Seminar XXIV Final Sessions 1 - Lacan in Ireland

We do not know what a living body is. It is an affair which for our part wehave to leave to God. I mean that – insofar as what I am saying has a sense- what I mean is that I read a thesis which, bizarrely, was produced in 1943.Don’t go looking for it, because you will never get your hands on it, youwill never get your hands on it, because you are here much more numerousthan the number of the copies of the thesis that came out, it is the thesis ofsomeone called Madeleine Cavet who was born in 1908, the thesis specifiesit, namely, about 7 years after me, and what she says is not foolish. Shesees perfectly well that Freud, is something absolutely confused in which, aswe say, a cat would not find its kittens. And she takes a measure, sheevokes on this particular occasion the work of Pasteur.Pasteur is a funny business. I mean that up to him – for after all it is fromhim that this comes – up to him people believed in what can be calledspontaneous generation, namely, that people believed that, to abandon –here lay the apparent foundation – to abandon a living body, naturally thingsstarted to swarm all over it, I mean that it swarms with what are calledmicro-organisms, as a result of which people imagined that these microorganismscould grow on anything whatsoever. It is quite certain that, ifyou leave a glass in the open air, there are things that fall into it and thateven, on occasion, make what is called a culture. But what Freuddemonstrated, what Pasteur demonstrated – this slip has all its value, giventhe sense of the thesis of the aforesaid Madeleine Cavet – what Pasteurdemonstrated, is that, on condition simply of putting a little cotton wool atthe mouth of a vase, things do not start to swarm inside and this ismanifestly one of the simplest demonstrations of non-spontaneousgeneration.But then that presupposes strange things. Where do these micro-organismscome from? We are reduced in our own day to thinking that they comefrom nowhere. It is as good as saying that it is God who fabricated them. Itis very, very annoying that people should have abandoned this openness tospontaneous generation which was in short a rampart against the existenceof God. For us, our friend Pasteur was moreover considered by the doctors95