Seminar XXIV Final Sessions 1 - Lacan in Ireland

after all noticed that to consist meant something, namely, that one had tospeak about body; there is a body of the Imaginary, a body of the Symbolic– this is lalangue – and a body of the Real about which we do not know howit comes out. It is not simple, not that the complication comes from me, it isin what we are dealing with. It is because I was, as someone or other hassaid, confronted with the idea that Freud’s unconscious supports, that I tried,not to answer for it, but to respond to it in a sensible way, namely, by notimagining that this avision – what Freud glimpsed, that’s what that means –that this avision concerns something which is supposed to be inside eachone, of each of those who make up a crowd and who believe that they are bythis fact a unity.This notion of crowd, which Massen-psychologie clearly means, has beentranslated as Psychologie collective et analyse du moi. There is nothing tobe done with that. Freud may well have explicitly started from whatGustave Lebon specifically call psychologie des foules, it is translated bypsychologie collective, a collection, a collection of pearls no doubt, eachperson being one of them, even though what is at stake, is to account for theexistence, for the existence in this crowd of something which qualifies itselfas ego.What can this ego be? It is in trying to explain this for you, that I tried toimagine this year the usage of what is called a topology. A topology, suchas you can grasp simply by opening anything at all called GeneralTopology, a topology is always founded on a torus, even if this torus is attimes a Klein bottle, for a Klein bottle is a torus, a torus that crosses itself –I spoke about that a long time ago.There you are. Here, you see that in this torus, there is something whichrepresents an absolute inside when one is in the void, in the hollow that atorus may constitute. This torus can be a cord, no doubt, but a cord itselfcan twist, and there is something which can be drawn as being the inside ofthe cord. In this respect you have only to unpack what is enunciated as aknot in a special literature.5