Seminar XXIV Final Sessions 1 - Lacan in Ireland

J. Lacan: Yes. Only the annoying thing is that one only ever passes by way oflinguistics. I mean that one passes by way of it, and if I enunciated somethingvalid, I regret that people cannot base themselves on it. To tell the truth, I don’tknow, I heard it said by someone who came like that to pull my sleeve, thatJakobson wanted me to participate in an interview. I am very embarrassed and Ifeel myself completely incapable of doing so. It is not that...and nevertheless Ihave, as Julia Kristeva has just said, I have been through it. There you are.I have been through it, but I have not remained there. I am still at the stage ofinterrogating psychoanalysis about the way in which it functions. What ensuresthat it holds up, that it constitutes a practice that is sometimes effective?Naturally there, one must all the same go through a series of interrogations. Doespsychoanalysis work, since from time to time it does work, does it work by whatpeople call an effect of suggestion? For the effect of suggestion to hold up, presupposesthat language, - here I am repeating myself -, that language depends onwhat is called man. It is not for nothing that at one time, I manifested a certain,like that, preference for a certain book by Bentham which talks about theusefulness of fictions. Fictions are orientated toward service, which is...that hejustifies in short. But on the other hand, there is a gap; that this depends on man,presupposes that we should clearly know, that we should know sufficiently whatman is. All that we know about man is that he has a structure; but it is not easy tosay what this structure is. Psychoanalysis has given a few squeaks about thissubject, namely, that man leans towards his pleasure, which has a quite clearsense. What psychoanalysis calls pleasure, is to suffer, is to suffer the leastpossible. Here all the same one should remember the fashion in which I definedthe possible, this has a curious reversal-effect, since I said that the possible iswhat ceases to be written. That is how at least I clearly articulated it, at the timewhen I was speaking about the possible, about the contingent, about thenecessary and the impossible. So then if one transports the word the least, likethat, quite clumsily, quite brutally, well then that means what ceases to be theleast written. And in effect, that does not cease in an instant. Here indeed iswhere I would like to pose again a question to my dear Julia Kristeva. What doesshe call – that is going to force her to get out a little bit more from this quiet voicelike earlier – what does she call the metatongue (metalangue)?What does the metatongue mean if not translation? One can only speak of atongue in another tongue, it seems to me, if what I said formerly is a fact, namely,that there is no metalanguage. There is an embryo of metalanguage; but onealways skids away from it, for a simple reason, which is that I know nothing aboutlanguage except a series of incarnated tongues. People strive to reach language123