Seminar XXIV Final Sessions 1 - Lacan in Ireland

astonishes me still more, is not that Le verbier de l’homme aux loups, not simplythat it sails ahead, but that it produces offspring, the fact is that someone whom Idid not know – to tell the truth, I think he is in analysis – whom I did not know wasin analysis – but this is a simple hypothesis – someone called Jacques Derrida whowrites a preface for this verbier. He writes an absolutely fervent enthusiasticpreface in which I believe I can see a trembling which is linked – I do not knowwhich of these two analysts he has dealings with – what is certain, is that hecouples them; I do not find, I must say, despite the fact that I launched thingsalong this path, I do not find this book, nor this preface to have the right tone. Asa kind of delusion, I am speaking to you like that, I cannot say that it is in the hopethat you will go and look at it; I would even prefer you to forgo it, but anyway Iknow well that when all is said and done you are going to rush to Aubier-Flammarion, even if only to see what I call an extreme limit. It is certain that thisis combined with the more and more mediocre desire I have of talking to you.What is combined, is that I am scared of that which in short I feel myself more orless responsible for, namely, to have opened the floodgates of something aboutwhich I could just as well have shut up. I could just as well have reserved formyself alone the satisfaction of playing on the unconscious without explaining thefarce of it, without saying that it is by this yoke of the signifier-effects that itoperates. I could just as well have kept it to myself, since in short if I had notreally been forced, I would never have done any teaching. It cannot be said thatwhat Jacques Alain Miller published about the split of ’53, that it was with anyenthusiasm that I took up the baton on the subject of this unconscious.I would even say more, I do not like the second topography all that much, I meanthe one into which Freud let himself be drawn by Groddeck. Of course onecannot do otherwise, these flattening-outs, the Id with the big eye which is theEgo. The Id is..., everything is flattened out. But anyway, this Ego – whichmoreover in German is not called Ego, is called Ich - Wo Es war – where it was,where it was: we have no idea about what was in Groddeck’s head to support thisId, this Es. He thought that the Id in question was what lived you. This is what hesays when he writes his Buch, his ‘Book of the Id’, his book on the Es, he says thatit is what lives you.47