Lacan Jacques. Seminar of January 14, 1975

Perhaps science has not yet accounted for treating matter as if it had an unconscious if it
knew something of what it does. This truth had a little moment of awakening in the time of
Newton. They objected to him--But finally? This space, this gravitation! What are you telling
us? How can each of these particles know how far it is from all of the others? In a word, they
evoked the unconscious of the particle. This truth became extinct very rapidly--they renounced 17
understanding anything in those little formulas, and this is all very well; all of their value is
there. Besides, it is in the measure that one returns to them that one has arrived at more
complicated formulas, knotting a few more dimensions into the business.
Analysis, this technique that I have in common with a certain number of the persons who
are here, what place does it occupy in regard to what science does?
Science counts. It counts the matter, in the matter. But if there were no language that,
already, bore the number, what sense would counting have there? Is it that the unconscious has
an accountant in it? I'm not saying something that one might count, I am speaking of the
accountant, this character whom you know, who scribbles figures, and I ask--is it that there is an
accountant in the unconscious? It is completely obvious that--yes.
Every unconscious is an accountant. And an accountant who knows how to do addition.
Multiplication, it hasn't yet gotten to that, and this is what gives it some difficulty. But could I
say that it knows how to count the blows? It is extremely maladroit--but it must count in the
manner of these knots. It is from there that proceeds this famous sentiment of culpability, which
makes counts and does not find itself there again, does not find itself again there ever. It loses
itself in its counts. But it is there that it is touched upon that there is at minimum a knot.
This knot, nature has a horror of it. It is another song than that of the void--nature has a
horror of the knot, and especially a Borromean knot.
This is why I take this thing (machin) up for you again, and I advise you to practice
manipulating it. This thing is nothing less than the Urverdrängt, the original, primordial
repression. Manipulating this little knot will give you nothing of the repressed, since this
repressed is the hole--you will never have it. But en route you will familiarize yourselves--at
least your hands--with this which you cannot in any fashion understand.
It is in fact completely excluded that you know this knot. This is the reason why, history
shows it, geometry has gone through everything, cogitating cubes, pyramids, diverse forms of
porcupines, inventing rigor, which means nothing other than solids, while it had within hand's
reach something that was worth as much as the stones, and without which one could not measure
the fields--cords. No one seems to have given these cords the least attention before the modern
époque.
It is getting late. I lead you back to this figure that I have already presented to you (figure
3).
I write sense in this joint here of the imaginary and the symbolic. There are two points
there, which do not proceed with the same movement relative to the two rounds, but are confused
when their wedging is produced.
There, I write phallic jouissance. Why? Because there is something called ex-sistence.
Existence has a history. This is not a word that one employs so willingly, at least in the
philosophical tradition. How did the people of the first centuries speak? We no doubt have
some aperceptions concerning the vulgar Latin language such as it was spoken on a considerable
surface--the core-language out of which came, by differentation, the romance languages. But we
have no evidence that one employed either existo or existere. This term emerged in the
philisophico-religious field. Curious! Thus religion had to inhale (hume)--the religious inhaling
(humante)--philosophy for a word to come out which seems however to have had, it is the case to
say, many reasons for being.
This naïve production, so to say, of the language, had to be untangled. Aristotle is the
first to situate existence by the universal, that is, beginning with the dictum of omni and nullo 18
--what is said of all can also be applied to whichever. Whence the notion that universality
implies existence. What followed consisted in demonstrating to Aristotle, which took a long
time, that this was not at all the case. Of course--we don't everyday make a clean sweep of the
idea that universality does not imply existence. But what is grave is to believe that existence
implies universality, that, with existence, we chatter about something participating in the general.
It is there that my little knot intervenes.
This Borromean knot is destined to show you that existence is of its nature ex-sistence,
that which is ex. It is what turns around the consistent and makes an interval. But in this
interval, that has twenty-six ways of being knotted. I say twenty-six ways in the measure that we
have no familiarity with these knots, neither manual, nor mental--which is the same thing. A lot
of people have had the suspicion that man is no more than a hand. If he only were a hand! But
there is his whole body. He thinks with his feet also--at least he ought to.
I now pose the question: what is it that resists the proof of ex-sistence, to be taken as
what is wedged in the knot? We must here follow the path of Freud.
Freud did not have of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real the notion that I have--
which is the minimum; for call them what you like, provided that there are three consistencies,
you will have the knot. However, if he did not have the idea of R.S.I., he nonetheless had a
suspicion. And what he did does not go without relating itself to ex-sistence, and departing, to
approach the knot. Besides, the fact is that I could have extracted my three from his discourse,
with time and patience. I began with the imaginary, I had to chew on the history of the symbolic,
with this linguistic reference for which I have not found all that would have arranged things for
me, and I have finished by bringing out this famous real in the form itself of the knot.
Freud, therefore, contrary to a prodigious number of persons, from Plato to Tolstoy, was
not a Lacanian. But nothing prevents me from supposing my three, R.S.I., to him--a banana skin
slipped under his foot--to see how he untangles himself from it.
For Freud, the three do not hold, they are only posed the one over the other. Also, what
did he do? He added a round (fig. 4), knotting with a fourth the three consistencies set adrift
(. . . .). He calls this fourth consistency psychic reality.
What is psychic reality for Freud? It is the Oedipus complex.
The Oedipus complex is not for all that to be rejected. It is implicit in the knot as I figure
it, and it ties the three, but at a minimum. To dispense with a fourth, to obtain the Borromean
knot, it suffices to make, at two points, pass above what was below. In other words, the real
must surmount the symbolic.
The surmounting of the symbolic by the real at two points is quite precisely what analysis
is about.
Be careful not to take this term surmount in the imaginary sense, believing that the real
has to dominate here. Besides, it suffices that you turn this thing around to see that, in the
contrary direction (sens), this does not work. Turned around, the knot still has the same
appearance--you do not have its mirror image; it is still levogyre. It is not a matter, between the
symbolic and the real, of a changing of the order of the layout (plan)--it is simply a matter of
their being knotted otherwise. For being knotted otherwise is what is essential to the Oedipus
complex, and it is how analysis operates.
It is in entering the niceties (finesse) of these fields of ex-sistence that we will proceed
this year.