby appearsas [[contingent]]. The entirety of Hegelian dialectic is made to stop that gap and
show, in a prestigious act of transmutation, how the universal, by way of the
scansion of the [[Aufhebung]], can come to be particularized.
Whatever the prestige of Hegelian dialectic, whatever the effects, seen by
[[Marx]], through which it entered into the [[world]], thus completing that whosemeaning [[Hegel ]] was, namely: the [[subversion ]] of a [[political ]] order founded on theEcclesia, the [[Church]], and on that score, whatever its success, whatever the[[value ]] of what it sustains in the political incidences of its actualization, Hegeliandialectic is [[false ]] and contradicted as much by the testimony of the [[natural]][[sciences ]] as by the historical progress of the fundamental science, [[mathematics]].
It is here that anxiety is for us a [[sign]], as was immediately seen by the con-temporary of the development of Hegel's [[system]], which was at the time quitesimply The System, as was seen, sung, and marked by [[Kierkegaard]]. Anxiety isfor us [[witness ]] to an essential breach, onto which I bring testimony that Freu-dian [[doctrine ]] is that which illuminates.
The structure of the relation of anxiety to desire, the [[double ]] breach of the
subject in relation to the object fallen from itself, where, beyond anxiety, it
must find its [[instrument]], the initial function of that [[lost object]]-there is the
fault which does not allow us to treat desire within the logically oriented im-
manence of [[violence ]] alone, as the dimension forcing the impasses of logic. It isthere that Freud brings us back to the very foundation of the [[illusion ]] of what he
called - in accordance with the workI of his time, which is that of an alibi-
[[religion]], and that I, for my part, call the Church.
On that very ground, which is that through which the Church persists in-
tact, and in all the splendor one sees in it, against the Hegelian [[revolution]],Freud advances with the [[enlightenment ]] of reason. It is there, at the foundation
of the ecclesiastic tradition, that he allows us to trace the cleavage of a path go-
ing beyond-deeper and more [[structural ]] than the milestone that he placedthere in the [[form ]] of the [[myth ]] of the [[death ]] of the father. It is there, on that shift-
ing and oh so scabrous terrain-and not without flattering myself at having an
audience worthy of [[understanding ]] it - that this year I intended to advance.
In so far as the Father-their father, of the fathers of the Church-is con-
cerned, may they permit me to tell them that I have not found them sufficient.
Some may [[know ]] that I have been [[reading ]] Saint [[Augustine ]] ever since the age of[[puberty]]. It was, nevertheless, rather late, [[about ]] ten years ago, that I became
acquainted with the De Trinitate. I have reopened it lately only to be astonished
at the extent to which, in the final [[analysis]], it says so little about the Father. To
be sure it has enough to say to us about the Son, and how much about the Holy
[[Ghost]]-but I won't say the illusion of I know not what evasion or11ight occursbeneath the [[author]]'s pen, through a kind of [[automaton]], when it is a question ofthe father. And yet, his is a [[mind ]] so lucid that I rediscovered with joy hisradical protest of any [[attribution ]] to God of the term causa sui, a [[concept ]] which
is, in fact, totally absurd, but whose absurdity may be demonstrated only by
way of the bringing into relief that I punctuated before you, namely that there
are causes only after the emergence of desire, and that what is a cause, a cause
of desire, can in no way be considered an equivalent of the antinomian concep-
tion of [[self]]-causation.
Augustine himself, who is able to formulate the [[thing ]] in opposition toevery form of [[intellectual ]] piety, flinches nonetheless, to the point of translating
Ehieh asher ehieh-which I have long since taught you to read-by an Ego sum qui
sum: I am the one who am. Augustine was a very [[good ]] writer, but in [[Latin ]] as in[[French]], that sounds false and awkward. That God affirms himself as identical
to Being leads to a pure absurdity. I had intended, concerning this, to bring
you all kinds of examples of other uses of analogous formulae in the Hebrew
[[texts]].
I am first going to recall briefly for you the meaning of that function of
petit a in the various forms I [[recalled ]] to you last year, and concerning which
those who follow me were able to see where they stopped-in anxiety.
The a, the object, falls. That fall is [[primal]]. The diversity of forms taken by
that object of the fall ought to be related to the manner in which the desire of
the Other is apprehended by the subject.
That is what explains the function of the [[oral ]] object. That function maybe [[understood]]-as I have insisted at length-only if the object being detachedfrom the subject is introduced into the Other's [[demand]], into the call to the[[mother]], and it delineates that [[space ]] beyond in which, beneath a [[veil]], lies theMother's desire. That act, in which the [[child]], in a [[sense ]] astonished, throws hishead back while removing himself from the [[breast]], shows that it is only ap-parently that the breast belongs to the mother. The [[biological ]] reference is inthis case enlightening. The breast is indeed part of the feeding [[complex ]] whichis [[structured ]] differently in different animal [[species]]. At this point it is a part
stuck onto the mother's thorax.
The second form: the [[anal ]] object. We know it by way of the phenomenol-ogy of the [[gift]], the [[present ]] offered in anxiety. The child releasing his [[feces]]yields them to what appears for the [[first time ]] as dominating the demand of the
Other, to wit: his desire. How is it that authors have not grasped better than
they have that it is at the anal level that the support for what is called generosity
is to be located? It is through a veritable sleight of hand, itself indicative of who
knows what [[panic ]] in the face of anxiety, that the posture of generosity has beensituated at the level of the [[genital ]] act.
It is, however, at that level that [[Freudian ]] teaching, and the tradition thathas maintained it, situates for us the gaping chasm of [[castration]]. [[Psycho]]-physi-
ologists who were Freud's contemporaries reduced its obstacle to what they
called the [[mechanism ]] of false detumescence. Last year, I thought it my obliga-
tion to show that Freud, for his part, from the very beginning of his teaching,
an culates that aspect of [[orgasm ]] which represents precisely the same function
anxiety in relation to the subject. Orgasm is in itself anxiety, to the extent
that forever, by dint of a central fault, desire is separated from fulfillment.
couple, in which each can view him or herself truly happy with the other. We
analysts ought to look at matters more closely in order to see the extent to
which thgadinoments are marked by a fundamental alibi, a [[phallic ]] alibi, in
which forik is gublimated to its function as a sheath, but in which something
that goes beyfššid remains infinitely excluded. It was in order to demonstrate
this to you that I commented at length on Ovid's fable based on the myth of
Tiresias. Indication should also be given of what is perceptible as a trace of the
unbroached realm of [[woman]]'s bliss [[[jouissance]]] in the [[male ]] myth of her alleged[[masochism]]. I have led ypu further.
Symmetrically, and y though on a line no longer descending but curved
in relation to that peal eeËupied by the chasm desire/fulfillment at the genital
level, I have gone so far ás to [[punctuate ]] the function of petit a at the level of thescoptophilic [[drive]]. Its [[essence ]] is realized in so far as, more than elsewhere, the
subject is captive of the function of desire. It is here that the object is strange.
In a first approximation, it is that eye which, in the myth of [[Oedipus]], fulfills sowell the [[role ]] of equivalent for the [[organ ]] to be [[castrated]]. But it is not quite that
which is at stake in the scoptophilic dr ve, in which the subject encounters the
world as a [[spectacle ]] that he possesses. He is thus [[victim ]] of a [[lure]], throughwhich what issues forth from him and confronts him is not the [[true ]] petit a, butits complement, the [[specular ]] [[image]]: i (a).
His image, that is, what appears to have fallen from him. He is taken, re-
joices, vents his glee in what Saint Augustine, in so [[sublime ]] a manner-Iwould have liked to go through the [[text ]] with ou-denounced and designated
as a lust of the eyes. He believes he desires because he sees himself desired, and
because he doesn't see that what the other wants to snatch from him is his [[gaze]].The proof of this is what transpires in the phenomenon of the [[Unheimlich]]. That
is what appears every time that, suddenly, through somè accident more or less
fomented by the Other, that image of himself within ëhe Other appears to the
subject as shorn of his recourse. Here the entire chain in which the subject is
held captive by the scoptophilic drive comes undone. The [[return ]] to the most
basal mode of anxiety is there, once again if it be needed, registered by the
Aleph of anxiety, since it is today that I am introducing the ign in order to
[[symbolize ]] it, in accordance with our [[needs ]] this year. Such is that to which, in
its most fundamental structure, the relation of the subject to petit a bears a
resemblance.
am obliged to designate what will discomfit, precisely on time, the imposture in
that fantasy which we analysts should know quite well in the form that I ar-
ticulated for you, during the year of my seminar on the [[transference]], by way ofthe term ¿ryaXµa ([[agalma]]).
desire, agalma is that object which the subject believes that his desire tends
toward, and through which he presses to an extreme the misperception of petit a
as cause of his desire. Such is the [[frenzy ]] of [[Alcibiades]], and the dismissal[[Socrates ]] subjects him to: Concern yourself with your soul means: Acknowledge thatwhat you are pursuing is [[nothing ]] other than what Socrates will later turn into your soul, towit: your image. See then that the function of that object is in the order not of a [[goal]], butrather of a cause of death, and prepare your [[mourning ]] as a function of it. Then will you
know the paths of your desire. For I, Socrates, who know nothing, that is the only thing that
I know - the function of [[Eros]].
Thus it was that I brought you last year to the gate where we now arrive-
the fifth term of the function of petit a, through which will be revealed the gamut
of the object in its-[[pregenital]]-relation to the demand of the-post-
genital-Other, to that enigmatic desire in which the Other is the site of a
decoy in the form of petit a. In the fifth term, we shall see the petit a of the Other,
I have not named that particular petit a, and yet, in other circumstances, I
could have shown you its [[singular ]] lighting. During a [[recent ]] meeting of ourSociety, concerning [[paranoia]], I abstained from [[speaking ]] on what was at issue,to wit: [[voice]]. The voice of the Other should be considered an essential object.Every [[analyst ]] is solicited to accord it its [[place]]. Its various incarnations shouldbe followed, as much in the realm of [[psychosis ]] as at that extremity of normalfunctioning in the [[formation ]] of the [[superego]]. Through [[seeing ]] the petit a source
of the superego, it is possible that many things will become more clear.
The relation of voice to the Other is solely a [[phenomenological ]] approach.
If it is truly, as I say, petit a as fallen from the Other, we can exhaust its struc-
tural function only by bringing our inquiry to bear on what the Other is as a
subject, for voice is the product and object fallen from the organ of [[speech]], and
the Other is the site where "it"-ça- speaks.
reason of the inevitability of the question I have uttered.
The entirety of [[analytic ]] [[theory ]] and praxis appear to us at present to have
come to a halt for not having dared, on the subject of that question, to go fur-
ther than Freud. That is in fact why one of those whom I have trained as best I
ld has spoken, in a [[work ]] that is not without merit, of the question of the father.*
Éat formulation was bad. It was even a misinterpretation, without there be-
ing grounds for reproaching him for it. There can be no question of the ques-
tion of the father, for the reason that there we are beyond what may be for-
mulatšdys a question. I [[want ]] merely to attempt to situate how today we might
have delineated an approach to the problem that has been introduced at this
juncture.
mention his name), has tged the path in this realm. Were I not obliged to cut
things short, I would hhe equested that you consult his work, since it is suffi-
ciently [[satisfying ]] to spato y the task of showing you how, despite the errorand confusion of the [[times]], Freud put his finger on what deserves to remain in
the work of Robertson Smith and Andrew Lang, after the critique-which is
no doubt well founded from the specialist's point of view-of the function of the
[[totem ]] conducted by my friend Claude Lévi-[[Strauss]]. Freud is the [[living ]] demon-
stration of the extent to which whoeveg functioning at the level of the pursuit
of [[truth ]] can completely make do witEout the advice of the specialist. For whatwould be [[left ]] of it, should nothing else be left than petit a, since what is to be at
stake is the subject prior to the question? Mythically, the father-and that is
what mythically means - can only be an animal.<ref>
4. See [[Jean Laplanche]], Hölderlin et la question du [[père ]] (Paris, P.U.F., 1961), an analysis ofHölderlin's psychosis in [[terms ]] of the [[Lacanian ]] [[category ]] of [[foreclosure]]. Laplanche had cut shorthis analysis with Lacan on November 1, 1963, and declared his [[solidarity ]] with the majority posi-
tion asking that Lacan's name be struck from the list of training analysts.</ref>
The primordial father is the father from before the [[incest ]] [[taboo]], before the[[appearance ]] of law, of the [[structures ]] of mafriage and kinship, in a word, of[[culture]]. The father is the head of that hoard whose [[satisfaction]], in accordance
with the animal myth, knows no bounds. That Freud should call him a totem
takes on its full meaning in the light of the progress brought to the question by
the [[structuralist ]] critique of [[Lévi-Strauss]], which, as you kgow, brings into relief
the classificatory essence of the totem.
We thus see that as a second term what is needed at the level of the father
seminars than had ever been done until now-the function of tlfo proper name.
The name, I demonstrated to you, is a mark already open to reading-for
which reason it will be read identically in all [[languages]]-imprinted on
something that may be, but not at all necessarily, a speaking subject. The proof is that Bertrand Russell can make a mistake and say that one could name a
geometrical point on the blackboard John. Now, we know Bertrand Russell to
have wanted to under other circumstances.
Can we ourselves not move beyond the name and the voice? - and take
our bearing from what the myth implies in that [[register ]] accorded us by ourprogress, that is: on the [[three ]] themes of [[erotic ]] bliss [jouissance], desire, and theobject? It is clear that, in his myth, Freud finds a singular [[balance]], a kind of co-
conformity-if I may be allowed to thus double my prefixes-of Law and
desire, stemming from the fact that both are [[born ]] together, joined and
necessitated by each other in the law of incest and what? - the supposition of
the pure erotic bliss of the father viewed as primordial.
Except, if that is alleged to give us the formation of desire in the child,
ought we not - I have insisted on this at length for years - to pose the question
of [[knowing ]] why all this yields [[neuroses]]?It is here that the accent I allowed to be put on the function of [[perversion]]
in its relation to the desire of the Other as such takes on value. To wit: that it
represents a backing up against the wall, a strictly literal [[interpretation ]] of the
function of the father, of the Supreme Being, of Eternal God. He is taken in a
strictly literal interpretation of the letter, not of his bliss, which is always veiled
and inscrutable, but ofhis desire, as interested in the order of the world-and
that is the [[principle ]] through which the [[pervert]], moulding his own anxiety, in-
stalls himself as such.
Thus are posited two of the prime blind arcades through which may be
seen contrasting and fusing the foundation of normal desire and that of per-
verse desire, which is located at the same level. One must take possession of
that gnarled axis in order to [[understand ]] that what is at stake is a [[totality]], agamut of phenomena that go from [[neurosis ]] to perversion.
Neurosis is inseparable in our eyes from a flight from the term of the
father's desire. That is what [[mysticism ]] replaces with the term of demand.
Mysticism, throughout every tradition, except the one that I am about to in-
troduce, which is quite vexing, is a [[construction]], [[search]], askesis, assumption -
anything you like - plunged toward the bliss of God. That is what leaves a
trace in mysticism- and even, and more still, in [[Christian ]] mysticism. As in thecase of neurosis, the [[insistence ]] of God's desire functions as a pivot.
I apologize for not being able to pursue that indication any further. But I
don't want to leave you without having at least pronounced the name, the first
name through which I wanted to introduce you to the specific incidence of the
[[Judeo-Christian ]] tradition. That tradition, in fact, is one not of erotic bliss, butof the desire of a God who is the God of [[Moses]].
==III==
It was before the God of Moses, in the last analysis, that Freud's pen
stopped [[writing]]. But Freud is surely beyond what his pen transmits to us.
The name of that God is the name Shem, which, for reasons I explained to
you, I would never have pronounced, although some do know its pronuncia-
tion. We have a [[number ]] of others, for example those given us by the Ma'asot,
and which have varied over the centuries. In Chapter 6 of Exodus, Elohim, who
speaks from the burning [[bush]]-which should be conceived of as his body,
kavod, which is translated as glory, and concerning which I would have liked to
show you that it is a matter of something quite different-says to Moses: You
selfto your ancestors, and that is what brought us to the point at which I proposed
that we meet.
God of [[Abraham]], [[Isaac]], and [[Jacob]], not of the [[philosophers ]] and the scientists, writes[[Pascal ]] at the head of the manuscript of his Pensées. Concerning which may be
said what I have gradually accustomed you to understand: that a God is some-
thing one encounters in the [[real]], inaccessible. It is indicated by what doesn't
deceive - anxiety. The God who manifested himself to¾braham, Isaac, and
Jacob, but first of all to Abraham, manifested himself by a name by which the
Elohim of the burning bush calls him, and that I have writtert here. It is read: El
Shadday.
The [[Greeks ]] who did the [[translation ]] of the Septuagent were much better
informed than we are. They didn't translate Ehieh asher as Iam the one who am, as
did Saint Augustine, but as I am the one who is. That's not quite it, but at least it
has a meaning. They thought like the Greeks that God is the supreme Being. I
equals Being.
[[People ]] are not freed like that from their [[mental ]] habits from one day to the
next, but one thing is sure: they did not translate El Shadday as the Allmighty,
but, prudently, as Theos, which is the name they give to everything that they
I was intending to introduce what I would manage to tell you by means of
something essential, whereby we meet up again with our Kierkegaard of a
while ago to wit, what is called in the [[Jewish ]] tradition the Akedah, or in other[[words]]: the sacrifice of Abraham.
I would have presented to you Abraham's sacrifice in the form in which
painterly tradition has figured it in a culture in which [[images ]] are not [[forbidden]].It was, moreover, rather interesting to know why they are so for the [[Jews ]] andwhy, from time to time, [[Christianity ]] has been taken with a fever to rid itself ofthem. Were they even reduced to cut-out [[figures]], I am giving them to you, in
order to show you what may be seen in images, which is necessary, ultimately,
not in order to make uþ for this year's seminar, for assuredly, the names, in so
far as they are concerned, are not there, but the images, in so far as they are, are
there in full array, so that you may rediscover in them all that I have announced
since the [[paternal metaphor]].
There is a boy, his head blocked out against a small stone altar. Take one
of the two paintings of the [[scene ]] by [[Caravaggio]]. The child is suffering, he
grimaces, and Abraham's knife is raised above him. The angel, the angel is
there, the presence of him whose name is not pronounced.
What is an angel? That is [[another ]] question that we will not have to deal
with together. It would, however, have rather amused me to have you laugh at
my last dialogue with Father Teilhard de Chardin. Father, concerning those angels,
how do you arrange to remove them from the Bible, what with your ascent of [[consciousness]],
and all that follows from it? I thought it would make him cry. But come now, are you
really sþeaking seriously to me? I take account of the texts, especially when it is a question of
the Scriptures on which, in theory, your [[faith ]] is based, As for that angel, here he is
rrey, accompanied or not by Father Teilhard's consent, restraining Abraham's
aih. Whatever be the case with that angel, it is indeed in the name of El Shad-
is Ïn that name that the pathos of the drama into which Kierkegaard draws us
ensues. For consider that prior to that restraining gesture, Abraham has
brought a boy to the site of a mysterious [[encounter]], and once there, he has
bound his hând to his feet like a ram for the sacrifice.
Before waxing emotional, as is customary on such occasions, we might re-
that Sarah, until she reached age 90, revealed herself to be infertile, and that
was the reason that Ishmael was born from the patriarch's cohabitation with a
[[slave]]. El Shadday's [[power ]] is proven by the fact that he was the one who drew
Abraham out of the world of his brothers and his peers -it's quite amusing
upon reading to realize, once one calculates the years, that many were still
Whatever the case, El Shadday has indeed also had something to do with
this child of a miracle, for, after all, Sarah has said as much: I am withered. It is
clear that menopause [[exists]], Isaac is thus the child of the miracle, of the prom-
ise. It's thus easy to imagine that Abraham holdrhim dearly. Sarah dies a short
while afterwards. At that time, there are a lot of people surrounding Abraham,
in particular Ishmael, who happens to be there for reasons which are unex-
plained. The patriarch shows himself to be a formidable progenitor. He mar-
ries another woman, Ketorah. If my [[memory ]] serves rue well, he has six chil-dren with her; he doesn't lose any time. Only those [[children ]] have not received
the brachah, like the child of she who carried him in the name of El Shadday.
El Shadday is not almighty; I could show you a thousand demonstrations of
it in the Bible. At the borders of the territory of his people, gHould a different
Elohim from Moab come up with the [[right ]] trick allowing his NBjects to repel
their assailants, it works, and El Shadday decamps with the tribes that brought
him along for the attack. El Shadday is he who chooses, he who promises, who
causes a certain covenant - which is transmissible in only one way, through the
paternal barachah - to [[pass ]] through his name. He is also he who makes one
wait, who makes a son be awaited for up to ninety years, who makes one wait
for many another thing more. I would have shown you.
Don't reproach me for having made too short shrift a while ago of
Abraham's [[feelings]], for, upon opening a little book that dates from the end of
the eleventh century by one Rashi, otherwise known as Rabbi Solomon ben
Isaac of Troyes, an Ashkenaze of France, you would be able to read some
strange commentaries. You know that this Rashi doesn't read a text line by
line, but rather point by point. You would be quite astonished to hear him give
voice to a [[latent ]] dialogue sung between Abraham and God, who is what is at
stake in the angel. When Abraham learns from the angel that he is not there in
order to immolate Isaac, Rashi has him say: What then? If that is what is going on,
him shed a little Flood. Would you like that? This is not my invention. It comes
rather from an extremely pious Jew, whose commentaries, in the tradition of
the Mishnah, are held in high [[regard]]. So there we are with one son and then
two fathers.
Is that all there is? Fortunately our cutout [[figure ]] is there in order to re-
mind us-in the more suniptuous form of the Caravaggio painting-that that
is not all there is. There is one such painting in which he is to the right, and in which you will find that head that I introduced here last year, invisibly, in the form of the Shofar, the ram's horn, which has been undeniably torn from him.
I won't have the opportunity to examine [[symbolic ]] values in any depth for you, but I would like to conclude with what that ram is. It is not true that it figures as a metaphor of the father at the level of [[phobia]]. Phobia is no more than its return, which is what Freud said referring to the totem. Man has not all that much reason to be proud at being the last to appear in creation, the one who was made out of mud, something no other being was worthy of, and so he searches for honorable ancestors, and that is where we still are-as evolu- tionists, we [[need ]] an animal ancestor.
I won't tell you the passages I have consulted, be it in the Mishna, specifically the Guirgueavotchi- I mention it for those whom it may interest, since it is not as big as the Talmud, and you can consult it, it's been translated into French - then in Rashi. Those are the only two references I wanted to give today. Rashi is briefest in explaining that according to Rabbinic tradition, the
ram in question is the primeval ram. It was there, he writes, as early as the seven days of creation, which designates it as what it is, that is, an Elohim- for it is not only he whose name is unpronounceable who was there, but in the clearest fashion, all the Elohim. The latter is traditionally recognized as the ancestor of the [[race ]] of Sem, he who [[links ]] Abraham, through a rather short path, to origins. That ram with tangled horns rushes into a thicket - I would have liked to show you in that site of the thicket something which is the object of extensive commentary elsewhere-, it rushes onto the site of the sacrifice, and it is worth noting what it comes to graze on when he whose name is unpronounceable designates it for the sacrifice that Abraham is to perform in place
of his son. It is his eponymous ancestor, the God of his race.
Here may be marked the knife blade separating God's bliss from what in that tradition is presented as his desire. [[The thing ]] whose downfall it is a matter of provoking is biological origin. That is the key to the mystery, in which may be read the aversion of the Jewish tradition concerning what exists everywhere else. The Hebrew hates the metaphysico-[[sexual ]] rites which unite in celebration the [[community ]] to God's erotic bliss. He accords special value to the gap separating desire and fulfillment. The [[symbol ]] of that gap we find in the same context of El Shadday's relation to Abraham, in which, primordially, is born the law of circumcision, which gives as a sign of the covenant between the people and the desire of he who has chosen them what? - that little piece of flesh sliced off.It is with that petit a, to whose introduction I had led you last year, along with a few [[hieroglyphics ]] bearing witness to the customs of the Egyptian people, that I shall leave you.
In closing, I shall say to you only that if I interrupt this seminar, I don't do so without apologizing to those who, for many years, have been my faithful audience here. And yet it is certain individuals from among its ranks who are now
tuyning that impress against me, fed on the words and [[concepts ]] I have taught ihËm, learned on the paths and ways on which I have led them. In one of those occasionally confused discussions in the course of which a group, our own, found itself tossed this way and that midst its eddies, an in- dividtial, one of my students, felt himself obliged-I apologize to him for hav-ing to deprecate his effort, which assuredly could have had echoes, and bring the [[discussion ]] back to an analytic level- felt himself obliged to say that the meaning of m teaching would be that the veritable import of the truth is that
one can nevegget hold of it. What an incredible misinterpretation! What childish impatience! Must I
indeed have people who are designated-one can only wonder why-as cultured among those most immediately within reach of following me! Where can you find a science and even mathematics-in which each chapter does not lead on to the new one! But is that the same thing as justifying a [[metonymic ]] function ofgrufh? Could you not see that as I advanced, I was per-
petually approaching a specific point of density to which, without the preceding steps, you could not arrive? At hearing such a rejoinder, are there not grounds for invoking the attributes of infatuation and stupidity, the kind of mind com-
posed of the litter that one picks up [[working ]] in editorial committees? Concerning the praxis which is analysis, I have sought to articulate how I seek it, and how I lay hold on it. Itetruth is mobile, disappointing, slippery.Are you not up to understanding thi his is because the praxis of analysis is obliged to advance toward a conquest of the truth via the paths of [[deception]]?
For the transference is nothing else - the transference into what has no name in
the place of the Other.
For a long time now, the name of Freud has not stopped becoming increasingly nonfunctional. So that, if my itmerary is progressive, and even if it is prudent, is it not because that which I have to encourage you against is that
toward which analysis constantly risks sliding--namely, imposture.
I am not here in a plea for myself. I should, however, say, that-having, for two years, entirely confided to others the executiork within a group, of a policy, in order to leave to what I had to tell you its spateind its purity-I have never, at any moment, given any pretext for believing that there was not, for me, any [[difference ]] between yes and no.6
November 20, 1963
Text established by Jacques-[[Alain ]] [[Miller]]
5. The failed policy of seeking integration into the IPA had been implemented by three
analysts-Serge Leclaire, Wladimir Granoff, and François Perrier-known as the "troika." It
was Granoff himself who ultimately penned the motion to deny Lacan his status as "titular"
member. The [[affirmation ]] of the difference between yes and no is intended to underscore the ab-
surdity of Lacanian analysts joining to eliminate Lacan from their ranks.
[[Category:Jacques Lacan]] [[Category:Seminars]] [[Category:Works]]
