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THE SUBJECT AND THE OTHER: ALIENATION

Your money, or your life

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The rim process, the circular process, the relation in question is to be supported by the small losange

that I used as algorithm in my graph precisely because it is necessary in integrating some of the

finished products of this dialectic.

It is impossible not to integrate it, for example, in phantasy itselfit is $ a [barred S, punch, petita].

It is impossible not to integrate it also in that radical node in which are conjoined demand and drive,

designated by the $GD [barred S, punch, capital D], which might be called the cry.

Let us keep with this little losange. It is a rim, a functioning rim. One has only to provide it with a

vectorial direction, here anti-clockwisethis is governed by the fact that, at least in our writing, you

read things from left to right.

Be careful! They are supports for your thought that are not without artifice, but there is no topology

that does not have to be supported by some artificeit is precisely the result of the fact that the subject

depends on the signifier, in other words, on a certain impotence in your thinking.

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The small V of the lower half of the losange, let us say here that it is the vel constituted by the first

operation, where I wish to leave you for a moment.

V

Indeed, you may find that these things are all rather silly. But logic always is a bit silly. If one does not

go to the root of the childish, one is inevitably precipitated into stupidity, as can be shown by

innumerable examples, such as the supposed antinomies of reason, for example, the catalogue of all the

catalogues that do not include themselves, and one arrives at an impasse, which, I can't think why,

gives logicians vertigo.

Yet the solution is very simple, it is that the signifier with which one designates the same signifier is

evidently not the same signifier as the one with which one designates the otherthis is obvious

enough. The word obsolete, in so far as it may signify that the word obsolete is itself an obsolete word,

is not the same word obsolete in each case. This ought to encourage us to develop this vel that I have

introduced to you.

The subject is grounded in the vel of the first essential operation. To be sure, it is not at all without

interest to develop it here, before so vast an audience, since it is a question of nothing less than that

operation that we call alienation.

One has to admit that there is a lot of this alienation about nowadays. Whatever one does, one is always

a bit more alienated, whether in economics, politics, psycho-pathology, aesthetics, and so on. It may be

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no bad thing to see what the root of this celebrated alienation really is. Does it mean, as I seem to be

saying, that the subject is condemned to seeing himself emerge, in initio, only in the field of the Other?

Could it be that? Well, it isn't. Not at allnot at allnot at all.

Alienation consists in this vet, whichif you do not object to the word condemned, I will use it

condemns the subject to appearing only in that division which, it seems to me, I have just articulated

sufficiently by saying that, if it appears on one side as meaning, produced by the signifier, it appears on

the other as aphanisis.

There is a vel that is worth illustrating, in order to differentiate it from the other uses of the vet, of the

or. There are two of them. You know, from your earliest lessons in logic, that there is the exclusive vet

I go either there or thereif I go there, I do not go there, I have to choose. There is another way

of using vetI go to one side or the other, I don't care, one's as good as the other. These two vets are

not alike. Well, there is a third, and in order not to mislead you, I will tell you straight away what it is

intended for.

Symbolic logic, which is very useful in bringing a little light into so tricky a domain, teaches us to

distinguish the implications of the operation that we call joining. To speak as one speaks when it is a

question of sets, adding two collections together is not identical to joining them. If in this circle, that

on the left, there are five objects, and if, in the other, there are also fiveadding them together makes

ten. But some of them may belong to both circles. If there are two that belong to each of the two

circles, joining them together will in this instance consist not in doubling their numberthere will be

in all only eight objects. I apologize if I am being naive in reminding you of this, but it is in order to

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give you the notion that this vel that I will try to articulate for you is supported only on the logical form

of joining.

The vet of alienation is defined by a choice whose properties depend on this, that there is, in the

joining, one element that, whatever the choice operating may be, has as its consequence a neither one,

nor the other. The choice, then, is a matter of knowing whether one wishes to preserve one of the parts,

the other disappearing in any case.

Let us illustrate this with what we are dealing with here, namely, the being of the subject, that which is

there beneath the meaning. If we choose being, the subject disappears, it eludes us, it falls into non-

meaning. If we choose meaning, the meaning survives only deprived of that part of non-meaning that

is, strictly speaking, that which constitutes in the realization of the subject, the unconscious. In other

words, it is of the nature of this meaning, as it emerges in the field of the Other, to be in

a large part of its field, eclipsed by the disappearance of being, induced by the very function of the

signifier.

This, as I have said, has a quite direct implication that passes all too often unperceivedwhen I tell

you what it is, you will see that it is obvious, but for all that it is not usually noticed. One of the

consequences is that interpretation is not limited to providing us with the significations of the way

taken by the psyche that we have before us. This implication is no more than a prelude. Interpretation is

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directed not so much at the meaning as towards reducing the non-meaning of the signifiers, so that we

may rediscover the determinants of the subject's entire behavior.

I would ask you to refer to what my pupil Leclaire contributed, at the Congrs de Bonneval, by way of

an application of my theses. You will see in his contribution that he isolated the sequence of the

unicorn, not, as was thought in the discussion, in its significatory dependence, but precisely in its

irreducible and senseless character qua chain of signifiers.

One cannot emphasize too strongly the importance of some such thing as I have just described for you

here. This alienating oris not an arbitrary invention, nor is it a matter of how one sees things. It is a

part of language itself. This or exists. It is so much a part of language that one should distinguish it

when one is dealing with linguistics. I will give you an example at once..

Yourmoneyor your life! If I choose the money, I lose both. If I choose life, I have life without the

money, namely, a life deprivedof something. I think I have made myself clear.

It is in Hegel that I have found a legitimate justification for the term alienating vel. What does Hegel

mean by it? To cut a long story short, it concerns the production of the primary alienation, that by

which man enters into the way of slavery. Your freedom or your life ! If he chooses freedom, he loses

both immediatelyif he chooses life, he has life deprived of freedom.

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There must be something special about this. This something special we shall call the lethal factor. This

factor is present in certain divisions shown us by the play of signiflers that we sometimes see at play at

the heart of life itselfthese are called chromosomes, and it sometimes happens that there is one

among them that has a lethal function. We shall find a parallel to this function in a rather peculiar

statement, by introducing death itself into one of these fields. For example, freedom or death! There,

because death comes into play, there occurs an effect with a rather different structure.

This is because, in both cases, I will have both. Freedom, after all, as you know, is like the celebrated

freedom to work, for which the French Revolution, it seems, was fought. It can also be the freedom to

die of hungerin fact, that's what it amounted to throughout the nineteenth century, which is why,

since then, certain principles have had to be revised. You choose freedom. Well! You've got freedom to

die. Curiously enough, in the conditions in which someone says to you, freedom or death!, the only

proof of freedom that you can have in the conditions laid out before you is precisely to choose death,

for there, you show that you have freedom of choice.

At this moment, which is also a Hegeian moment, for it is what is called the Terror, this quite different

division is intended to make clear for you what is, in this field, the essence of the alienating vel, the

lethal factor.

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