Seminar XXIV Final Sessions 1 - Lacan in Ireland

y writing. And writing only produces something in mathematics, namely, therewhere people operate by formal logic, namely, by the extraction of a certainnumber of things that one defines, that one defines principally as axiom, and thatone only operates quite brutally by extracting these letters, for they are letters.Yeah, this is not at all a reason for people to believe that psychoanalysis leads oneto write one’s memoirs. It is precisely because there is no memoir of apsychoanalysis that I am so embarrassed. There is no memoir, that does notmean that memory is not involved in this affair. But to write one’s memoirs is adifferent matter. Everything depends on a metaphor, namely, that peopleimagine that memory, is something which is imprinted; but there is nothing to saythat this metaphor is valid. In his project, Entwurf, Freud articulates veryprecisely, the impression of what remains in memory. Because we know thatanimals remember is not a reason that it should be the same for man.What I enunciate in any case, is that the invention of a signifier is somethingdifferent to memory. It is not that the child invents; he receives this signifier, andthis is even what would make it worthwhile to make more of them. Why wouldwe not invent a new signifier? Our signifiers are always received. A signifier forexample which would not have, like the Real, any kind of sense. We do not know,it would perhaps be fruitful. It would perhaps be fruitful, it would perhaps be ameans, a means of shocking, in any case. It is not that people do not try. That iseven what the witticism consists of, it consists in using one word for anotherusage than the one for which it is made. In the case of famillionnaire, onecrumples this word; but it is not in this crumpling that its operational effectconsists.In any case there is a thing that I risked operating in the sense of a metatongue,the metatongue about which just now I was interrogating Julia Kristeva. Themetatongue in question consists in translating Unbewusst, by une-bévue, this hasabsolutely not the same sense; but it is a fact, the fact is that once a man isasleep, he une-bévue’ s at full tilt, and without there being any inconvenience,apart from the case of somnambulism. Somnambulism is inconvenient, when onewakens when one wakens the somnambulist, if he is walking on the rooftops, he124