Seminar XXIV Final Sessions 1 - Lacan in Ireland

What is happening, is it not, the danger, if the analyst therefore does not makehimself a Passer, namely, if, I may say that the very reading of Freud, of the PasserFreud, qua manifesting his decision, does no longer bring about in them an effectof division, namely, this exigency of the S(Ø) which makes one sense that Freud, inhimself, bears witness to this indivisible locus of what he says and which in factmakes him the responding heretic of his word. Because what is proper to awriting is it not – I am giving you this last example before concluding – the properof a writing whatever it may be is that in a writing the subject of the enunciatedand the subject of enunciating may well be present, but it is not for all that thatthe writing will be a Passer: the writing will only be a Passer if the two ‘I’s’ arearticulated in a transmissible way. Take the rather characteristic example of theactor, of the interpreter; a heart-rent interpreter, when he interprets a text, awriting, it will be heart-rending for this jury who is the spectator, his tears aregoing to draw tears from you and though he says he’s acting, one could say that ifhe cries, if he is overwhelmed somewhere, it is because his enunciating has beenshaken by the signifiers of the author; in such a way that what I am saying to youis that it is not the interpreter who is the Passer of the text, it is the text which isthe Passer of the enunciating of the actor. I even heard it said in the EcoleFreudienne, these are the sorts of things that are said, that some Passers thathave been accepted by the jury, if the Passer is accepted, it is because he will havebeen able to give rise in his Passer to an enunciating of the Passer which, for itspart, Passes with the jury and that, since it gets Passed, it makes the rest pass,namely, the Passer.I come back to my starting point to tell you that it is even more complicated thanthat. If the author himself, of whom I am speaking, plays his proper role in thefiction that I told you about, that doesn’t prove, if he played his own personage,that he would play the role to perfection, crying out the truth as one might say –this has happened to great authors like Moliere – that does not prove that, ifchance accepted this fiction, if the chance of life made him encounter the samesituation as the one that he described to his personage, that does not prove thatat that moment he would not be gauche, borrowed; and nevertheless thesignifiers in question, it is not a question, as for an actor, of borrowed signifiers, inprinciple they are his own. I come therefore to the idea that the author is not at79