Seminar XXIV Final Sessions 1 - Lacan in Ireland

which coincides with my experience, namely, that I do not recognise allwomen. There is no such thing, but is all the same necessary to say that thisis not self-evident; There is no such thing, unless it is incestuous – this isvery exactly what Freud put forward – there is none such except incestuous,I mean that, - what Freud said -, the fact is that the Oedipus myth designatesthe following, that the only person that one wants to sleep with, is one’smother, and as regards the father, one kills him. It is even all the moreprobable that one knows neither who is your father and your mother, it isexactly why the myth of Oedipus has a sense; he killed someone that he didnot know and he slept with someone that he had not the slightest idea washis mother, it is nevertheless like that that things happened according to themyth, and what that means, is that the only true thing is castration. In anycase with castration, one is quite sure of escaping it, as all this so-calledGreek mythology designates clearly for us, namely, that the father, it is notso much his murder which is at stake as his castration, that castration passesby way of murder and that, as regards the mother, the best thing that one cando with her, is to cut it off to be quite sure of not committing incest.What I would like, is to give you the refraction of these truths in sense. Onewould have to manage to give an idea of a structure, which is such that itwould incarnate sense in a correct way. Contrary to what is said, there is notruth about the Real, since the Real is sketched out as excluding sense. Itwould be still too much to say, that there is something of the Real, because,to say that, is already to suppose a sense. The word Real has itself a sense, Ieven at one time, played a little bit on it, I mean to invoke the things, Ievoked as an echo the word reus which, as you know, in Latin means guilty;one is more or less guilty of the Real. This indeed is why moreoverpsychoanalysis is a serious thing, I mean that it is not absurd to say that itcan slide into fraudulence.There is something that must be noted in passing, which is that, as I pointedout the last time to Pierre Soury – the last time, I mean in his own place, atJussieu, the one of which I spoke to you the last time – I pointed out to himthat the reversible torus from which he approaches the Borromean knot is104