…appropriate discourse - Lacan in Ireland

13.11.68 I 14
As regards structuralism, in truth one can understand the unease that may be
produced among some people from the treatment that people pretend to inflict from
the outside on our common habitat, and also that people may want to get out of it to
stretch their legs a little. It remains, nevertheless, that ever since this impatience
seems to all appearances to be taking hold of some people, I notice that I do not find
myself all that uncomfortable in this basket, since moreover in my eyes it does not
(8) seem to me that this structuralism should be identified to anything other than what
I call very simply seriousness, and in no way certainly to anything that resembles in
any way what one could call a philosophy, if by this word there is designated a vision
of the world, or even some way of assuring on the right or the left the positions of a
thinking. Let it suffice, to refute the first case, if it is true that as a psychoanalyst I
cannot in any way claim to introduce in any fashion what is ridiculously called a
psychoanalytic anthropology - it would be enough to recall, at the very entry into this
domain of constitutive truths everything that psychoanalysis brings into this field,
namely, that there is no union of man and woman without castration:
a) determining by way of phantasy, precisely, the reality of the partner for
whom it is impossible,
b) without castration operating, in this sort of hiding place that posits it as a
truth in the partner for whom it has been really spared, apart from some
accidental excesses.
Let us strongly insist that, developing this formula from Genesis that God created
them - there is also created him - man and woman – make no mistake, God knows
why! - in the case of one the impossibility of the accomplishment of castration comes
to posit itself as determining her reality; in the other, the worst thing that is threatened
as being possible does not need to happen to be true, in the sense that this term offers
no recourse.
This simple reminder, it seems, implies that at least at the heart of the field that is
apparently ours, no harmony, however we may designate it, is in place, that assuredly
some purpose is required of us which is precisely that of a suitable discourse. In order
to sustain it, we will have in a way to ask ourselves the sort of question from which all
philosophy started. Faced with so much knowledge, which is not without its value