ITALIAN NOTE [1]
(307) What the Italian group has going for it is that it is a tripod [2]. As such one can sit on it.
But in order to make it the seat of psychoanalytic discourse, it must be put to the test: its use will be decided on the basis of its stability.
From the time that he utters his first cries, the speakingbeing has the capacity to think ‘with his feet’.
Even so, at the present moment we will do well to consider it as given that a vote for or against will decide where the weight of thought lies if the feet mark discordant time.
I suggest that they start from where I did in overhauling another group, namely the EFP.
The analyst said to be of the School, AS [Analyste de l’École, AE][3] will henceforth be appointed on the basis of his submitting to the test called the Pass – although he is not obliged to do so since the School also has delegates who do not offer themselves in this way. They are called Analyst Member of the School, AMS [Analyste Membre de l’École, AME].
The Italian group, if it hears me, will keep to naming those who apply for entry on the principle of the Pass, thereby taking the risk that they might not pass.
The principle is as follows, one that I have spoken about in these terms.
The analyst is authorised only from himself, that goes without saying. It matters little to him whether my School gives him a guarantee, one that is, without doubt, under the ironic title of the AMS. It is not with that that he operates. The Italian group is not in a position to give this guarantee.
It has to ensure that it is only through self-authorisation that there is an analyst.
For my thesis inaugurates a break with the practice through which those so-called Societies[4] turn analysis into a recruitment examination; this does not imply, however, that just anybody might be an analyst.
(308) For [my thesis] states that it is a matter of the analyst; it supposes that there is one.
To authorise oneself is not to autho-ri(tuali)se [auto-ri(tuali)ser].
As I have asserted elsewhere, the analyst pertains to the not-all [pas-tout].
Not-all beings that speak would know that the making of an analyst is in authorising himself. The proof that there is an analysis is necessary but it is still not sufficient.
Only the analyst, that is to say not just anyone, is authorised from himself. Now it is a fact that there is [self-authorisation]; it is with this that they function. This function only renders the ex-sistence of the analyst probable. This probability is sufficient to guarantee that there might be one; the chances might be great for each of them, but insufficient for all.
If it were agreed however that only analysts function this way, if this were taken as an aim, it would be one worthy of the Italian tripod.
I would like to open up this path here, if you wish to follow it.
It is necessary (this is the reason why I have waited to open it up), it is necessary to take the real into account. Namely, that which is the mainspring of our experience of knowledge:
There is knowledge in the real, although it is not the analyst but the scientist, who lodges it there.
The analyst lodges another knowledge in another place, one that has to take into account the knowledge in the real. The scientist produces knowledge on the basis of the semblance of being its subject. This is a necessary condition but it is not sufficient. If it does not seduce the master through concealing from him that therein lies his ruin, this knowledge will remain buried as it was for twenty centuries during which the scientist believed himself to be a subject, but only of more or less eloquent dissertations.
I only come back to this well-known point in order to recall that the analyst does depend on that but even so, for him it is not enough.
It was necessary for the clamour of so-called humanity to be added; knowledge is not made for [humanity] because [humanity] does not desire it.
There is an analyst only in so far as this desire comes to him; namely that already, through this, he is the refuse [rebut] of the aforesaid (humanity)[5].
As I said already: it is the mark of that condition that the analyst must carry, whatever his adventures, in order for his fellows [congénères] in ‘knowing’ [savoir] to find it[6]. It jumps out at you that this assumes another (309) knowledge, one previously elaborated, for which scientific knowledge has given the model and bears the responsibility. It is precisely what I ascribe to it, having transmitted a desire that is completely new to the lone refuse of learned ignorance. Making an analyst is a matter of verification. Be that as it may, what science owes to the hysteric’s structure, Freud’s romance, are love affairs with truth.
That is the model from which the analyst, if there is one, represents the fall, the refuse I have called it, but this is not just anyone.
To believe that science is true under the pretext that it is transmissible (mathematically) is a really delusional idea that each of its [science’s] steps refutes in discarding a first formulation as an out-dated notion. There is no notable progress because of this for want of knowing what follows. There is only the discovery of knowledge in the real. An order that has nothing to do with what was imagined before science but nothing assures that it will have to do with good fortune [bon heur][7].
If the analyst winnows himself[8] from the refuse of which I have spoken, it is well to have a glimpse of the way humanity is situated with regard to good fortune (it is where it bathes: for it [humanity] there is only good fortune), and it is in this that [the analyst] must have discerned the cause of his horror, of his own, his, detached from that of all others, the horror of knowing.
From that moment he knows how to be refuse. Analysis[9] must have made him feel that, at the least. If he is not carried to enthusiasm by it, he may well have had an analysis, but as to being an analyst, no chance. It is this that my recently established ‘Pass’ often illustrates: it is enough that the passers dishonour themselves in leaving the thing uncertain, and due to which the case falls under the blow of a polite declining of the candidacy.
That will have another implication for the Italian group, if it follows me in this business, for in the School of Paris there have been no breakages for all that. As the analyst is only authorised from himself, his failing passes to the passers, and the session continues happily overall [bon heur général], however tinged with depression.
What the Italian group would gain by following me is a bit more serious than that which I achieve cautiously. It is necessary that [the group] takes a risk.
I will now articulate some things for people who hear me.
There is the object (a). It ex-sists now, as I have constructed it. I suppose that you know about the four episodic substances, (310) you know what they are for: to be enveloped by the drive through which each aims at the heart but only reaches it with a shot that misses it.
That gives support to the most effective realisations, as well as to the most charming realities.
If that is the fruit of analysis, send the aforesaid subject back to his precious studies. He will decorate with some additional trophies [potiches][10] the patrimony supposed to make God happy. Whether one loves to believe it or whether it [ça] appals, it’s all the same to the family tree from which the unconscious subsists.
The guy or the gal [le ga(r)s ou la garce][11] in question meet in harmony there [faire relais congru][12].
If he does not authorise himself to be an analyst, he will never have the time to contribute to knowledge, without which there is no chance that analysis will continue to rise in the market: this is important if the Italian group is not to be doomed to extinction.
As for the knowledge at stake, I have put forward its principle like the ideal point that one can assume when one has a clear sense of the outline: namely, there is no sexual relation, and by relation, I mean one that can be put into writing.
Someone will say to me, certainly not you, that it is useless on this basis to try – this is another thing to argue about – but if your candidates have no chance of contributing to knowledge, you will not survive.
Without testing this relation with writing, not a means, indeed, of arriving at what I had, at the same time as I put forward its non ex-sistence, proposed as a goal through which psychoanalysis would make itself equal to science: knowing how to demonstrate that this relation is impossible to write, which may mean that it is not affirmable but it is also not refutable: in the name of truth.
As a consequence, there is no truth that can be spoken wholly, even this one, since it is spoken neither more nor less. The truth serves for nothing other than to be the place where this knowledge gives itself up.
But this knowledge is not nothing. Because this is what it concerns: in acceding to the real, [knowledge] determines it just as well as the truth of science does.
Naturally this knowledge is not cut and dried. Because it is necessary to invent it.
Neither more nor less; not to discover it, since truth is nothing more than firewood, I say: truth in so far as it proceeds from f…trerie. (Spelling to be commented upon, there is no ‘f…terie’.)[13].
(311) The knowledge that Freud designated as the unconscious is that which invents the human humus in its permanence from one generation to another, and now that we have made an inventory of it, we know that it shows a staggering lack of imagination.
We can understand it only with the benefit of this inventory; namely to leave in suspense the imagination that is in short supply there, and to call on the services of the symbolic and the real that the imaginary knots (that is why it cannot be dropped) and to try, starting with them, for they have proven themselves in knowledge, to enlarge the resources thanks to which we can do without that unfortunate relation in order to make love more worthy than the proliferation of chatter that it constitutes to this day—sicut palea said St Thomas on finishing his life as a monk. Find me an analyst of this type [tuile] who would connect the thing [truc] with something other than a rough sketch of an organon[14].
I conclude: it is the tripod itself that will assure the role of the passers until the new order is established since the group has only these three feet.
Everything must turn around the writings that will appear.
1973
Translated by Susan Schwartz
(Translation revised August 2024)
4
Note italienne, Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001, pp. 307-311. All footnotes are the translator’s.
There were three members of the Italian Group: Giacomo Contri, Muriel Drazien and Armando Verdiglione
All square brackets used for the purpose of clarification are the translator’s.
Société psychanalytique de Paris and Société française de psychanalyse.
‘Rebut’ means refuse, rubbish, waste, junk, dregs. I have chosen to translate rebut as ‘refuse’ because it seems to best suit the syntax of most of the sentences in which Lacan uses it in this paper.
In her Seminar of 2007-2008, Commentaire de la Note Italienne (Edizione Praxis de Camp Lacaniano, Rome, 2014), p. 55, Colette Soler insists that Lacan is using ‘savoir’ as a verb not a noun: that is, as ‘knowing’ rather than ‘knowledge’, in the sense of savoir la trouver ‘knowing how to find it’, ‘it’ being the mark that distinguishes the analyst who knows he is the refuse of humanity.
In French ‘bonheur’, meaning ‘happiness’, is written as one word; here, Lacan separates it into two in order to make a play on words. ‘Bon heur’ can be translated by ‘good fortune’ and also by ‘good encounter’ in the sense of a chance encounter which has a positive effect: eutuchia. Love is such a chance encounter.
Lacan uses the verb ‘se vanner’ a verb with a number of denotations, including ‘to winnow’. In her Commentaire, Soler argues for the metaphorical use of this verb, pp. 65-66. It is the inverse of sieving where the grain, which is valued, remains in the basket; ‘to be winnowed means to make the refuse fall’ and it is from this refuse that the analyst makes himself.
The Repertoire of the IF-EPFLF uses ‘l’analyse’ [the analysis] here; in the version of Note italianne in Autres écrits we find ‘l’analyste’ [the analyste]. See p. 309.
A potiche is also used to describe a person whose position is more decorative than functional.
Lacan makes a play on ‘ga(r)s’, meaning ‘guy’ and ‘garce’ a vulgar, sexualised term for a girl. Lacan plays with the couple: gars-garce.
Lacan appears to be suggesting that in this harmonious encounter we can see the unconscious fantasy wherein the sexual relation exists.
Lacan is saying that truth proceeds from foutrerie, that is from the fact of fucking and reproducing, and not from fouterie, the fact of saying stupidities. See Soler’s Commentaire pp. 108-09.
Aristotle’s six books of logic are referred to as the Organon. In general the word refers to an instrument of thought or system of reasoning. In referring to a ‘rough sketch’
Lacan is emphasizing an organon that is more imaginary than logical.