MOTHER AS DAS DING

Freud comments somewhere that if psychology succeeded in making some people anxious, by insisting excessively on the reign of the instincts, it never- theless also promoted the importance of the moral agency.

This is an obvious truth, one that is confirmed every day in our practice. Furthermore, we still do not rate highly enough in the world outside the exorbitant character of the power of the sense of guilt, which is exercised without the subject's knowledge. Thus it is that which presents itself in the massive guise of the sense of guilt that I believe is important to focus on more narrowly this year. Moreover, it is important to articulate it so as to bring out the originality, the revolution in thought, that was the effect of the Freuthan experience in the field of ethics.

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Last time I tried to show you the meaning in Freuthan psychology of the

Entwurf in connection with which Freud organized his first intuition con-

cerning what takes place in the experience of the neurotic. I tried, in partic- ular, to show you the pivotal function that we must accord something which is to be found in a detour taken by the text. And it is one that it is important not to miss, especially since Freud picks up on it again in a variety of forms right to the end. I mean das Ding.

Right at the beginning of the organization of the world in the psyche, both logically and chronologically, das Ding is something that presents and isolates itself as the strange feature around which the whole movement of the Vorstel-

lung turns - a Vorstellung that Freud shows us is governed by a regulatory

principle, the so-called pleasure principle, which is tied to the functioning of the neuronic apparatus. And it is around das Ding that the whole adaptive development revolves, a development that is so specific to man insofar as the symbolic process reveals itself to be inextricably woven into it.

The ethics of psychoanalysis

We find das Ding again in the Vemeintmg article of 1925, an article that is full of ideas and also of questions. It occurs in a formula which we must assume to be essential since it is placed at the center of the article and is, so to speak, the crucial enigma. Das Ding has, in effect, to be identified with the Wieder zu finden, the impulse to find again that for Freud establishes the orientation of the human subject to the object. Yet you should note that this object is not even stated. And here we might give its due to a certain textual criticism, whose attachment to the signifier sometimes seems to take a tal- mudic turn. It is remarkable that the object in question is nowhere articu- lated by Freud.

Moreover, since it is a matter of finding it again, we might just as well characterize this object as a lost object. But although it is essentially a ques- tion of finding it again, the object indeed has never been lost. In this orien- tation to the object, the regulation of the thread, the Vorstellungen relate to each other in accordance with the laws of a memory organization, a memory complex, a Bahnung (that is to say, a facilitator, but also, I would say more decidedly, a concatenation) whose neuronic apparatus perhaps allows us to glimpse those operations in a material form, and whose functioning is gov- erned by the law of the pleasure principle.

The pleasure principle governs the search for the object and imposes the detours which maintain the distance in relation to its end. Even in French the etymology of the word - which replaced the archaic "quérir ("to search")" - refers to circa, detour. The transference of the quantity from Vorstellung to

Vorstellung always maintains the search at a certain distance from that which

it gravitates around. The object to be found confers on the search its invisible law; but it is not that, on the other hand, which controls its movements. The element that fixes these movements, that models the return - and this return itself is maintained at a distance - is the pleasure principle. It is the pleasure principle which, when all is said and done, subjects the search to encounter nothing but the satisfaction of the Not des Lebens.

Thus the search encounters in its path a series of satisfactions that are tied to the relation to the object and are polarized by it. And at every point they model, guide and support its movements according to the pardcular law of the pleasure principle. This law fixes the level of a certain quantity of exci- tation which cannot be exceeded without going beyond the limit of the Lust/

Unlust polarity - pleasure and unpleasure are the only two forms through

which that same and single mode of regulation we call the pleasure principle expresses itself.

The admission of quandty is regulated by the width of the channels that do the conducting, by the individual diameters that a given organism can support - the thing is expressed metaphorically by Freud, but it is almost as if we were to take it literally. What happens once the limit is exceeded? The

Das Ding (II) 59 psychic impulse is not as such capable of advancing any further toward what is supposed to be its goal. Instead it is scattered and diffused within the psychic organism; the quantity is transformed into complexity. In a kind of expansion of the lighted zone of the neuronic organism, here and there in the distance, it lights up according to the laws of associative facilitation, or con- stellations of Vorstellungen which regulate the association of ideas, uncon- scious Gedanken, according to the pleasure principle.

The limit has a name. It is something more than the Lust/Unlust polarity Freud speaks of.

I would have you note that it is avoidance, flight, movement, which in the beginning, even before the system starts to function, normally intervenes in order to regulate the invasion of quantity in accordance with the pleasure principle. And it is to the motor system that the function of regulating the bearable or homeostatic level of tension for the organism is handed over in the end. But the homeostatis of the nervous system, which is the site of autonomous regulatory mechanism, is distinct from the general homeostasis (with all the potential for conflict that that implies), the homeostasis which activates the balance of moods. The balancing of moods occurs, but as an order of stimulation arising from within. That is how Freud expresses it. Certain stimulations come from within the nervous system, and he compares them to external stimulations.

I would like us to stop for a moment at this limit of pain.

Those commentators who collected the letters to Fliess consider that Freud slipped up by using the term motorisch, motor, instead of secretorisck, cell, nucleus, organ. I once said that it did not seem to be clear that it was such a slip. Freud tells us, in effect, that in the majority of cases, the reaction of pain derives from the fact that the motor reaction, the flight reaction, is impossible. And the reason for this is that the stimulation, the excitation, comes from within. Consequently, it seems to me that this so-called slip is only present in order to point to the fundamental homology between the relationship of pain and the motor reaction. Besides - this idea occurred to me a long time ago, and I hope you will not find it absurd - in the organiza- tion of the spinal marrow, the neurons and axons of pain coexist at the same level and at the same spot as certain neurons and axons of the tonic motor system.

Thus, even pain must not be simply attributed to the register of sensory reactions. I would say, and this is something that the surgery of pain reveals, that it is not a question of something simple, which can be considered a simple quality of sensory reaction. The complex character of pain, the char- acter that, so to speak, makes it an intermediary between afferent and effer- ent, is suggested by the surprising results of certain operations, which in the case of some internal illnesses, including some cancers, allow the notation of

pain to be preserved, when the suppression or removal of a certain subjective quality has been effected, which accounts for the fact that it is unbearable.

All this belongs to the sphere of modern physiological research, and it does not yet allow us to explain the problem fully. I will, therefore, limit myself to suggesting that we should perhaps conceive of pain as a field which, in the realm of existence, opens precisely onto that limit where a living being has no possibility of escape.

Isn't something of this suggested to us by the insight of the poets in that myth of Daphne transformed into a tree under the pressure of a pain from which she cannot flee? Isn't it true that the living being who has no possibility of escape suggests in its very form the presence of what one might call petri- fied pain? Doesn't what we do in the realm of stone suggest this? To the extent that we don't let it roll,1 _{but erect it, and make of it something fixed,}

isn't there in architecture itself a kind of actualization of pain?

What happened during the period of the Baroque, under the influence of an historical movement that we will come back to later, would support this idea. Something was attempted then to make architecture itself aim at plea- sure, to give it a form of liberation, which, in effect, made it blaze up so as to constitute a paradox in the history of masonry and of building. And that goal of pleasure gave us forms which, in a metaphorical language mat in itself takes us a long way, we call "tortured."

I hope you will pardon my digression, since it does, in fact, point in the direction of the themes we will take up again later, in connection with the man of pleasure and the eighteenth century, and the very style it introduced into the investigation of eroticism.

Let us return to our Vorstellungen, and try to understand them now, to surprise them in their operations, so as to understand what is involved in Freuthan psychology.

The character of imaginary composition, of the imaginary element of the object, makes of it what one might call the substance of appearance, the material of a living lure - an apparidon open to the decepdon of an Erschei-

nung, I would say, if I took the liberty of speaking German; that is to say,

mat by means of which the appearance is sustained, but which is also at the same time an unremarkable apparidon - something mat creates that Vor, that third element, something that is produced starting from the Thing. Vorstel-

lung is somediing that is essentially fragmented. It is that around which West-

ern philosophy since Aristotle and φαντασία has always revolved.

Vorstellung is understood by Freud in a radical sense, in the form in which

it appears in a philosophy that is essentially marked by the theory of knowl-

1 _{The pun here involves a reference to the French proverb "Pierre qui roule}

Das Ding (II) 61 edge. And that is the remarkable thing about it. He assigned to it in an extreme form the character philosophers themselves have been unable to reduce it to, namely, that of an empty body, a ghost, a pale incubus of the relation to the world, an enfeebled jouissance, which through the age-old interroga- tions of the philosophers makes it the essential feature. And by isolating it in this function, Freud removes it from its tradition.

And the sphere, order, and gravitation of the Vorstellungen, where does he locate them? I told you last time that if one reads Freud carefully, one has to locate them between perception and consciousness, between the glove and the hand.

It is between perception and consciousness that is inserted that which func- tions at the level of the pleasure principle. Which is what precisely? - The thought processes insofar as they regulate by means of the pleasure principle the investment of the Vorstellungen, and the structure in which the uncon- scious is organized, the structure in which the underlying unconscious mech- anisms are flocculated. And it is this which makes the small curds of representation, that is to say, something which has the same structure as the signifier - a point on which I insist. That is not just Vorstellung, but as Freud writes later in the same ardcle on the unconscious, Vorstellungsreprasentanz; and he dius turns Vorstellung into an associadve and combinatory element. In that way the world of Vorstellung is already organized according to the possibilities of the signifier as such. Already at the level of the unconscious there exists an organization that, as Freud says, is not necessarily that of contradiction or of grammar, but the laws of condensadon and displacement, those that I call the laws of metaphor and metonymy.

Why should it be a surprise, therefore, if Freud tells us that these thought processes that take place between percepdon and consciousness would not mean anything to consciousness, if they were not transmitted there by the methation of a discourse, of that which can be clarified in the Vorbewusstsein, in preconsciousness? But what does that mean? Freud leaves us with little doubt; it is a question of words. And we must, of course, situate the Wort-

vorstellungen that are involved in relation to our argument here.

Freud tells us this is not the same thing as the Vorstellungen whose thought processes of superposition, metaphor and metonymy we follow through the unconscious mechanism. It is something entirely different. The Wortvorstel·

lungen inaugurate a discourse that is articulated on the thought processes. In

other words, we know nothing about our thought processes, unless we engage in psychology - allow me to say that to make my point more forcefully. We only know them because we are speaking of something which goes on inside us, because we are speaking of them in terms that are unavoidable - terms whose indignity, emptiness and vanity we are also aware of. It is from that moment when we speak of our will and our understanding as distinct facul-

tics that we have a preconscious, and that we are able, in effect, to articulate in a discourse something of that chattering by means of which we articulate ourselves inside ourselves, we justify ourselves, or we rationalize for our- selves, with reference to this or that, the progress of our desire.

It is definitely a discourse that is involved. And Freud emphasizes that, after all, we know nothing else except this discourse. That which emerges in the Bewusstsein is Wahrnehmung, the perception of this discourse, and noth- ing else. That is exactly what he thinks.

That is why he tends to reject utterly superficial representations or, to use Silberer's term, the functional phenomena. There are no doubt in a given phase of a dream things that represent the functioning of the psyche to us imagistically - a notable example represents the layers of psychic activity in the form of the game of Chutes and Ladders. What does Freud say? Involved here is the production of dreams by a mind given to metaphysics or, in other words, to psychology, which tends to expand on what the discourse necessar- ily imposes on us when we should be trying to distinguish a certain rhythm in our inner experience. But this representation, Freud tells us, overlooks that structure, that most profound gravitation, which is established at the level of the Vorstellungen. And he affirms that these Vorstellungen gravitate, operate exchanges and are modulated according to laws that you will recog- nize, if you have followed my teaching, as the fundamental laws of the sig- nifying chain.

Have I managed to make myself understood? It seems to me difficult to be any clearer as far as this essential point is concerned.

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We have now reached the point where we must distinguish the effective artic- ulation of a discourse, of the gravitation of the Vorstellungen, in the form of

Vorstellungsreprasentanzen of these unconscious articulations. We must exam-

ine what in such circumstances we mean by Sachvorstellungen. The latter are to be set in polar opposition to word play, to Wortvorstellungen, but at this level they go together. As far as das Ding is concerned, that is something else.

Das Ding is a primordial function which is located at the level of the initial

establishment of the gravitation of the unconscious Vorstellungen. I did not have time last week to make you appreciate how in ordinary German usage there is a linguistic difference between Ding and Sache.

It is clear that in every case they cannot be used interchangeably. And that even if there are cases where one can use either one, to choose one or the other in German gives a particular emphasis to the discourse. I ask those who know German to refer to the examples in the dictionary. One does not use

Das Ding (II) 63

man Ding - it is not for everybody. Master Eckhart uses Ding to refer to the

soul, and heaven knows that for Master Eckhart the soul was a Grossding, the biggest of things. He certainly would not use the term Sache. If I wanted to make you sense the differences by giving you a general measure of the way in which the use of the signifier breaks down differendy in German relative to French, I would cite this sentence that I was on the point of citing last time, but that I held back because I am not after all a Germanist, and I wanted to make use of the interval to test it on the ears of some people whose mother tongue is German. One could say that "the Sache ist das Wort des Dinges." Or, in French, "L'affaire est le mot de la chose ("The affair is the word of the thing.")·"

It is precisely as we shift into discourse that das Ding, the Thing, is resolved into a series of effects - in the sense that one can say meine Sache. That suggests all my kit and caboodle, and is something very different from das

Ding - that thing to which we must now return.

You will not be surprised if I tell you that at the level of the Vorstellungen,