Seminar XXIV Final Sessions 1 - Lacan in Ireland

is something which is, I can confide in you, experienced very early on,experienced by the fact of someone, like everyone, who was close to me,namely, the one that I called at that time, I was two years older than her, twoand a half years, my little sister, she is called Madeleine and she said to meone day, not ‘I know’, because the ‘I’ would have been too much, but‘Manène knows’.The unconscious is an entity that I try to define by the Symbolic, which isonly in short an extra entity. An entity with which one must know how todeal. Knowing how to deal with it, is not the same thing as a knowledge, asthe Absolute Knowledge of which I spoke earlier. The unconscious is whatprecisely makes something change, what reduces what I called the sinthome,the sinthome which I write with the orthography that you know.I always had to deal with consciousness, but in the form which formed partof the unconscious, since it is a person a ‘she’ on this particular occasion, a‘she’ since the person in question put herself in the third person by namingherself Manène, in a form which formed part of the unconscious, I amsaying, since it is a ‘she’ who, as in my title for this year, a ‘she’ qui s’ailaità mourre who pretended to be a bearer of knowledge.He or she, is the third person, is the Other, as I define it, it is theunconscious. It knows, in the absolute, and only in the absolute, it knowsthat I know what was in the letter, but that I alone know. In reality, ittherefore knows nothing, except that I know it, but this is not a reason that Ishould tell him.In fact, this Absolute Knowledge, I did more than allude to it somewhere, Ireally insisted on it with my big boots, namely, that the whole appendix thatI added to my writing on The purloined letter, namely, what goes from page54 to page 60, and that I entitled in part ‘Parenthesis of parentheses’, is veryprecisely this something which, here, is substituted by Bozef.87