Seminar XXIV Final Sessions 1 - Lacan in Ireland

from the beloved to the lover. What I have told you there, in any case is notcorrect, because the second moment cannot be articulated as such, it issynchronically articulated with a third moment which exists, I would say,synchronically with it in the following way: the subject, this time, if youwish, being himself a musician, being therefore a producer of the music,addresses himself to a new other, which I called the subject supposed tohear who is no longer altogether the Other at the starting point, it is a newother. This new other, precisely, is no longer the ‘vel’ it is no longer ‘eitherone or the other’. To this new other, he is also going to identify himself,namely, that there is starting from the top of the loop, a double arrangementwhere the subject is both the one who is speaking and the one who ishearing.Something may perhaps illustrate this division for you: this is what ishighlighted, in my opinion, by the myth of Ulysses and the Sirens. Youknow that Ulysses, in order to hear the song of the Sirens, had stuffed withwax the ears of his sailors. How ought we understand that? Ulyssesexposes himself to hearing, to hearing the invocatory drive, in fact tohearing the song of the Sirens; but what he is exposed to, since, when hehears the song of the Sirens, you know that history tells us that he shouts tothe sailors, that he says to them: ‘Stop, let us stay here’. But he has takenhis precautions: he knows that he will not be heard. Namely, that this mythin my opinion illustrates, this is my second moment, namely, that Ulysses isput in the position of being able to hear in the measure that he had assuredhimself that he could not speak, namely when he had assured himself thatthere would not be this reversal of the drive, namely, the second and thethird moments, namely, when he had assured himself that there would notbe a subject supposed to hear, because of these wax stoppers. You see thatthe first moment, ‘to hear’ is one thing, but that even poses for us theproblem of the ethics of the analyst. Is the analyst precisely not someonefrom whom one can hear that he hears certain things, is he not, at a givenmoment, necessarily, by the very structure of the instinctual circuit, in aposition of having to make himself a speaker? Not to behave like Ulysses,let us say, who had already taken a first risk of hearing certain things.37