Seminar XXIV Final Sessions 1 - Lacan in Ireland

question was neither more nor less than the unconscious and that in short it wasvery difficult to know clearly the idea Freud had of it. Everything he says, it seemsto me, it seemed to me, prescribed that it should be a Knowledge.Let us try to define what this can mean to us, a Knowledge. What is at stake, inKnowledge, is what we can call signifier-effects (effets de signifiant).I have here a yoke that I must say terrorised me. It is a collection which has comeout under the title of La philosophie en effet. Philosophy in effect, in signifiereffects,it is precisely what I am trying to get out of unscathed, I mean that I donot believe that I am doing philosophy, but one always does more of it than onebelieves, there is nothing more slippery than this domain; you also do it, you toohave your moments, and it is certainly not what you have most to rejoice about.Freud therefore had only a few ideas about what the unconscious was. But itseems to me, in reading him, that one can deduce that he thought it was signifiereffects.Man – we have to call a certain generality by that name, a generality inwhich one cannot say that some stand out; Freud had nothing transcendent abouthim: he was a little doctor who did, good God, what he could in terms of what wecall curing, which does not take us very far – man therefore, since I spoke aboutman, man can scarcely escape this business of Knowledge. This is dictated to himby what I called the signifier-effects, and he is not at ease: he does not know howto ‘deal with’ (‘faire avec’) Knowledge. This is what is called his mental debilityfrom which, I must say, I do not except myself. I do not except myself simplybecause I have to deal with the same material, with the same material aseveryone else and that this material, is what dwells in us. With this material, hedoes not know how ‘to deal’ (‘y faire’). It is the same thing as this ‘dealing with’that I spoke about just now, but these nuances of the tongue are very important.This y faire cannot be said in every language. Knowing how to deal with issomething different to know-how. It means to get on with it. But this ‘yfaire’indicates that one does not really capture the thing, in short, in a concept.This leads us to pushing the door of certain philosophies. You must not push thisdoor too quickly, because you must remain at the level where I placed what in42