Seminar Session 22/11/06
00:54:55
I would like to begin this evening by telling you I am very pleased to be here again after my sudden “break” on August 31st…And of course it was in the aftermath (après coup) of this break that I really began to speak, because I think that, whatever the facts were in and of themselves, speech is something that I could not not receive as stemming from anywhere else but discourse.
I had already hit upon the name for this seminar: “What is knowledge?” But this ensuing break may in fact have contributed something on the order of the new: This is the ABCs of the Freudian discovery, which he dubbed “stunning” and that may be the best or worst of things. Therefore to speak of things from this perspective would indeed seem to lead us down the path of Freud’s discovery and the unique way he himself was able, at certain moments, to be arrested by his experience as a psychoanalyst, arrested and the way in which he transmitted that he responded or not to what presented itself in this moment of arrest, insofar as something like it was needed in order for the dimension of the Real to emerge.
But as long as we stick with talking about this or that thing Freud said in one way or another, or what Lacan said in one way or another, we remain mired in a place in which nothing new will occur; whereas the crux of the matter is to know how it is possible for a new path (x) to open up. What is important in a cure, at the level of the transference, since that is our true guide, is (the occurrence of) this new something.
So along these lines what I would like to do this evening is sketch, more or less on the fly, the outlines of this dimension of knowledge, and then move on to explore a staged encounter that will obviously be understood as a kind of conceit, between Condorcet and the Psychoanalyst. Because what I would like to transmit to you this evening is not tidbits of knowledge (connaissance) about Condorcet himself: all of which are easily found in the book Condorcet, Intellectual and Politician by Robert and Elisabeth Badinter. If we merely repeat what others say even if it’s in order to add to it here and there, in my opinion we become barred from this dimension I just mentioned, a dimension having to do with the fact that a speaking being, at a certain moment in time, may encounter something clearly related to knowledge, but that he may be unable him to respond to via something he is completely unaware of. [vy: et qu’il puisse être dans la possibilité d’y répondre par quelque chose dont il n’a aucune idée]. This would be one way of describing what Lacan called knowledge in the Real.
In order to say a few more words with respect to this viewpoint on knowledge, I shall attempt to portray it via Freud, but not so much in terms of his actual writings, as what he transmitted beyond them.
Imagine we are sitting here near the end of 1892, the time when Freud and Breuer wrote their “Preliminary Communication” to the Studies on Hysteria, on the subject of the workings of repression, on the one hand, and on how a hysteria becomes instigated on the other…I would like to focus on one particularly “arresting” aspect of the text, which is the fact that translators generally overlook an umlaut over the “a” in one of the words in the original: Krankung is the word typically translated into French as “illness,” instead of Kränkung – the experience of mortification.
I am returning to this writing precisely insofar as here there is something written – this umlaut over the “a” is an inflexion the translators forgot, and now all of a sudden everything is different, since Kränkung, the experience of mortification, has been left out as the cause of the symptom, which is not an illness or “affliction” (affection) as it is usually translated into French. This experience of mortification most likely has something to do with the death drive – which is thus there from the beginning.
As you can see therefore some people recoil from this arresting dimension when it appears in discourse, because of the experience of mortification it entails, but the appearance of something new represents a potential response to it. Here already therefore, Freud could easily be said to be on the path towards the witticism he would later describe in 1905. But the death drive per se was always something he situated in a dualism with the life drive; whereas here the main issue is how mortification, meaning the disappearance of already-made knowledge, is able to in a sense give birth to a topos out of which newness originates under the aegis of the life drive.
Perhaps these things I am saying appear a bit strange to you, since clearly they are thoughts that came to me while I was unable to move. You see when a bone breaks macrophages appear whose function it is to gobble up the remains. They are known as osteoclasts because they clear the terrain in anticipation of the arrival of the builders, the osteoblasts which are fundamental to the osteogenesis that typically occurs without us even needing to think about it.
I guess I needed this “break” in order to think through what was continually going on in the body without me knowing it, although I did have some awareness of it nonetheless – something on the order of the Real had developed, invisible to the naked eye, which science bears witness to as the fusion of the life and death drives. This is written into cellular functioning as such.
Of course we were not at this stage in our scientific understanding at the point in time when Freud said what he did about these issues, but it is still rather surprising when we realize that our bodies are in a permanent state of flux in which cells that disappear are replaced by the appearance of new ones; this life and death process is the essence of life itself. In fact this is precisely one theory about cancer, that cells which are supposed to die stop doing it, and this then leads to the extraordinary deluge that unfolds in the wake of this pathological proliferation.
For now let’s return to the experience of mortification, Kränkung, which appeared therefore in Freud’s writings very early on, and which we might even see, not that this can be known for sure, as a kind of slip of the pen insofar as it is almost as if something wrote itself – this is why I wrote the word sonécrit (soundwriting) on the board. Its a website I recently created that is now viewable at www.sonecrit.com. Sometimes things write themselves in a way that they sound out. In fact did something of this order occur in Freud’s own consulting room, in his transferential experience?
He was working with Lucy R., an English governess who came to see him for symptoms including depression, severe sinus infections, etc., in short various “manifestions,” and it was while he was working with Lucy R. that Freud gradually uncovered what was at the origin of the symptom, a specific scene. I’m not going to get into the details of it this evening, in order for us to be able to focus straightaway on the moment in his discourse on it that matters to us most – what was at the origin of her symptom was an internal conflict surrounding a promise she had made to the mother of the children she was charged with, to the effect that she would (always) take care of them. But then one day she received a letter from her own mother who said she herself was sick, and Lucy R. felt she should return to England. This was the initial conflict, after which others would gradually appear.
While she was telling him all this, Freud had an idea related to the father, and the role played by the seduction of the father and her being in love with him. This was during the period when he had not yet had the dream which followed his own father’s death, and he let something slip by with Lucy R. What would really be interesting is to hear their voices and see for ourselves how they looked at each other – at any rate that would speak volumes beyond what Freud himself says.
What he says he told her is this: “Listen my dear friend, I believe what is at the root of your symptom is not at all what you believe it to be. In fact you love the man who is the father of these children but you cannot accept it.” Upon which, (here is where we really need to follow things closely, since suddenly we are immersed in discourse in the true sense of the word as Lacan used it), she immediately replied: “Ah yes I know, I realize that.” And Freud just as immediately answered back: “But if you knew this why didn’t you tell me?”
It is this particular retort that I would like to attempt to explore with you this evening, and the others as well. What I mean is Freud’s “construction” here, (which was new at time, all this knowledge that was there to be erraten, meaning to be divined and revealed to the patient, to wit her love for this man which was a displacement of a love for her father), he was completely immersed in the activity of thinking about this and thus what clearly surprised him was that she knew it already.
Otherwise put what he could not tolerate, (this was his reading of the affair), was that she had not told him it and this is the knowledge we are confronted with in his own written version of the case. It’s a knowledge that could be qualified by us as being based on an Imaginary coherency – a defined, organized and delimited knowledge that can be understood. The question it raises however concerns whether something does not stop not writing itself in the immediacy of this interplay, and in Freud’s response in particular.
Lucy R. enables us to presuppose that a knowledge exists which is other than the one he has just revealed to her. “I know that already” presupposes an other knowledge than this (Imaginary) one, something that stops not being written.
As it turns out what happened next was a result of transference love – she produced all the elements needed to confirm what he had just told her, of course, but then in the ensuing days her symptom, that is her sinus infection, got worse, forcing an interruption of the cure, after which she soon returned to tell him “I am better now.”
So the real question concerns the fact that Freud was not “arrested” by something present Lucy R’s saying rather than her said. This is what I would like to draw your attention to, because, (I’ll say it again), what was missing here, of course, is something that in fact occurred during an unheard moment of silence that certainly was not long, but during which something important had to have taken place. And this is what our own experience is all about, something that gets through (se passe) during the transference. Are we able to serve as the receivers of a knowledge other than the one governed by the Imaginary which instills itself in us and makes us understand things, which leads us to pay attention exclusively to the history? This is the question. This other knowledge, according to Lacan at least, is related to two different orders – it is an unconscious knowledge, and a knowledge in the Real.
Things are definitely not straightforward. Unconscious knowledge is governed by the Symbolic; but knowledge in the Real is what we will at least touch on this evening because what is important about it is that it is something that has to be engaged with when its right under your nose, insofar as it disappears immediately after it makes an appearance. In other words, is it possible, is it possible for us to listen to (entendre) something that is of the order of a jouissance, to hear something that is being heard (ouïr quelque chose qui s’entend), as in “that we are saying remains forgotten behind what is said in what is being heard (“qu’on dise reste oublié derrière ce qui se dit dans ce qui s’entend”).
What is being heard? That is the question. I did not realize I was going to encounter all these same questions in the work of a man who lived nearly a century before Freud, whose name was Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet.
This is more or less what I wanted to touch on this evening, to share this scene, this conceit of a meeting between Condorcet and the Psychoanalyst in this dimension of discourse, with the aid of what Lacan said in his Seminar of 21 May, 1974, which I shall paraphrase:
“At first I was concerned with trying to more or less put my finger on what the unconscious is, via the dimension of speech, function and field; but now what I have realized, (only these small things were never noticed because they were linear), is that in order to try and touch on this it is necessary to begin on the basis (of the question), How do speech and the sexed being work together?”
Not ‘sexual,’ but sexed, as in the formula of sexuation. Sexed means that men and women are defined in relation to language. This is how sex is defined, not at all on the basis of whether this or that persons decides to line up behind the banner of Man or Woman. There is a feminine part of every speaking being, and it is this feminine part exactly that enables, clearly, insofar as it orients us towards this other jouissance than phallic jouissance, towards the act of hearing as such.
And thus suddenly a question arises: What is the voice? What is sound, insofar as sound is not entirely reducible to sonority as such, and thus what is the body? Clearly, and also how does the speaking being manage to get by with his jouissances, insofar as the speaking being known as Man is subject to the law of the phallus? How does Man eventually manage to “get by” with the presence of this canker, the unconscious, insofar as it is ‘dug out,’ insofar as he is cankered, and how is a woman, not the woman but a woman mind you, who is, and I quote, “much better ventilated with respect to her jouissances” eventually able to connect with Man in a discursive moment?
This is the direction, it seems to me anyhow, that Lacan’s teaching leads us, especially in the way it extends Freud beyond all the limits we know about him. And this is the question I would like to entertain with this highly particular man Condorcet, by having him supposedly meet with the Psychoanalyst. Why did he find himself in a highly specific state at a certain period, which state, I believe, he was already saying in the title of the work he was writing at the time, the state known as “Draft of a Historical Picture of Progress in the Human Mind (Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain). What is a “draft?”
Here is what someone who knew him quite well, Diderot, had to say about this in a salon in 1775, and I quote: “Drafts share a fire that the picture does not have: this is the moment when the heat of the artist makes itself felt, pure verve unmixed with the pall of afterthought that reflection casts over everything. The painter’s artistry as such is spread liberally over the canvas, as if the pen of the poet, the pencil of the skilled drawer, were running and playing with themselves. The picture makes me see one pronounced thing: how many things barely suggested do I envision in the draft?”
Malraux’s “Voice of Silence” echoes these words by Diderot: “The draft was in principle a state the work was in prior to its achievement, and above all to its final execution, but a unique sort of draft also existed, one in which the painter, ignoring the spectator and indifferent to illusion, reduced a real or imaginary spectacle to something that thereby became paint, smear, color, movement. A sketch is a note, certain drafts are an ending, and because they are an ending, there is an order of difference between them and the finished picture. Completing certain drafts in no way meant taking them to their end. Those the great painters chose to preserve, those by Rubens, the Gardens by Velazquez, give us the impression of being representations that are unfinished but nonetheless completed yet plastic expressions whose submission to representation would weaken if not destroy them. Art was entering in conflict with finitude, and the borderline between the draft and the picture was beginning to lose its precision.”
What I envision is that what (Condorcet was doing) was something of this nature, and I want to tell how it is he eventually entered into this domain, of course, because it was at the time when he had to go into hiding following a warrant having been issued for his arrest. This was in July of 1793 and he had been forced to go into hiding at Madame Vernet’s. This is the factual history, but I will try to pinpoint something that goes beyond it in order to account for the way in which Condorcet had become an artist during this period.
Now, in order to arrive at this unique moment we’ll have to move fairly quickly. It’s the Fall of 1791, the beginning of the Legislative period, and his star had been rising for almost a year. Of course he was already well-known: before the Revolution he had been a member of the Academy of Sciences and the Académie Française, the Saint Petersburg Academy, etc. But he could not speak in public.
He “knew how to use his pen,” as he put it, but whenever he mounted the public podium his voice would break and people failed to heed him – this was the first thing.
During the legislative session from late 1791 until the fall of 1792, he began to have difficulties with Robespierre and became obsessed with finishing a Draft (projet) Constitution.
Furthermore, he was aware of the conflict growing between the Girondins and the Montagnards, and he was convinced it should absolutely not be allowed to reach a boiling point, in case France had to defend herself from attack along her borders. In reality however, what drove him was this draft of a Constitution, which he wrote in conjunction with several Friends (Amis).
However what he failed to take into account, (and it is in this sense that he may be called naïve as a politician, but doing so doesn’t take us very far), what he did not realize was that what everyone in the Convention was really concerned with at first was what to do with the King.
The second thing was that the Montagnards were dreaming of just one thing in particular, eliminating the Girondins, and he had taken his distance from the Girondins already.
On February 15th, he mounted the podium to read out the Draft Constitution, but he was quickly forced to stop because his voice broke, he could no longer continue, and Barrès was the one who read the Draft in full.
The important thing to note was that all this work he had done, because it was really he who had put his all into this draft, was never really heard by the Deputies for all the reasons I just mentioned, meaning because their true agendas had to do with the King, the struggle between the Montagnards and the Girondins, and so on, and above all something else: No one wanted a Constitution because it would have ended the Convention itself, and the Montagnards in particular needed the Convention to continue in order to gradually assume power as they did, especially in terms of the events surrounding the decision to execute the King, a matter about which Robespierre and Condorcet had a dispute. Condorcet reasoned, of course, that the Deputies were not in a position to decide what to do with the King themselves. Furthermore he was against the death penalty in general, and therefore killing the King was out of the question for him. In his view what was needed was for men with a knowledge of the law, Magistrates let’s call them, to be appointed in order to collectively define how to dispose of the King. And Robespierre himself announced two days later that in effect the Assembly was not constituted in order to make this decision, and that a special Assembly designed specifically for this purpose was needed, but that this would be done as a Public Security measure (par mesure du Salut public), meaning the decision regarding the fate of the King would be made without a trial.
In short Condorcet took the side of respect for the law and deemed it necessary to decide the King’s fate based on it, but Robespierre won a vote to the effect that this decision would take place without a trial.
This was more or less the main issue at the time the Draft Constitution was finished, in December 1792, and the King was executed in January 1793. So this is a crucial first aspect.
But there was something else. In the days after he had introduced the Constitution on February 15, 1793, the Jacobins, (talk about pure politics), decided that it was completely unacceptable and a new one would have to be written. Thus a draft would have to be drawn up in the months that followed, (because it was decided to hold off for two months on making a decision about the Constitution Condorcet had already introduced), and thus he had two months to find another solution so that another Constitution could be instituted. Thus we arrive at the 24th of June, the actual date when this other Constitution was voted in.
Condorcet was really put out by all this: His first draft was rejected and the King was killed, a scandal in his view. Of course he was not in favor of the restoration of the monarchy, he for one had decided that the King could in no instance have the right to be restored following his flight to Varennes. For him this was a simple matter of 2+2=4, and I will briefly return to this (question of mathematics) in a moment.
And then a third thing happened: On the 2nd of June police surrounded the Assembly and demanded it take a position concerning the 29 Girondins in their custody – otherwise put, they wanted it to issue orders for their execution despite the fact that this was something that obviously falls outside a legislature’s purview.
The combination of these three elements forced Condorcet to intervene.
So. He knew he shouldn’t mount the podium because if he did it would be a disaster, therefore he took up his pen and wrote an article entitled “To the Citizens of France in Favor of a New Constitution,” the one which the Montagnards approved on 24 June.
The article contained two points of particular note: the first thing he did was point out that those who appeared to adulate the people, (clearly a reference to Robespierre), were in fact only looking to manipulate them, and thus in reality held them in contempt. This first point was daring but still in essence acceptable. The second point he made however stated that the draft Constitution had been quickly and haphazardly drawn up in such a way as to allow the Monarchy to be restored. In fact this was pure calumny, since the draft contained no provision whatsoever of the sort.
A few days later a Montagnard by the name of Chabot entered the Assembly with a letter in hand and said: “Citizens, I have become aware, as have you, of the fact that there is a traitor amongst you, and I am in a position to say who it is because I hold here in my hand a letter, (no one ever asked him to read what was written in it), I have here in my hands a letter in which is written the same sentences to be found in the declaration to the citizens I spoke of before.”
I forgot to mention he didn’t sign it because it was a major risk, and we have to realize he must have been in different mindset at the time, Condorcet that is, because he was acting as if he were still living in the Ancien Régime, when it sufficed not to put your name on something in order to avoid being sent to the Bastille. But this world was gone for good, an entirely other universe had emerged.
Chabot therefore demanded that an order for Condorcet’s arrest be issued, which was approved, but he had already gone into hiding, we know, because men were immediately sent to his house on the rue de Lille and he was not there…He had been tipped off when the news was leaked and had already fled.
So that’s the history of the thing as people tell it. That is more or less what Freud and Lucy R., in one way or another, tell each other. What interests us on the other hand is discourse. This is where the stakes in the transference come into play.
We know Condorcet became focused (while in hiding) on a single idea, that of writing what he called a “fragment of justification.” Indeed he became a virtual “prisoner” of the idea that he had to somehow prove he was not someone who deserved to be arrested for treason.
But then something new comes to him from the Other, from the voice of his wife, leading him to change course from the justification in which he was exhausting himself, to the “Draft.” He changed discourses completely. I find this particularly interesting because it reminds me of what I wrote elsewhere concerning what transpired between Constance and Mozart when he was writing the Overture to Don Giovanni.
In 1786 he married Sophie de Grouchy, who was twenty years his junior, very beautiful, full of wit (esprit), and who had started her own salon – she visited him regularly along with several friends, and she probably saw in his body and face how ravaged this man was, how fixated he had become, how something had ensnared him. Seeing how the Real fixed and fixated him, at a key moment she told him:
“But…[I don’t know what she really said, but I am imagining he heard something in her voice, beyond the said of what she said]: do you remember how a year or two ago you were incessantly talking to me about drafts? Do you remember? And this draft was so important to you, I know you do. You don’t need any books for it, you are hidden here, and you don’t need books, you already have this draft in your head. Leave your justifications behind and turn towards this Draft instead.”
Later, when she published the draft after Condorcet’s death in 1795, she actually wrote in a short note that her husband had stopped seeking his justification in order to write his Draft “at my behest.”
This is what was decisive, this thing that occurred at that moment, because I believe it was an entirely unique moment when the feminine part of Condorcet was able to enter onto the scene and engage in a dialogue with his masculine part, given he heard in the voice of a woman, but not just any woman, his wife (femme) whom he loved and who loved him, something unheard (of) and Invisible. Something that was related in this “well-ventilated” way to the jouissance of a woman of which Lacan speaks, something of the Real of a woman. Of course we cannot say what this ever elusive thing is. Perhaps this is one of those unique moments when unconscious knowledge leads to a pure Real that pushes in the direction of drafting.
Thus this is what apparently was needed, (since it’s only in the aftermath that we can say this anyhow), what he needed, and this in the end is the encounter in question, this is a certain way of speaking about (the meaning of) an other discourse or an other jouissance, to hear something. Something that got through via the body, and thus something that at that precise moment resided in him. And indeed what he wrote at that precise moment was really something that wrote him.
He wrote something that at the time, in that period ruled as it was by the theory of degeneration, was completely subversive. He wrote something absolutely unthinkable: that human being is perfectible. This was something he had discovered on his own during his forays into mathematics – I won’t be able to get into it here, but I will try furnish you with, we might say, a few pencil strokes of the draft itself, in order for us to be able to see that it had nothing to do with the business with Robespierre, nothing whatsoever.
So what did he write, he went a bit overboard, why? Because he was fascinated by all those people who mounted the podium, who knew how to speak even though he wasn’t able to, and he ended up at the origin of knowledge.
He was very familiar with Condillac and the theory of sensations at the origin of his concept of knowledge. He furthered however that Man is not a purely passive receptor in this sense because sensations have to be taken over and handled by what he called “reason.”
Reason for him was in fact mathematical ratio, which in his view made it necessary for everything received to be immediately taken up and incessantly reworked. Reason is the receiver that instruere. His main distance from the Montagnards and Robespierre, who all spoke of education, was based on the fact that he spoke of instruction.
Instruere in Latin means to apply in layers, it has nothing to do with dux, with the chief or head, with education. In struere means to apply in layers, meaning each time something new appears, all knowledge based on previous experiences (toutes connaissances) is rejiggered, in a manner of speaking, in order for new relationships between them to appear – this relation to knowledge is comparable to that of a picture, it is a draft.
For him reason is something that is ever-elusive and sudden. Of course, at root, there is therefore this radical exterior, and if we take things beyond sensualism, we can already see the dimension of the Other appear, obviously, but not in the sense of sensorial perceptions. There is therefore this radical exterior, and there is this receiver there equipped with the reason that guides him, (this is what he calls reason, we might call it something else), the essential point is that in terms of the one by one, as we psychoanalysts say, those who retain some knowledge have to transmit what is called their concepts of elementary knowledge. Otherwise put, the real issue is not so much the overall quantity of knowledge at stake, but the fact that there is a knowledge inequality, an inequality between human beings at the intellectual level, as at the physical.
Otherwise put again, equality is not about everyone having to know the same thing, a whole lot or a whole little. Equality is about each of us possessing elementary knowledges based on experience (connaissances élémentaires), that is to say the basis of that which will eventually enable us to develop a (faculty of) critical judgment with respect to what we are told and what is proposed to us as law.
Otherwise put even still, human beings are perpetually traversed by this re-juggling, (remaniement), which itself is what authorized the rejuggling of the Constitution as part of the (normal) workings of politics.
Equality is related to the fact that we are all equal in the eyes of elementary knowledge (savoir élémentaire), or “knowledge we are taught.”
Of course someone like Newton thought a bit more than most others, but everyone is subject to the universal law of gravity. Newton, like everybody else. Just because he knows, simply because he uncovered the principle of the law of gravity itself does not mean his not subject to it. This therefore is equality. And citizenship is likewise important because political power must necessarily ensure that those who are called citizens possess this elementary knowledge: the citizenry was no longer to remain in utter ignorance like before.
These are, in broad strokes the elements, the outlines of the Draft and I think next time I will say a few more words about them along with Casanova, because it was Casanova who wound up in exactly the same position in the end.
After all Casanova’s life also ended in a castle where he wrote his Story of My Life from 1789 to 1798. Thus we might say Condorcet was in the same subjective position when he wrote his Draft, the position of the Nachträglichkeit, the après-coup, in the sense that he revealed something on the order of writing itself, its essential traits, something other than just a history. The main point he made about the institutions (of education) in his day, the clergy, the clerical order, the Church, had to do with the fact that its main goal was to paralyze reason.
In other words what I have been attempting to elaborate here pertaining to the critical spirit that develops out of reason is blocked by any teaching that is, as he put it, based on dogmas and belief. This is how he described it. These are definitely topics for discussion, but this was his way of seeing it, this is where he was coming from and thus everything that was “instituted,” fixated, (this relates to us as psychoanalysts in our own relation to institutions), and that obeyed laws considered immutable, stemmed in his view, in one way or another, from a lack of potential for forward change.
Indeed this was the substance of his reproach against the Montagnards, that they were secular clerics, and he even referred to Robespierre as a “fake priest.”
I’ll stop there for this evening.