Lacan Jacques. Seminar XXII, R.S.I.

What best attests that it is, is precisely this mens that I have introduced with "mental debility." For it is not given to all bodies, inasmuch as they function, to suggest the dimension of stupidity. Where does this come from? Language (La Langue), and not just any language, Latin, has coined a word for it. This is what puts back in their place those who impute precisely to Latin this stupidity, while it is the only language that has not come up with an opaque term, the

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s, or who knows what other metaphor - for a knowledge of which we cannot know if it exsists, since it is the knowledge supposed by the real. The knowledge of God, it is certain that it ex-sists, we have given ourselves enough trouble to spell it out. It ex-sists, but only in the sense I inscribe by ex-sistence, otherwise than is usually done. It sists perhaps, but no one knows where.

All we can say is that what con-sists gives no testimony of it. It is then striking that the language that we suspect of being the most stupid is itself the one that has coined the term intellegere, to read between the lines: that is, otherwise than in the way the symbolic is written.

It is to this effect of the writing of the symbolic that is owed the effect of sense, in other words, of stupidity - shown to this day in all the so-called systems of nature. Without language, we could not have the least suspicion of this stupidity, which is also how the body is shown to be alive.

In truth, this mental debility, attested to, I do not hope to get out of in any way. I don't know why what I bring you would be less stupid than the rest. This would make sense of that banana skin that someone slipped under my foot in ringing me up to go to Nice and give a conference on, I kid you not, The Lacanian Phenomenon.

Well! I do not expect this to be a phenomenon. If I persevere - and you know that I persevere without looking twice - it is only because I believe myself to have grasped something, one couldn't say with my hands, but with my feet - the entrance in play of the trace that the analytic experience draws; which, it must be said, is not so easily supported, and notably by analysts. Such that, if there is a phenomenon, it can only be the lacananalyst phenomenon, or else laca-not-analyst.

At Nice, naturally, I could explain nothing of all that to them, since for them I was a phenomenon. The organizers, what they wanted was to attract a crowd. And there is always a crowd to see a phenomenon. Me, I was not going to say to them - You know, I'm not a phenomenon! That would have been Verneinung. In the end, I let loose for a good little hour and a quarter.

And then, I posed them some questions, I mean - I asked them to pose me some. This was a request (demande). You will believe me, if you wish, that unlike you, they posed them, for three quarters of an hour, and these questions were striking in this way: they were pertinent, in a second zone, of course. To the extent that I found myself in the situation, without having challenged the Lacanian phenomenon, of having demonstrated it. The Lacanian phenomenon - it is not certain that they grasped it themselves - is that I have effects on a public which has only heard from very far, by repercussion, what I articulate here, the teaching I do to clear the way for the analyst to the discourse that supports him, insofar as it is indeed from discourse, and always from discourse, that suffers this little thing that we try to manipulate in analysis. That's it, the phenomenon. And it is in sum a little vague. And I might have been tempted to write the three letters in an other order - instead of "RSI," "RIS," which would have made a laughing (ris), that famous laughing of water over which I equivocate in my Ecrits - on page 166.

I must comfort myself in saying that this phenomenon is not unique, it is only particular - I mean that it is distinguished from the universal. What is annoying is that it has been to this day unique at the level of the analyst. However, it is indispensable that the analyst be at least two: the analyst having the effects, and the analyst theorizing those effects. This is why I so appreciated being accompanied by a person who is an analyst.

Parenthesis closed; and I can now get to what I want to advance today. I have only found one way to give a common measure to these three terms, real, symbolic, and imaginary: it is to knot them as a Borromean knot. These rounds-of-thread, what is it that distinguishes each

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from the other? Absolutely nothing but the sense. And this is what gives us hope that we will
take a step this year - hope in the short term, there is no other.

The hope is only for me in this business, but if I did not have the answer, as you know, I would not ask the question. Certainly, when you win something somewhere, it is forcibly at the expense of something else. And in other terms, if analytic discourse functions, we will certainly lose something elsewhere. But if all of the systems of nature arisen up until now are marked by a mental debility, what good is it?
I would like to return to the Borromean knot for an instant.

The Borromean knot consists strictly insofar as three is the minimum (fig. 1). If you unknot two rings in a chain, the others remain knotted. In a Borromean knot, if you break one of the three, all three are liberated. The remarkable thing, a fact of consistency, is that you can add an indefinite number of rings - it will always be true that, if you break one of the rings, all of the others, however numerous, will be free. See this figure, which at I have already sketched for you (fig. 2).

This property alone homogenizes all that there is of number after three. In the sequence of whole numbers, 1 and 2 are detached - something begins at three that includes all of the numbers, as far as they are numerable. This is what I put the accent on in last year's seminar.

That is not all. There is more than one way to Borromize a number of consistent torii.

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have already indicated to you in its time that there are many probably, a quantity that there is no reason not to qualify as infinite, in the sense of the numerable, because you only have to make a loop in the following fashion (fig. 3). It is clear that you can make as many turns as you like to knot together two torii. There is no plausible limit to this arrangement. It will be no less true that the borromean knot, whichever, has for its inferior limit the number 3. The borromean knot will always carry the mark of the 3. On this basis, you have to ask yourself, to what register does the Borromean knot belong? Is it to the symbolic, the imaginary, or to the real?

I put forward beginning today what in what follows I will permit myself to demonstrate - the Borromean knot, insofar as it is supported by the number 3, is of the register of the imaginary. For the triad of the real, of the symbolic, and of the imaginary only exists by the addition of the imaginary as third. And it is by this that space, insofar as it is sensible, is found reduced to this minimum of three dimensions - that is, by its attachment to the symbolic and the real - where the imaginary is rooted.

Other dimensions are imaginable, and they have been imagined. It is for holding to the symbolic and the real that the imaginary reduces itself to what is not a maximum, imposed by the sack of the body, but, on the contrary, a minimum, which makes it so that we don't have a Borromean knot except beginning with 3.

Before leaving you, I am going to give you some punctuations of what we are going to have to demonstrate this year.

I would like to draw to your attention that it is not at all implied in the notion of the Borromean knot that it be a matter of rounds of thread or of torii. It is just as conceivable that, comformable to the intuition of Desargues in ordinary geometry, these rounds will open or, to say it simply, become cords, conceived of as rejoining themselves - why not? - at infinity. One can nonetheless define in this way what one calls a point.