Seminar XXIV Final Sessions 1 - Lacan in Ireland

not pinpointed it? He calls this a serpigineu (billhook-like?) process. It is not evensure that it is a serpigineux process there where it is judged to be the centre oflanguage. I for my part, I said all the same that this Japanese who had a very livelytaste for the metatongue, namely, that he took great enjoyment in having learnedEnglish, and then French afterwards. Is this not where the slippage was? Heslipped into mental trauma from this fact that, in all these metatongues that hemanaged to handle rather easily, well then, he could not find himself in them. Ifor my part advised that he should be given some room and that one should notstop at the fact that Clérambault had invented, one fine day, a thing called mentalautomatism. Mental automatism is normal. If as it happens I do not have it, formy part, that is by chance. There are all the same, all the same somethings thatcan be called bad habits. If one starts saying things to oneself, as the aforesaidJapanese expressed himself textually, if one starts to say things to oneself, whywould that not slide towards mental automatism because it is all the same quitecertain that, according to what Edgar Morin says in a book which was recentlypublished and in which he questioned himself about the nature of nature, it isquite clear that nature is not as natural as all that, it is even in this that thereconsists this rottenness which is what is generally called culture. Culture seethes,as I pointed out to you in passing. Yes.The types modelled by social relations consist in word play. Aristotle imputes, wedo not know why, being hysterical to the woman; it is a play on the wordhysteron. I pointed out something to you about kinship. La parenté en question,is a book tackled by Needham, Rodney Needham who is not the good one. Whydoes everyone get engulfed in the most banal type of kinship? Why do people,who come to speak to us in psychoanalysis, talk to us only about that? Whywould we not say that we are entirely akin to a pouâte for example, in the sensethat I articulated just now, the pas pouâteassez? A pouâate, one has just as muchkinship with him, why does psychoanalysis orient, orient people who openthemselves to it, orient people, in the name of what, towards their childhoodmemories? Why does it not orientate them towards a kinship with a pouâte, apouâte among others, any one at all? Even a pouâte, is very commonly what iscalled a mental defective. It’s hard to see why a pouâte would be an exception.126