Seminar XXIV Final Sessions 1 - Lacan in Ireland

someone for whom I have great esteem, he is J.–C. Milner. It is No 30, whichappeared in May 1976. It is called Réflexions sur la réference. Something that,after reading this article, is an object of interrogation for me is the following; it isthe role that he gives to the anaphore. He notices that grammar plays a certainrole and that specifically the sentence that is not so simple: ‘I saw 10 lions andyou, he says, you saw 15 of them (tu en a vu 15)’, the anaphore involves the useof this ‘en’. It very precisely highlights things by saying that the ‘en’ does notconcern the lions, it concerns the 10. I would prefer that he should not say ‘tu ena vu 15’; I would prefer him to say ‘tu en a vu plus’. Because, in truth, the tu inquestion has not counted these 15. But it is certain that in the distinct sentence: ‘Icaptured 10 lions and you, tu en a capturé 15’, the reference is no longer to the 10but to the lions. It is, I believe, quite gripping that in what I call the structure ofthe unconscious, grammar must be eliminated. Logic must not be eliminated, butgrammar must be eliminated. In French there is too much grammar. In Germanthere is still more. In English, there is a different one that is in a way implicit.Grammar must be implicit to have its proper weight.I would like to indicate to you something which is from a time when French didnot have such a burden of grammar. I would like to point you towards somethingcalled Les bigarrures du seigneur des Accords (‘The variegations of the lord ofconcords’). He lived right at the end of the 16 th century. It is gripping because heseems to be all the time playing on the unconscious, which is all the same curious,given that he had no kind of idea of it, even less than Freud, but it is all the sameon it that he plays. How manage to grasp, to say, this sort of flux that usage is?And how state precisely the way in which, in this flux, the unconscious, which isalways individual, can be specified?There is something striking, which is that there are not three dimensions inlanguage. Language is always flattened out. And that indeed is why my twistedbusiness of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real, with the fact that theSymbolic is what goes above what is above and which passes beneath what isbeneath, this indeed is what gives it its value. The value is that it is flattened out.44