Luce Irigaray, Gail Schwab - To Speak Is Never Neutral (2002)

To Speak is Never Neutral
To Speak is Never
Neutral
LUCE IRIGARAY
Translated from the French by Gail Schwab

Published in che USA and Canada in 2002 by
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Routledge is an imprint ofthe Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Continuum
This English cranslation CD Continuum 2002

Originally published as Parler n 'est jamais neutre (('.) Les Editions de Minuic 1985
Luce Irigaray has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1998,
to be identified as the author of chis work.
The publishers wish to record cheir thanks to che French Miniscry of Culture for a grant
towards the cosc of cranslation.
This books is supported by che French Ministry for Foreign Affairs, as part of che
•
Burgess programme headed for the French Embassy in London by the lnstitur Franc,:ais du
Royaume-Uni .
WHrtJ • %.Ultl • Prtlllntitl

lUuauQJIE PUNCAJSE
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Contents
Chapter I Introduction 1
Chapter II Linguistic and Specular Communication 9
Chapter III Negation and Negative Transformations in the 25
Language of Schizophrenics
Chapter IV Towards a Grammar of Enunciation for 43
Hysterics and Obsessives
Chapter V On Phantasm and the Verb 55
Chapter VI Linguistic Structures of Kinship and Their 63
Perturbations in Schizophrenia
Chapter VII Sentence Production among Schizophrenics and 85
Senile Dementia Patients
Chapter VIII The Utterance in Analysis 95
Chapter IX Class Language, Unconscious Language 109
Chapter X The Rape of the Letter 121
Chapter XI Sex as Sign 137
Chapter XII Idiolect or Other Logic 153
Chapter XIII Does Schizophrenic Discourse Exist? 173
Chapter XIV Schizophrenics, or the Refusal of Schiz 179
Chapter XV The Setting in Psychoanalysis 193
Chapter XVI The Poverty of Psychoanalysis 205
Chapter XVII The Language of Man 227
Chapter XVIII The Limits of Transference 237
Chapter XIX In Science, Is the Subject Sexed? 247
Notes 259
Index 269
I
Introduction
Rereading these texts affected me, and several comments, or ideas, came to
mind. In particular, I felt irritated and amused by the language of science.
I have for several years been confronting the reality of scientific require-
ments, those norms or criteria of a so-called rigorous process. I stand
before them as if I had to answer to them, to submit to being judged. A
kind of tribunal of discourse, deciding what good thinking, good exposi-
tion, and valid truth and research are. Supposedly, they are impossible
outside of already existing scientific and epistemological frameworks. Off
the beaten path, there is only poetry, politics, and demagogic fantasy.
These value judgments - 'positive' indicates the framework of true
theory; 'negative' indicates language that does not live up to it - are always
stuck in norms of platonic truth. In other words, they remain embedded in
an ideology that has never been thought through. This idealism, and its
ideological consequences, require the ascendancy, or the authority, of a
sentence or formula of the type: one says that x is equal to, greater than, or
less than y. That is nothing more than an encoding of the world from
which subjectivity is removed, and which is subordinated, under cover of
the universal, to one single subject, or to several subjects. No feelings
apparently . . . A language divested of all pathos, absolutely neutral and
detached, is transmitted by someone to someone else, who has no acknowl-
edged origin or source either. This language is supposedly a translator, or a
perfect translation, an adequate copy of the universe, and today, of the
subject as well. The formula, its mechanics, and its machinery are suppo-
sedly enough. No more creation of life. Everything has already been
realized in sterile duplications. The subject has become a machine, with no
becoming — finished.
Hence my anger and my laughter! Such is the danger we face today.
This is also what makes certain discourses successful - or unsuccessful -
some complicit with the general mechanics, but somehow beyond time —
without past, present or future - and some with an anarchy, or a demago-
guery, lacking rigor and logic, flip sides of the others. The most rigorous
discourses supposedly correspond to the defensive destiny of humanity:
mimicking nature as closely as possible? The most exact science is
supposed to be simultaneously atemporal and chameleonesque, versatile
enough to change color in order to blend into the background. At the end
2 TO SPEAK IS NEVER NEUTRAL
of an era, the most highly elaborated aspect of culture seems to turn back
into the most elementary. What we lack is the creation, the affirmation,
that says: / live.
This affirmation is sought - perhaps - in the esthetically variable graph-

isms of science and of art. They meet up in fabrications that claim to be
detached, closer to the world than to their producers. They're supposedly
faithful to reality, and can only be interpreted obliquely, in surfeit. As
always? All that can be told about the subject would be its itinerary, its
directions, its profiles, and its colors? Numbers are supposedly better
vehicles than language, which is either too subjectively invested, or not
enough. Formulas, figures, painting . . . and religion. Non-numeric scien-
tific discourse claims to be neutral, a duplicate of reality, untainted by
emotion.
This science is not without naivety, especially when it claims to be a
science of the subject, as in psychology, sociology, psychoanalysis, or linguis-
tics. However, it is difficult to comprehend its imperatives, except as preten-
sions to a childish type of objectivity: a moral code of 'good conduct,'
political economy of the truth. Neutral language supposedly could and
should be spoken by everyone. Which is obviously impossible . . .
But science does not say 'I,' or 'you,' or 'we.' Science stays out of that
polemic, forbids it. Science's subject is 'one.' Who is this one7. Are its verbs
already substantives, already officially recognized and consecrated acts? We
find the only acceptable verbs in enunciations already transformed into
exchangeable objects without pathos. Except the pathos of reason, perhaps?
An irreversible reason? A universal one?
This science which claims to be the most scientific, or the only scientific,
science, is scientific only in the ethical absence of the subject. It can only
make claims to non-encroachment by the subject because it is deployed in
a world already constructed through and through. Already subjectivized?
But we're not supposed to know that. This kind of science leaves no room
for the unexpected, or for chance. All that's left are the views and perspec-
tives on the world of a subject who no longer even lives there.
Why would a subject not say: I feel thus, I see such and such a thing, I
want or / can do this, I affirm that7. It's supposed to be a question of time?
Of a control over research? But this control no longer recognizes itself as
such, and claims to be the truth.
T is sometimes truer than 'one' or than 'it.' Truer because it admits its
source. And when science moves very quickly, the transmutation of T into
'one' may make no sense. Except perhaps as an unavowed imperialism.
So all of this bowing down before 'one' and 'it' irritated me, and made
me laugh, because I was supposed to bow down as well. It is not proper to
INTRODUCTION 3
say T in certain research, certain publications. And deciding to say T

earned me bad grades in science. Which means that science is a question of
style . . . A type of discourse. An unavowed technique, which cannot distin-
guish itself from the so-called truth.
If I eliminate the 'ones' and the 'its,' those impersonal forms of proper
scientific tone, I am often forced to use the passive voice, in order to admit
to my feelings, to say that I am not an absolute subject, not pure action. I
do not simply control; I am also controlled.
And my formation as subject results from the impact of other bodies, of
matter that is foreign to me. In refusing the imperialism of the T that is
the paradigm of all speaking subjects, or of a neuter 'one,' or an imper-
sonal 'it,' I acknowledge the ways in which I have been affected. Not
always how I have been affected, but in which ways. No more undifferen-
tiated, substitutable, universal subject. In changing, metamorphosing, and
anamorphosing, does the subject not wonder about the resistance, or the
insistence, of its own existence? Of its own body? Because either all of
one's energy is reducible to scientific organization, and can be defined and
regimented according to the norms and the tools of science, or certain
dimensions, notably affective ones, and certain limits, notably bodily ones,
are in conflict with that control.
In becoming, in accepting that it becomes, the subject must take into
account its form and its sex. It cannot claim to be a universal without
form. It has, and is, an incarnate form. It creates a morphology, and is
one. The relation between the two is its story, with its projects, its genera-
tions, its loops, and its repetitions.
Up until now the form-giving subject has always been male. And this
structure has, unbeknownst to itself, clearly given form to culture, and to
the history of ideas. They are not neuter.
We end up with this paradox: scientific studies prove the sexuality of the
cortex, while science maintains that discourse is neuter. Such is the naivety
of a subject that never interrogates itself, never looks back toward its
constitution, never questions its contradictions. We learn that the left and
right sides of the brain are not the same in men as in women, but that,
nevertheless, the two sexes speak the same language, and that no other
language could possibly exist. By what grace, or what necessity, is it
possible to speak the same language without having the same brain? With
what do we speak? Is the brain simply a center for processing information
already encoded elsewhere? Where? With no traces of its coming into
being? And this processing is then imagined, directed, or marked, by
which sex?
Living beings, insofar as they are alive, are a becoming. They produce
form. No becoming is morphologically undifferentiated, even if its source
is chaotic. And the problem of sexual difference weighs in heavily, no

doubt, on the side of the primary matter of nature, but also on the side of
language. Do we still have something to say? Do we still have meaning to
produce?
The female remains within an amorphous maternal matrix, source of
creation, of procreation, as yet unformed, however, as subject of the auton-
omous word. The coming, or the subjective anastrophe (rather than the
catastrophe), of the female has not yet taken place. And her movements
often remain stuck in mimetic tendencies: whether it's a defensive or an
offensive strategy, the female behaves like the other, the one, the unique.
As of yet, she neither affirms nor develops her own forms. She lacks some
kind of birth, or some kind of growth, between the within of an intention
and the without of a thing created by the other, a passage from within to
without, from without to within, whose threshold remains the prerogative
of the subject that has always been. The female has not yet created her
language, her word, her style. He, she, they [feminine case], I, are suppo-
sedly still the reservoir of the meaning, and the madness, of discourse.
How does the subject come back to itself after having exiled itself within
a discourse? That is the question of any era. More pertinent to ours,
perhaps? Language having become the language of technology, where the
automaton is master, it is not always easy for the human subject to recog-
nize its own path through the imperatives and circuits of machines. Has it
lost space and time? There is a rupture between our own language, the
language we program ourselves, and the one that comes back to us.
Notably, when the information is transmitted to and through a certain
number of mechanisms in different parts of the universe, in various sectors
of society, in various languages, etc.
The thread has been cut, lost, propagates itself along electric, electronic,
atmospheric, magnetic circuits. The sky, the earth . . . Where are we
coming from? To whom are we speaking? How do we manage not to get
lost in all this? Outside the most generalized processes, the subject is cut
loose, wanders adrift, goes astray. . . .
Why does it go on refusing any contra-diction, any face-to-face with the
other sex? As yet unheard-of fecundity of and within sexual difference. The
generation of a new culture that desire and the death drives would seek to
postpone.
The analysis of language is a precious source of information and of

foresight. It is also an effective aid for someone who knows how to use it:
a word is as good as a chemical. But it has its toxins as well . . . A discourse
can poison, surround, close off, and imprison, or it can liberate, cure,
nourish and fecundate. It is rarely neutral. Even if certain practices strive
INTRODUCTION 5
for neutrality in language, it is always just a goal, or a tangent, and never

reached; it is always to be constructed. An ethics of neutrality can only be
developed very slowly, and through rigorous analysis of discourse, and
discourses.
This book is a questioning of the language of science, and an investiga-
tion into the sexualization of language, and the relation between the two.
It is also research into deviations, idiolects, neocodes, neoformations,
and anomalous structures, in their relations to the most common, the
most readily received, code. The strategy, tactics, and theory of enunciation
can often be broached only through deviant practices. Unless one were able
to find a subject who had happened upon a perfect distance with respect to
its language, a metalanguage without dogmas or superimposed schemata?
But that is virtually impossible. In order to theorize enunciation, we would
need discussion among at least two or three interlocutors. And that never
happens. Everyone chooses his or her own ideal perspective, makes the law
in his or her own domain, hires assistants, and claims to have the first
word, or the last. . . . Or builds a house closed off to the other, to others.
Two sexually differentiated subjects would be one possible solution.
However, this proposal is still dismissed as limited in scope, not really
pertinent. Nevertheless, it could be the angle, the summit and the base
from which we could protect language against the reign of a binarism
which allows the subject to do nothing more than manipulate or weigh
data, using divisions, oppositions, and contradictions that exhaust our
reserves without creating anything new. Driven by already existing
meanings, particles of significations. Oscillations or polemics of survival
that do not engender new forms of life.
Discourse hardens up and closes off. In the subject itself. It loses its
fluidity of communication, stiffens into pathological forms - pathogens
that require the invention of strategies of observation, and of therapies for
and through language. Psychoanalysis is perhaps the most astonishing of
these: the most stratified experimental theater for the enunciation and for
the pragmatics of language, revealing their impasses, their illnesses, their
economic crises, their auto-logical circles, etc. This setting for the interpre-
tation of language is not widely recognized as such. It is, nevertheless,
unique as a scientific possibility. However, it depends on the aptitude of
the subject for self-criticism and self-analysis vis-a-vis its most subtle and
resistant determinations. This task is the task of the clinician and his or
her patients, without witnesses guaranteeing some truth foreign to the
scene. The tool is the speaking subject and his or her relation to the word.
I had sought to group these texts by theme, purpose, or goal. However,
respect for chronological order seemed more interesting in its simplicity.
Of course, requests or requirements on the part of the journals or insti-
tutions that inspired the research or meditation do interfere with this
chronology. But, even if only to show the evolution of a style in the trans-
lation of thought, it is meaningful to leave the texts in the order of their
writing. One reads in this the perplexity of the exposition of the work:
complex, complicated, dependent at times on influences or subordinations,
on the scientific oversimplifications required by publishing, or on a style
that will sometimes be called literary or poetic, and which is often nothing
more than the discovery of a mode of affirmation. All philosophers and
thinkers are poets in the peaceful exposition of their message. But the
strange economy of reason dictates that this style not be recognized, or
that it remain unappreciated, until after the death of the writer. Who
salutes the poet . . . in Aristotle, in Hegel, in Einstein?
A decisive contribution to the history of culture is signed in the text or
the formula - the writing of a thought or of an equation cannot be
separated from its expression. The existence of any creative work denies
the opposition philosophy and science v. literature. Creation is writing just
as much as it is a practice of objectivity, truth, or thought. It is both.
Commentators and metalinguists believe that it is possible to dissociate, to
differentiate, the two. For the one who creates, however, this opposition
has no meaning, other than an artificial and paralyzing one.
How else can we understand the current effervescence centered around

literature? And around writing as such? And how then can we understand
the repeated claims by numerous scientists that science cannot be expressed
poetically?
We are dealing with at least two phenomena: the interpretation of a
story that is being read after the fact; and a period of transition where new
meaning has not yet been discovered. The subject of science, or of the
episteme, is dragged down, or swallowed up, by repetitions and formulas,
by graphisms in which it does not recognize itself, but which control it.
Too lucid or not yet lucid enough to create. Able to get to the bottom of
certain things and not others? Affirming itself in maintaining the past
order, and in repressing future discovery and research. This is domination
by those who do not create.
There remains the still veiled horizon, which needs other instruments of
translation. To go back to, or to finally turn to, T? The sexed I. As yet
unexplored discourse, especially in the sciences which refuse to confine
themselves to metalanguage . . . It is extremely difficult, for anyone who
does not affirm herself or himself as a sexed subject, not to remain blindly
within the confines and the commentaries of the language, or the
languages, of the other, especially the other sex. If science refuses the
subject the right to affirm its sex, is the discourse it prescribes not confined
to a generally neuter metalanguage, amputated of an important objective
dimension?
INTRODUCTION 7
The truth the subject believes about the world is still just a double of his
or her own obscured, unrecognized truth. Without knowing it, she or he
tells her or his own story, affirming as universal a truth that remains
partial. No one, man or woman, inhabits his or her space in the postula-
tion of norms valuable for all. Everyone, woman or man, has to negotiate
varying degrees of freedom or confinement. Everything ends up being out
of focus - discourse, words and gestures, whether taken together or apart.
What is needed is an ethics for those who would build and inhabit their
own territory, their own world, and who respect the other's, particularly
the other scxs.
Strange days . . . Where our truth is sought in the animal or in other
domains. Science is interested in the homes and languages of animals, in
vegetables and in minerals . . . more than in human beings? Humans
supposedly need an economy for life and one for speech, but no ethical
link between the two realities.
II
Linguistic and Specular
Communication
Genetic Models and Pathological Models
The reciprocal integration of the body and of language, origin of the

imaginary, decenters man1 in relation to himself, and marks the beginning
of his wanderings. The ineluctable corollary of this is the impossibility of
the return to the body as the secure place of his identity to himself. All he
is is mediated by the word, and his trace can be found only in the word of
the other.
In lived experience, the primary imaginary can be detected in the
primordial phantasms forming the deep structures of human behaviors.
The phantasm is the original specification of the imaginary in the submis-
sive, passive mode, witness to the contingency of the coming into being of
the subject - - pierced by the world and by language from the begin-
ning. Too closely defined, the phantasm changes into chains. Chance then
becomes necessity, and possibility is reduced to linear reality. It is up to
the word of the other to unleash what has been bound up. Retracing
certain pathways, it reactivates all of their intersections, except when it acts
as a boundary of immutable lines.
This word is sometimes the analyst's, but can also be the lover's, or the
poet's. They all share the goal of getting back as close as possible to the
initial integration of the body and of language, not in an endlessly retraced
circular path, but in a spiral whose revolutions get closer and closer to the
point of origin. Hence their incantatory power, and the fact that they
temporarily liberate man from his phantasmagoria, making him the
subject of all that, more essential than his story, is woven underneath his
story, like his silence and his foundation itself.
At that time, man has no language. He is its plaything without power to
play with it. He does not yet benefit from the signifier. But the discourse
of the other leaves its indelible traces in him, constituting him as signifying
matrix. A discourse of love whose content is provided by himself. And, in
this primitive dyad that man forms with the other, he is by turns signifier
and signified. But he is not yet structured as <1>2 by the signifier, and a
fortiori has not mastered the double face of the sign. That is to say that the
subject has not been established in its singularity. The linguistic correlation
of the phantasm is to be sought in the verb in its infinitive, impersonal,
atemporal form: verb-substantive.
*
The effect of the third term on the relation of the <subject> to the other,
of the <subject> to language, is decisive. At the introduction of the third
party into the primitive relation between the child and the mother, 
and <you>3 are established as disjunction, separation. The initial mono-
logue becomes the possibility of dialogue. However, this opposition of 
and <you>, of <you> and , remains <one>, without potential for inver-
sion or permutation — the father being only another <you> — if the mother
and the father do not communicate with each other.
In this dialogue between <youl> and <you2> - from which he feels
excluded even though he is included within the communication - the
possibility of communication through integration into the code is estab-
lished for the subject, who is henceforth a being with/of language. It is
through experiencing that the <you> that is for him the father - or the
mother - is an in communication with the mother, just as the mother
is an when she speaks to the father, and therefore that the and the
<you> are interchangeable, are relations and not terms, that the subject
enters into the circuit of exchange.4
However, this requires that the subject has been constituted - the same
as for the eventual permutation of the two other terms of the exchange -
as a <he>. What is <he> at this point, if not <zero>, condition of the
permutation of and <you>, and in some ways empty form that
guarantees the structure? Evocative of, without being similar to, that
empty space in (draughts) or chess that allows one pawn to move into
another's space. The status of <he0> is nothing like that of or <you>,
despite the ambiguity that reifies it and classifies it with the latter, the
personal pronouns. It is nothing and nobody, but rather the possibility of
identification and of permutation of and <you>, of <the sender> and
<the receiver>, the only terms that effect communication. Implicated in
communication as its condition of possibility, this third, or, even more
accurately, fourth number — , <youl>, <you2>, <he0> — is a blank, a
void, the space left by an exclusion, the negation that allows a structure
to exist as such.
Situated in this space, the child is excluded from communication while
at the same time integrated into it. This requires him to go through a first
death, an experience of nothingness. The subject immediately constitutes
itself as an I/O, if not a you/0, through identification with the father, or
with the mother, senders or receivers of the exchange at which he is
present.
LINGUISTIC AND SPECULAR COMMUNICATION 11
The constitution of the circuit of exchange is none other than the

positioning of the so-called Oedipal structure. The notion of castrating
agent is thus reduced to a phantasmagoria, a misleading diachronic reifica-
tion of a synchronic operation. In the same way, delegating its function to
the father alone seems doubly excessive. The mother as well as the father is
alternatively and <you> in their exchange, and this is no doubt the
origin of Oedipal ambivalence. In any case, the castrator, if he exists, is to
be sought elsewhere, in the very conditions of the structure of communica-
tion.
These things can be considered differently. In their initial non-reversible

relation, and <you> make up <one>. Lack of differentiation of
persons, of the identical and the non-identical, this <one> is already the
possibility of their future disjunction. If a third term intervenes, <one>
first divides up into:
[I = one] + [youl = one] + [you2 = one]
This first division and the positioning of the persons translated by the +,
addition and disjunction, leaves room for indeterminacy. here is still
 or . Identification with the self merges with identifi-
cation with the other. It is when it becomes that <one>
becomes the possibility of disjunction and permutation. In the exchange
between <youl> and <you2>, <one> comes to take the place of , at the
same time establishing identity to self as the interchangeableness of the
locutor and the receiver of the message <one> witnesses.
There is analogy between the status of <one> and of <zero> in the
functioning of the structure of exchange. To grasp this operation is to
understand that the unconscious can be founded as structure and not as
content.
At this stage, fictional of course, the functioning of the exchange is not

yet linguistic communication. And this first structuring falls into the not-
known, because it is not expressed; forever imperceptible to the subject
and yet the basis of his behaviors as well as his words. The object of
exchange is yet to be instituted, to be founded.
It will spring from the sleight of hand analyzed by Frege in reference to
the engendering of the sequence of numbers. 5 <Zero> is counted there as
<one>, <heO> as <hel>. <Hel> is the signifying assumption of <heO>,
constitutive of the referent.
The first object of communication comes into being as hel/heO. It is,
for example, when he, excluded from the communication, is named in the
father's and mother's dialogue, that the subject, the <zero>, becomes
<hel>. But it also occurs when he is designated as 'son,' 'man,' /woman,'

or 'John,' in the words of the father, guarantor of the matrix of communi-
cation.
The proper name best represents the paradox of the engendering of ' 1'
out of <zero>. Pure signifier of the <zero> of the subject, the proper name
constitutes it as ' 1 ' by inserting it into the open set of T' + ' 1 ' + ' 1 , ' etc.,
that is proper names.6 It is never a closed set: another subject can be
inserted into it, and the engendering of' 1' out of <zero> is repeated for all
possible subjects. However, this engendering is also the necessary condition
for the ordering of the objects of communication, just as <zero> is the
necessary condition for the ordering of the sequence of numbers. Hel/HeO
is not only the possibility of the inclusion of the world as object of
exchange, but is also supported by being structured in organized sub-sets,
always defined by reference to the <zero> of the subject. It is thus that one
might represent the totality of animates and inanimates as (1) + (2); the
sum of persons, animals and things as (1) + (2) + (3), etc. Such a struc-
turing of the world, whose complexity is actually unequalled by the
elementary picture painted above, is always modifiable, never truly finished
or closed off, because it originated as <zero>.
The constitution of the object of communication, of 'hel,' is a death

that is correlative to the structuring of the subject itself as signifier, finite,
T.' But this death is the condition of the insertion of the subject, of
<zero>, into the chain, of its coming to, and its representation in, the
order of the signifier. It exists here only as the place of the word of the
other whose subject is object, and as such assimilatable to the world, to the
inanimate. If it should name that other, the signifier would become the
representative of its representation. This requires that the subject identify
with the guarantors of the word, and it could then be symbolized as 1/
hel//heO/one. Thus in the back-and-forth movement from its structuring
by the signifier to its mastery of it, the subject is born in its singularity.
Exclusion, the necessary condition for the establishment of the structure
of exchange, has as its correlate finiteness, inherent in the object of exclu-
sion. The double aspect of the nothingness and the finiteness of death is,
for man, already inscribed in the very premises of communication. This is,
no doubt, the source of his ability to anticipate death, since he lives it as
soon as he is introduced to the symbolic order. All he has to do is to turn
the origin into an ending.
' H e l ' corresponds more precisely to 'he' classified with T and 'you'
among the personal pronouns. However, unlike the latter, it already carries
the mark of gender - 'he'/'she' - and of number - 'he,' 'she'/'they' - sign
of its status as object of communication. The constitution of 'hel' allows
the disjunction of T itself into (I), subject of the enunciation, and CI,'
subject of the utterance. Even though the former underlies all utterance, it
is not always expressed there, not always materialized. Ambiguous in this
way, '(I) " I " desire' can be opposed to '(I) "You" desire' where the two
subjects are clearly dissociated. But that is over-simplifying. (I) can be
absent from 'I,' or can disguise itself as 'you,' or as 'he,' or even more
effectively be represented under cover of the anonymous 'one.' The path is
thus laid out for the deceits and deceptions of discourse, the subject's way
to avoid the primary risk of finiteness, of reification, but also a proof of
the impossibility of coincidence of (I) and 'I.' Thus the utterance can
never be taken at face value, but must be taken as an enigma, a rebus,
where the subject conceals itself. Knowing that, is one of the surest trump
cards of analytic practice.
Allowing the subject to be absent from the discourse, 'hel' is also the
condition of the inclusion or the exclusion of the world as possible subject
of the utterance. It is also lwe - T + ('you' or 'he'), or T + ('he' or 'you'),
or T + ('you' + ['they animate' or 'they inanimate']) - or else it is 'you
plural'— 'you' + 'he.' We are not dealing here with the initial 'one,' the
primordial lack of differentiation among persons, or between the world
and persons. The marks of gender, and of number, carried by the gramma-
tical forms attest to this. Persons here add up to specific disjunctive units,
and the world is divided into animate and inanimate elements.
Although they are objects of the partners of the enunciation, T and

'you' are not explicitly objects. Their function as subjects of the utterance
can conceal the fact that they are already objectivized as those subjects.
This remains true for the totality of utterances whose traces can be found,
and whose science is founded, in analysis.
What is explicitly given as object is the object of the utterance; that is,
'me,' 'you,' 'him/her,' etc. As point of convergence for the subject of the
enunciation and the subject of the utterance, 'me' becomes the partial and
no doubt illusory possibility for the subject to master its objectivization,
but is sometimes also the intentional transfer of objectivization to the
other. is here opposed to <You see me>. In any case, 'me'
is always a problematic and precarious appropriation. Turning oneself
into an object always includes the risk of being possessed. Only the
disjunction of 'himself/'him' palliates this ambiguity. <He sees himself>
but . If 'him' is an object for the subject that I am, 'he'
cannot really possess his own image constituted as an object for me in my
role as subject. And even when he sees himself, it is still I who benefit
from the spectacle. Thus, turning oneself into an object implies possible
capture by the other.
More subtle is the mastery offered by where the utter-
ance itself is taken up as object of the subject of the enunciation. It is
(you) that it seeks to evict as the very space of all alienation. The discourse
turns back in on itself, forms a loop. It envelops the subject, imprisons it
in its own circularity and repetitions. (I) vacillates from having missed its
call to (you). It doubles up its words, gets stuck in its utterances, the
totality of which build up a <self> little by little.
Thus, the <self> that is named or displayed in the totality of the
discourse is the objectivization of the subject, as well as its descent to the
level of inanimate object: 'the self.' It is the 'me' cut off from its dialectical
links to the subject, a trace of the subject, no doubt, but one that has
fallen into disuse, where the subject subsists only as mute and opaque reifi-
cation, just one among many objects in the world. Unless, failing to
reestablish the link to (I), it is simply absorbed into the world. The 'self is
then the subject made world.
At every stage of the differentiation and lack of differentiation of persons

we find <one>. The blending of identity and non-identity, it is the neces-
sary condition of their disjunction. The negative pole. Thus it is
noteworthy that the animate subject 'one' never becomes the object of the
utterance. At the most it is the object of the partners of the enunciation,
interchangeable with 'hel" or, more precisely, with 'someone' or 'no one'
— asexual, non-countable. This usage is also ambiguous, because often
within 'one' (I) or (you) can be concealed. 'One says' is not far from '(I)
. . . say' or '(you) . . . say.' When the subject is included in 'one' 7 — 'We
will be coming tomorrow' - it is indeterminate, not delimited for the
other, without gender, or individual identity. Thus 'one' appears to be the
last refuge of subjectivity, the closest possible position to the <zero> that
founded it, or to the underlying unconscious.
The 'id' can be understood as the flip side of 'one' in the primitive
disjunction of persons and things, animate and inanimate elements. Thus,
in its possible substitution for 'one,' it is the reification of the unconscious.
In response to the imposition of the proper that which constitutes it as

one/zero, the subject takes on the masked and fleeting appearance of the
personal pronouns. Both the name and the pronouns have, according to
linguists, a 'zero' signified - an ambiguous way of pinpointing both the
coming of the subject into discourse, and the difficulty of delimiting it by
linguistic means.8
*
The specular experience can be understood as the space of a possible reprise
of the first integrations of the body and of language founding the subject. As
such, it is a privileged moment for taking note of the assumptions, as well as

the denials, the persistence and the inadequacy of the subject.
Specularization9 is principally the perceptual experience of linguistic
communication in its structure - , <you>, <heO> - and its primordial
object hel/heO. The unveiling of a second imaginary, it reveals the signifier
constitutive of <hel>. It represents the engendering of <hel>, the paradox-
ical springing forth of the unit from the 'zero'. Hence the jubilation, but
also the retreat, before this double aspect of identification, and even more
of exclusion and finiteness, that the signifying structure implies. <You> is
to be sought in those to whom the child turns.10 For the subject, because
of its split, things are not so simple. Hel/HeO is still the <(I)> which
benefits from its image, a gaze that can open or close at will upon the
spectacle — unlike the ears which cannot refuse to hear — an evocation of
future mastery over, indeed of future questioning of, the signifier. The
fallen primordial <one> - in a word, the unconscious - remains. Non-
specularizable, it is the guardian of specularization. Witness to its inade-
quacy, it ensures the return, the intervals and eclipses of the subject who,
at all times, wants to vanish in order to reappear as <1>, in a repetition
irreducible to any temporal continuity, or to an infinite that cannot be cut
up into countable units, or an iterative sequence.
The specular image, visualization of the signifier, reveals its effects. Its
structuring powers can be well illustrated in the neurological anticipation
it allows the still immature child, anticipation made possible by the fact
that he is constituted as <1> by the signifier. This unification, however ,is
also a disjunction. The image unifies, but it also separates. As <1>, the
child turns toward its mother, who has become an other. They had been
merged; now they are juxtaposed, added together as T' + T.' The Gestalt
of the image, like the discreteness of the signifier, institutes discontinuity.
They have the same splitting function. Thus the specular image, like, and
as, the signifier, is a carrier of death. It stands out as the correlate to struc-
turing. Because life is in-finite outpouring. And this definite form of the
self, of the specular alter ego, or of the proper name, fixes the real in deter-
mining it, cutting it out, cutting it off. The discriminating formalization
of the second, diurnal, imaginary, which is tied up with death, is opposed
to the primary nocturnal imaginary, the guardian of life.
Death is also found elsewhere. All structure presupposes an exclusion,

an empty set, its negation, the very condition of its functioning. Down
out of imaginary formalization falls a non-structured real. The signifier is
always inappropriate to the signified. Faced with its image, the subject
feels itself situated in the place of exclusion, not specularizable in its
tripartite character — , <zero>, <one> — and yet constituted as such by
specularization. Thus the specular experience is reminiscent of the passage

through nothingness required by the introduction of the subject into the
order of the signifier, best represented by the imposition of the proper
name.
This absence of the subject from its own image, as from its own name,
undoubtedly explains their power to make unreal It is where it is not that
the subject is constituted as identical to itself. Thus is inaugurated for the
subject the parade of captures by space, or by discourse, fascinating
because the subject believes they hold the keys to its identity whose
paradoxical engendering remains concealed. Undoubtedly, in turning
toward the other, particularly toward the guarantor of communication, the
subject will learn more about its fundamental alienation in the symbolic
world, mediated by the tribute to the signifier. And yet . . . The other has
no power except insofar as he has conformed to the established order, as
representative of the law to which he submits. Trying to get back to a first
cause would be endless, and useless anyway, because the alienation is
inscribed in the very principle of the synchronic functioning of the struc-
ture of linguistic exchange. The mirror seems to offer an escape from this
social enslavement. Man seems to be able to attribute the signifier to
himself, and become master of his own identity, freed from dependence
on the word of the other.
Could we not then narrate this new version of the 'fall?' Man recognizes
his own image in woman and thinks himself master of the universe. The
day when Adam took a companion, not really other, but drawn from
himself, is the day that he separated himself from God, and denied his
subjection to the Word (it goes without saying that the manducation of
the empty set did not promote the circulation of the signifier, any more
than its metaphorization as a comestible object facilitated comprehension
of what is at stake).
As seductive as it is, specular identification is nonetheless spatial aliena-

tion. In an initial moment, the mirror takes the place of the other, the first
place of identification, all the more fearsome for being mute, immediate
mediation, non-dialectizable. Thus specular identification is, for man, the
unveiling of his freedom, but also the possibility of his madness. The most
fascinating and the surest alienation.
This spatial alienation does not even avoid dependence on the other, as
fundamental to specular identification as to the imposition of the proper
name. For without the other's presence, the relationship of my image to
the other's body which is established as I turn back toward the other, the
spectacle of my image remains foreign to me. It is an other that I there
encounter, but not really an other, because the other is merged with the
world, and not any more established in his own singularity than I am in
mine. It is the presence of 'you' that allows the exclusion of the world,
constituted as empty set. From then on the structure that constitutes the
relationship between my gaze, my image and the other's <body>, can
function in the alternating commutation of the three terms. The gaze of
the other - <(you)> - is thus the divided and necessary witness of my
specular identification. The other's appropriation as mine - <for me> -
remains ambiguous. For our respective gazes - <(I)> and <(you)> - our
respective images are objects alternatively. In order for them to take on
value as duplication of reality, our <bodies> will have to be, in their own
turn, excluded, and our juxtaposed images become the common object of
our exchange as possible subjects of our utterances. It is only as a final step
that <you> itself will be constituted as an empty set, leaving as the only
terms of the structure my gaze — <(I)> — my image, and the 0/one.
Thus I can feign possession of the specular image, bestow it or take it

away from myself at will, and play at modifying it - in game-like prefi-
guration, similar to the syllabic games of the young child, of my power
over the signifier. However, this mastery is ambiguous. The subject
exhausts itself in a stereotyped reiteration, in the juxtaposition of
metaphors which, even if they mime the possession of the 0/one, do not
permit its real emergence into the linear signifying chain.
The image is a deceitful signifier. It looks from the start like a global,
finished discourse. And the comparison of two specular images is rather
more like the simultaneous presence of two autonomous representations
of the same paradigm, than like the veritable relationship between one
signifier and another. Nor does it resemble the establishment of a conti-
guity between signifiers that would be more than a simple juxtaposition,
unable to constitute a specular utterance. I can try to articulate a total text
by grimaces, the simulacra of utterances. These are then inscribed in an
already given matrix; but when the first message is sent, the last is also
sent. At the level of the specular text, A implies A and not Z, in
maximum redundancy, total recursiveness. If, judging this iteration
unbearable, the subject should mutilate its face, the text would, of course,
be changed, but it would then be irreducible to the former text, a new set
without relationship or link to the previous set. This is to say that the
global signifier that is the image in the mirror excludes any possibility of
temporal succession, because it cannot carry within itself the mark of the
preceding image or of the one that will follow, any more than it can be
associated with another image. Unlike the signifying chain of discourse.
The subject does not find the way to carry out its own creation in this
atemporal utterance?
Instability in the terms of 'communication' results from the totality of

the text in specularization, because the gaze is constituted simultaneously
as sender and receiver of the message. The image defines <hel>, but is still
also a possible subject or object of the utterance - or <me> - or even
the subject of the enunciation - <(I)>. No doubt such permutations can be
found in linguistic exchange, but they are carried out there in temporal
succession. I can function as sender and receiver of the message only one
after the other and not at the same time. This inscription of the utterance
into duration is a function of the inadequacy of the signifier to the
signified which requires the temporal unfolding of discourse. Thus, at the
level of the terms of exchange, the diachronic instability of communication
is opposed to the synchronic instability of specularization.
These different modes of specular <discourse> can be explained by the

properties of the structure itself. It does not function due to the relative
inadequacy of the signifer to the signified, but through a play of permuta-
tions of two signifiers to one signified, reset continuously in motion by the
fact that the stakes are never engaged irreversibly. This can be ascertained
through the fact that the subject appropriates its own image, its metaphor,
as soon as it is constituted, but with no assurance of ever really seizing
hold of itself there.
This type of structure can also be found at another level of linguistic

communication - that of writing, which permits the specular duplication
of the word.11
*
The avatars of specularization, and the distortions of language, can always be
understood as expressions of a primordial absence, or at least of the precar-
iousness of the empty set, of the <zero>, which underlies the structure of
exchange and guarantees its functioning. If it has not been situated at the site
of the <zero>, and if therefore it has not been able to assume non-identity to
itself, the very condition of its identification, the subject, if it even exists at
that point, cannot recognize the mirror image as the same and as other than
the self, and cannot come into, even as it necessarily remains excluded from,
the chain of discourse. The subject cannot exist merged with the signifier
even in its negation or its denial, but it is also threatened if it refuses its effects
or finds in them a too precisely appropriate representation of itself, or,
indeed, if it wants to benefit from the signifier while eluding its law.12
For the psychotic, the deficiency is already to be found with the parents.
He was, they say, his mother's partial object. That is undoubtedly to affirm
that he was from the very beginning constituted by her as a reifying projec-
tion of her unconscious. Not having assumed her own non-identity to

herself, she cannot consent to the status of alterity for her child. He will be
the signifying medium of her desire, thenceforth destined to be partial.
The same fate falls to the father also, unless he appears as the simple
signifier of the law. Whatever the case may be, the relations of the mother
to her man, as to her child, are structured within the permutation of two
signifiers for one signified, reminder of the specular structure. The triangu-
lation which presupposes, in the place of the partners of the exchange, two
signifieds for one signifier, is never established here. This failure of triangu-
lation means that the child never acquires the status of a distinct unit, and
is thus deprived of the layering proper to the signified — he is given as pure
signified object merged with the world - and of all possibility of represen-
tation in the signifying chain. Never having been constituted as hel/heO in
the first place, he is destined never to be anything but the representative of
the desire of his mother, with no possible access to the function of repre-
sentation for himself.
For the psychotic, the presence of the mirror signifies the confrontation
of the pure signifier that he is, with that other, specular, signifier that
duplicates him. The fact that he either turns the mirror around or turns
away from it, or looks behind it for a trace of the signified, or sees his
father in the image, shows how unbearable that confrontation is for him.
The specular image presents itself to him as the place of a signifying depri-
vation, as he is left as nothing in front of the mirror which takes on his
only right to existence. Unless, turning back to his mother, he lives the
unsustainable contradiction of being at the same time himself and his
opposite, signifying medium of her signified only, as well as its negation.
Thus he comes face to face with the metaphoric layering of life and death
rather than living their metonymic succession, which alone is bearable.
The resulting anguish will not cease until the intolerable ambiguity is
lifted. Merging into the image - going through the mirror - or denying it,
and thus eliminating one of the terms of the contradiction, appear as the
only possible ways out.
For the neurotic, the problem lies not in the formation of the system of
exchange, but in the dynamic of its functioning. The structure of commu-
nication has a foundation here, but it has a tendency to jam up, freeze,
and suspend exchange. These stases in the economy of the system can be
understood in reference to the primordial experience of desired object on
which access to the status of desiring and speaking subject depends.
The hysteric did not get enough love. Or at least that is his most funda-
mental phantasm. With respect to his mother's desire, he experiences
himself as signifier marked by the sign of incompleteness, indeed of
rejection, derisory because unable to sustain the comparison with the

phallic signifier. The impotence and the abusive intolerance of the lawgiver
father leave the mother in her immoderation and her refusal, or her
inability, to symbolize her desire in some way, to focus it on some object,
and thus allow her to change objects.
Thus for the hysteric, <hel> is always to be elaborated, to be deferred in
its unifying virtue, the threat of exclusion from the field of desire that
sustains him. His identity to himself will therefore always be precarious,
and always feared. He does not accept himself as fragment, as facet of an
always future unity, contested as soon as he feels himself taken in his
totality. The subject suffers from this refusal, this fragmentation, of the
signifier which should constitute him. He is always to be born, in the
process of being born, halted at the metaphoric time of his structuring,
which he relives over and over, exhausting himself being the ideal object,
finally assumable because it conforms to the one he senses in the place of
the other's desire. Sisyphean enterprise, because the other is never that first
other who marked him with the sign, and whose fundamental dissatisfac-
tion - phantasm or reality — he feels.
For the hysteric, the confrontation with the mirror is like the test of his
insignificance. As the image unveils itself as the space of his unity, he
rejects it as inappropriate to hold the gaze of the other. Ceaselessly
outlined, only to be denied, the image inaugurates an inexhaustible series
of sometimes confused sketches whose ending is dependent on vanquishing
fragmentation, on the spatial reassembling of multiple, heterogeneous
identifications, a unity desirable because postponed, and, in any case,
impossible. For these specularizations, which claim to be partial, are also
labile, lived in an instant, outside of all temporal contiguity which would
authorize their summation. For the hysteric, beginning over again the
metaphoric moment of his constitution ends up positioning <hel> as
transcendence in the face of which all <hel'>, <hel ,/ >, etc., collapse as
derisory inadequacies. Avoiding the splitting function of the signifier,
ceaselessly palliating his incompleteness, the subject misses the moment of
his disappearance, but also the correlative moment when, excluded but
involved, he could re-emerge in metonymic succession. That is to say that
the image will be above all object - <hel> - for the other, the only true
subject - <(I)> - and not taken up as representation of the subject himself
— <me> or <myself>. If the image does take the risk of being the subject of
the utterance, it is only on condition of leaving the responsibility for the
utterance to the other. The question mark reveals this, just as, punctuating
the grimace, smile or mask, it reveals the precariousness of their assump-
tion by the subject. Never reducible to the empty set, without risk of
evanescence for the subject himself, the other remains the immediate
guarantor of all speech and of all desire.
The obsessive felt too loved. Therein lies his force and his tragedy. His
mother found him too appropriate a signifier for her desire; as for him, he
is marked by the sign of this comprehensiveness, or even excess. It is not
that the phallic referent is totally missing, but that it is referred to some
elsewhere, to some absent hero, whose death would be the surest guarantee
of non-intrusion. Never incarnate in the person of a 'living' father, it
leaves the child the certitude of being, in the present, the exhaustive
answer to the desire of the mother, not subject to those polar inversions
that are the risks of desire and the marks of its actual existence.
Naming is no problem for the obsessive, since it confirms him in his singu-
larity as desired being. For him, his name will be the emblem, badge, and, no
doubt, epitaph, of his phallic status. He experiences himself as too identical
to himself, as the too exact adequacy of his signified to his signifier. In this
stable equilibrium, the subject walls himself off, and, riveted to what he has
been, is incapable of liberating himself for a perpetual becoming. The bar
separating <hel> from the other participants in the exchange thickens,
resulting in the stereotyping of discourse, the recurrence of utterances. If they
can be heard as empty, it is not that the subject is absent. On the contrary, he
duplicates himself there completely. However, in this metonymy of the self,
detectable to the other in the loops of his interminable palavers, he seeks to
recover himself without ever truly expressing himself. Stillborn.
The obsessive enjoys specular reflections. He likes to verify the perma-
nence of his identity to himself and to reassure himself of his mastery over
it. Specularization is for him without risks, established at the time when
the image is contemplated — <me>, <myself> — and not invested - <hel>.
In order to monopolize the spectacle more completely, he evicts all other
gazes. <(You)> is the more easily excluded for being possessed in his desire
at the level of the image itself. It is there that as <(you)> he can re-emerge,
neutralized in his alienating functions, for a Active dialogue. Alone, in
front of the mirror, absolute master of the signifier, the obsessive will
attempt to escape its power of fascination through meticulous examination,
through an exhaustive inventory, imitations of a true temporal succession.
In fact, these pure metonymies are inscribed in a spellbinding circularity,
closer to the pacing of a prisoner than to a veritable progression. And the
obsessive himself, always turned toward his past, is not fooled. Looking for
what? The lost traces of the subject?
The fact that the subject is introduced into the signifying order as the
representative of a system of connotations, and not as denotation, allows
us to explain his future difficulties in sustaining the dynamic of exchange.
That he was, as a first step, marked by either the + sign or the — sign,
impedes the shuttling back and forth from exclusion to excess that is the
condition of his effective emergence into discourse. The work of the
analyst will be to restore his non-identity to himself, his identity to <zero>

that permits the inversion of the sign. This requires that the analyst
himself take up the wager and function as <zero>, the empty set,
temporary guarantor of the free play of structure.
*
The specular image is the analog of the signifier, but not of language in its
double nature. The signified is on the side of the non-specularizable. If we
go back to the genetic fiction of the mirror stage, while the image repre-
sents the signifier, it is through the <one> that the signified is introduced;
it is the <one> that will fall beneath the signifier in order to give it
meaning. The gaze represents the subject who plays with the signifier.
Thus the distortions of language emerge.
The schizophrenic, who lacks the back-and-forth from the mirror to his
body, is the play of the signifier. His discourse is evocative of a new
language of substitutions, of neo-forms that he claims are equivalences, but
that are really pseudo-metaphors because they cannot be deciphered. The
axis of contiguity vanishes. Like fireworks, his discourse fascinates with its
freedom of creation, its playful offhandedness. That it has no meaning can
be seen in the fade-ins and -outs of the intonation and of the articulation,
as in moments of perplexity where the <subject>, listening, waits for
language itself to pick up the ball. He is not really the sender of a message,
just the carrier. Language, having become a free activity of generations and
transformations, here holds the place of the subject of the enunciation.
For the delusional, things are different. His foreclosure of the specular
image becomes the elaboration of a closed system, palliating the missing
image. Language freezes into fascinating totalities where the <subject>
alienates himself. Words no longer serve as a means of exchange. They are
too similar to him and at the same time too inaccessible. Inaccessible
because similar. The delusion represents an attempt at structuring the
<self>, and the <subject> can be detected in the fragile and fecund part of
the system, the stream where he nourishes himself.
The senile dementia patient - studies have been done showing the loss
of recognition of the mirror image13 — is pure object of the utterance. His
irrepressible discourse spreads out along the chain, flat, very poor in
vocabulary. He also is 'spoken,' not by language but by speech, or usage,
hardened into a system of uncontrolled utterances. Hence that intermin-
able succession of idiosemiological utterances which become more and
more stereotyped as memory problems increase, and as the field of
immediate experience diminishes.
Does one speak of language distortions in the neurotic? No, not really.
And yet . . .
The hysteric never runs out of words. Meaningful words, yes, but he
takes them back immediately. That's never what he really wanted to say.
Please don't take him at his word! It's his obsession. He takes up the
stream of signifiers, selecting one in order to reject it immediately and
choose another, which he denies as soon as it's out. There's no end to it.
He can't tolerate his image, any more than he can pin himself down in
discourse. The stream of signifiers and the stream of images, his zigzagging
discourse, the masks he changes from moment to moment, all show his
desire for a total discourse that would encompass all signifiers and for an
image that would consist of innumerable contradictory facets. And then
what? He gets lost in his utterances, doesn't recognize himself in his
masks, suffers. 'Who am I?' c What can that mean?' he worries, wonders.
Lost, he turns to you. Because, finally, he senses the subject in his
discourse. It's you.
How different are the prudent and formidable words of the obsessive.
He delights in his discourse, touches it up, polishes it. He is the man of
one single utterance, and of one unique image. He'll serve it to you over
and over, prepared or presented differently. Don't be offended. He doesn't
take you for deaf or stupid. He just ignores you. He talks to himself. You
are merely a pretext, a spectator just barely admitted to the dialogue he
carries on with himself, and which will go on in your absence. The less
you show yourself, the better he'll feel, because he brooks no disagreement
with his discourse or with his image. Only your silence, the suspension of
your own desire, can one day interrupt the flux of redundant utterances,
utterances of utterances, often, for the sake of prudence, empty. He inter-
rupts himself: 'To whom was I speaking?' If you persevere, and resist the
temptation to get a word in edgewise, scanning the silence when he finally
speaks to you, his desire may be able to liberate itself from the capture of
the gaze, from its too perfect appropriateness to the signifier, and open up
a real dialogue.
Thus the distortions of language - aberrant prevalence of the signifier or

the signified, of the image of the l body,' fragmentation, over-investment,
juxtaposed metaphors and frozen metonymies — are related to those of the
specular experience. This is not to say that the specular experience merges
into the experience of spoken communication. It represents it. One
presupposes the other. And if one of the terms of specularization turns up
missing, or vacillates, is the underlying discourse not the missing or vacil-
lating origin?14
Ill
Negation and Negative
Transformations in the Language
of Schizophrenics
For an approach to schizophrenic language, psycholinguistics can use

several types of functional models, depending upon the hypotheses
adopted, or on the level of discourse targeted by the research.
It can study the utterance produced. In that case, textual analysis is
applied to spontaneous or semi-induced discourse. The linguist uses a
taxonomic model to carry out differential analyses of linguistic perfor-
mances. Such analyses, done by Lorenz, for example, permit at best an
elaboration of deviant grammars for schizophrenia. In this distributional
perspective, the utterance can be studied only as a divergence from the
norm, and can take on broader significance only when compared to the
utterances of non-schizophrenics.
However, analysis can also take place at the level of enunciation - that
is, at the level of the generation of messages. The methodology is adopted
from generative and transformational grammars, which establish rules for
enunciation, and for the transformations the utterance undergoes between
its generation and its realization. Specific characteristics of enunciation can
be detected in spontaneous discourse; however, linguistic models allow for
experiments whose analysis brings the production of language to the
forefront. For example:
• the production of sentences simulates the generation of utterances by
asking respondents to produce a sentence integrating certain
morphemes;
• the transformation of minimal sentences simulates the activity of the
speaking subject by asking him or her to carry out linguistic operations
under conditions where morpho-syntactical variables are limited, but
which require the use of one or several transformations.
What can then be defined is not a deviant grammar, but a grammar
specific to the schizophrenic, whose language can be seen as a whole,

functioning independently of other languages, but using the same linguistic
code. The compatibilities and incompatibilities of the lexemes used in the
sentences produced, the ways in which messages are disambiguated, the
resolution of semantic or syntactic anomalies, the relationship between
the grammar of the sentences and their acceptability, the specific structure
of the lexical classes where the choices are made — where the inclusion of
terms is just as important as their exclusion - all permit the definition
of the languages of schizophrenics as neo-structurings resulting, at the level
of the generation of the sentence and its transformations, from singular,
specific rules, definable in linguistic terms.
These two types of approach to schizophrenic language remain above all

descriptive, even when they lead to the construction of functional models.
The psycholinguist can try to get beyond distributional analysis of the
utterance, and beyond generative and transformational analysis of the
enunciation, by taking as explanatory hypotheses the structures of commu-
nication that underlie the generation of messages. She or he can study the
modifications and perturbations in schizophrenic language, in order to
determine the cause of the specificity of the verbal production of schizo-
phrenics.
When the structures of communication are reduced to their three funda-
mental terms — subject: /; addressee: you; world: he/she/it — there are three
levels where the relation between the partners of communication and its
object or referent can be discovered.
(a) It can be studied at the level of the sentence, or of the utterance, in
the interrelations among 7,' 'you,' and 'she/he,' or their representatives. This
will mean analyzing the relative frequency of the pronouns, and the dialec-
tical relationships among sender, addressee and referent.
(b) At another level, the relationships among the partners of the
enunciation and the referent can be pinpointed by specifying the types of
transformation preferentially used or excluded by respondents. Thus inter-
rogative transformations appear to be a way to leave responsibility for the
utterance to the addressee, whereas emphatic transformations, at least
when applied to the subject of the utterance, leave the world in the
position of principal guarantor of communication. Finally, negative trans-
formations can be carried out only by respondents capable of assuming
responsibility for their own statements.
(c) The kinds of relationship established between enunciation and utter-
ance also reveal the type of structures of communication preferred. The
statements / am hungry, I notice that I am hungry, he was hungry that day,
are all situated differently with respect to the process of enunciation. They
can be qualified respectively as direct utterance, utterance of an utterance
NEGATION AND NEGATIVE TRANSFORMATIONS 27
(or indirect utterance), and narrative. The indirect utterance, systematically

employed, appears to be a means of eliminating the addressee, whereas
narrative assigns responsibility for the utterance to the world, and not to
the subject.
In this last type of analysis, utterances are not treated as texts where
signifiers are studied in order to reveal the contents of a message; it is
rather the linguistic forms that are taken as a means of locating the subject
in the enunciation.
Linguistic perturbations and deficiencies were noted, among aphasics, in

the realization of the message, and, among patients with senile dementia,
in the generation of the message. What is problematic among psychotics,
however, is the very existence of a dialectical relationship among the
partners of enunciation and between the subject of the enunciation and his
or her utterance, or the object of communication. Of course, this distinc-
tion must be made with caution, in the sense that the levels of language
interact with each other. Isolatable in models, they merge in the realization
of the subject's discourse, where they work together to determine its speci-
ficity. Nevertheless, it is useful to determine what type of analysis will be
most fruitful, as well as which angle will allow us to explain most exhaus-
tively, and to render explicit, the forms constituting the specificity of the
discourse of a particular type of subject. It is from this perspective that I
have chosen to center my research on the language of schizophrenics
around the perturbations in the structures of communication.
I have just indicated, in a general overview, that variations in the structures

of communication can be apprehended in several ways. Among these diverse
types of analysis, I have chosen to deal with the problem of negative trans-
formation, particularly its controlled realization in response to experimental
exercises, because, even though only a small number of variables come into
play, they allow us to examine the essential problem of schizophrenic
language. Indeed, the results of the experiment, to which can be applied a
distributional analysis determining the divergences between performances of
schizophrenic respondents and those of so-called 'normal' respondents, or of
other pathological groups, allow us to demonstrate the relationship between
the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the utterance - or, if one
prefers, between (I) and T or 'you,' in a statement of the type: [(I) say]: T
love, or [(I) say]: 'you' love. The negative transformation, in fact, requires
the ability to dissociate the subject of the enunciation, who generates

sentences, from the utterances produced. It is only insofar as utterances are
experienced as distinct from the subject, as objects proposed for communi-
cation, that transformations can be applied to them.
Of course, one might object that the process of dissociation is empha-
sized by the artificial nature of the exercises, and that, in any case, the
utterance to be transformed is suggested by the researcher, which brings in
new variables. However, despite their artificiality, the exercises do not
create non-existent problems, because the spontaneous discourse of schizo-
phrenics also raises the issue of negative transformations.
Respondents are asked to perform two different exercises in order to

verify their aptitude for transforming a statement. In one of the exercises, I
give the respondent a predicative sentence and ask him or her to apply a
negative transformation, indicating the morphological procedure she or he
will have to use: he/she closes the door —• he/she does not close the door.
In the other exercise, the opposites exercise, I ask the respondent to supply
the opposites of given adjectives or verbs, active or passive. The adjectives
used exclude morphological opposites - they are adjectives of the wide/
narrow as opposed to the polite/impolite type. The same for the verbs; I
exclude those of the type do/undo, or those that indicate an inversion and
not an opposite: to light up/to put out the light.
The opposites exercise is based on the hypothesis that the lexical
opposite (big/small; to love/to hate) is created, in the same way as the
negation of a sentence {he comes/he does not come), from a negative transfor-
mation applied to a part of the predicate of the kernel sentence. It assumes
the relative equivalence - with differences in the effect of the negation - of
he is not big —• he is small; or not to love —• to hate.
Since the opposites exercise is much more easily manipulated (even for
the so-called 'normal' groups of respondents) than the negative transforma-
tion exercise, the greater part of this study will be devoted to the analysis
of results collected in response to it. Those obtained from the transforma-
tion of sentences will be brought in later.
Description of the exercise: the opposites requested are from two gramma-
tical classes:
• ADJECTIVES: grand, pauvre, chaud, doux, profond, beau, absent, vrai,

pareil, comique, masculin, etc. [big, poor, hot, sweet (soft),
deep, beautiful, absent, true, similar, comic, masculine,
etc.]
• VERBS: naitre, aimer, savoir, etc. [to be born, to love, to know

(knowing), etc.]
These words present different types of ambiguities:
• between several possible grammatical classes: knowing is both a verb and
a substantive
• between words having different distributions - for example, sweet (soft) —
or even between words and phrases: to be born can be heard as not to be-,1
• between h o m o p h o n e s distinguished only by the fact that some of them
are associated with inanimates and others with animates: thus, deep can
be associated with inanimates {deep water) or with animates {deep mind),
or with behaviors or actions of animates {deep text, deep gaze). These
divergent meanings result in two different types of opposites: shallow or
superficial. This type of ambiguity is frequent on the list given to the
respondent: a warm spell/a warm person-, a sweet dish/a sweet person, etc.
Negative transformations require a disambiguation. In receiving the cue,

the patient must, prior to performing the transformation, exclude certain
types of distributions. T h e transformation cannot be carried out on an
ambiguous term, but only after the word has been disambiguated. This
will be emphasized in the behavioral reactions of the schizophrenics.
T h e instructions operate on two levels.

W i t h the simplest instructions, the respondent is asked to give the
opposite of a word - 'Give the opposite of the word big — with no insis-
tence on the fact that a negative transformation is expected. Such direc-
tions are usually sufficient to elicit the response.
If no response is obtained, the researcher proceeds to the second level,
and the transformation is demonstrated using a morphological type of
negation; the researcher leads the respondent to a lexical substitution
through the execution of a transformation on a predicative sentence - 'If
he is not big, he is . . . ?'
O n e example is always given before the presentation of the first cue.
5
T h e respondent groups: the schizophrenic population was chosen by
psychiatrists - Drs Daumezon, Boige and M e l m a n - of the Hopital
Sainte-Anne. There were 45 respondents, 35 of w h o m were classified as
paranoids, 5 as catatonics, and 5 as hebephrenics. T w o control groups also
responded to the exercises:
• T h e so-called 'normal' groups consisted of 15 respondents in the neuro-

surgical unit at the Hopital Sainte-Anne whose socio-cultural level was
similar to that of the schizophrenics, and 4 9 students in humanities at
the University of Tours. The performances of these two groups of

respondents are convergent; the responses of the students, however, are
more diverse, closer to those of the schizophrenics. The students there-
fore seemed more useful as a control group, a choice also justified by
the greater number of respondents in the group.
• The pathological groups were patients with Parkinson's Disease,
aphasics, non-aphasic patients with brain lesions and patients with senile
dementia. The respondents were examined in the neurosurgical unit at
the Hopital Sainte-Anne, the patients with senile dementia by myself,
and the other groups by J. Dubois and P. Marcie.
The schizophrenics' behavioral reactions to the instructions are specific.
(a) This type of exercise is well received by respondents, which can be

seen in the limited number of refusals. For 45 respondents, there were
three whose reactions showed confusion such as tears — and one absolute
refusal to respond. This type of behavior is problematic, however, in that
the 'normal' control groups do not show any such reaction to the exercise.
On the other hand, the number of refusals is considerable among the
patients with senile dementia - between 20 percent and 40 percent reject
the exercise. The intolerance of the two groups would seem to be due to
different causes. Among senile dementia patients, there is intolerance to
any exercise carried out on language itself - metalinguistic operations, in
Jakobson's sense. Also significant is the phenomenon of linguistic inertia
which results in echolalic stereotyping of the refusal. Among the schizo-
phrenics, the refusals seem to be caused by their inability to dissociate the
subject of the enunciation from the subject of the utterance, or to distin-
guish the production of the sentence from the sentence produced. This can
be observed in the stupefaction, or the confusion, respondents feel when
faced with the exercise, and the justifications for their behavior they give
afterwards.
(b) There were very few admissions of ignorance. There are some,
however, in the responses of the various control groups, and even among
the 'normal' groups, but not with respect to the same items as for the
schizophrenics. Thus, profond [deep] results in 59 percent failure among
the students, as opposed to 2 percent failure among the schizophrenics.
On the other hand, naitre [to be born] results in mourir [to die] 100
percent of the time among the 'normal' respondents, whereas 10 percent
of schizophrenics respond: je ne sais pas [I don't know]. Similarly, aimer
[to love] results in only 2.5 percent failure among the 'normal' groups, as
against 11 percent among the schizophrenics; savoir (to know): 5 percent
as against 18.5 percent. It should be noted that among the schizophrenics
there are admissions of ignorance mostly when the opposite of a verb is
requested, and in particular of verbs implying an animate subject — naitre,
aimer, savoir [to be born, to love, to know] - all verbs that have very
strong connotations.
(c) Very often, a comment accompanies the response. The comments

can grosso modo be reduced to two types.
(i) The comment expresses a modalization of the response: on pourrait

dire; par exemple; ga depend; peut-etrc, je suppose-, quelque chose comme ga
[one could say; for example; that depends; maybe; I suppose; something
like that], etc.
Modalizations can be analyzed in various ways:
• They are not idiosemiological comments (of the kind one finds so
frequently among the senile dementia patients) referring to the
immediate context or to the past experience of the patient.
• They may signify the search for ambiguity at the level of the response
itself, the reverse side of the ambiguity of the cue which the respondent
does not wish to take responsibility for disambiguating; hence the
relative aspect given the answer. The respondent may be insisting that
the meaning given to the answer depends on the meaning the researcher
gives to the question.
• They can also express a refusal to assume responsibility for the utterance,
and the decision to leave the choice of response to the researcher. This
explanation, although broader in its application, since it deals with the
relation of the subject to her or his utterance, is related to the previous
one, because the verbal behavior of the schizophrenic tends to leave the
choice of response and the responsibility for eliminating the ambiguity
of the message to the person giving the instructions.
This interpretation is confirmed by two behavioral reactions.

• If the given term is ambiguous or experienced as such, the respondent
may ask the researcher to eliminate the ambiguity. The schizophrenic
reacts by asking for the spelling of the word, for its use in a context that
fixes its meaning, occasionally for a definition of the term: Vous voulez
dire par la? Comment le concevez-vous? [What do you mean by that?
How do you conceive that?], etc. This type of reaction is found very
rarely among the 'normal' respondents or among the other pathological
groups.
• Leaving the responsibility for the utterance to the researcher can also be
expressed by a simple interrogative expression of protest that modalizes
the response.
(ii) The comments show a questioning of the normal code, of the rules
of language and of learned definitions, an attitude which lies at the origin
of the neo-code schizophrenics substitute for the given one. This
questioning may be expressed:
• through relativizing the learned code: c'est relatifi c'est trop simple,
apparemment c'est, j'aurais voulu mieux [it's all relative; it's too simple;
apparently it's; I would have preferred], etc.
• through a double response; or through insisting on the ambiguity: (the
opposite of good?) mauvais ou mechant [bad or mean]; (the opposite of
mean?) Bonne ou aimable [Good or lovable], etc. It also frequently
happens that the schizophrenic gives a series of answers, refusing to stick
to the one that is strictly related to the given item. These behaviors can
be analyzed as the refusal to assume responsibility for a choice, or an
utterance.
• through an explicit substitution, by the respondents, of their own
arbitrary codes for the normal code: (The opposite of true?) Dans Vetat
actuel des choses, je dirai irreel [In the actual state of things, I would say
unreal].
The results of the survey: in comparison to the responses of the 'normal'

and the other pathological groups, the principal characteristics that stand
out at first glance in the responses of the schizophrenics, can be grouped
under several rubrics.
(a) Diversity of responses: for example, the opposite given for beau
[beautiful] is laid [ugly] 100 percent of the time among the 'normal'
respondents, and 48 percent of the time among the schizophrenics, who
also answer moche [tacky] (19 percent), vilain [nasty] (14 percent), and
mauvais, mal, desagreable a voir [bad, evil, disagreeable to see], etc. Naitre
[to be born] results in mourir [to die] 100 percent of the time in the
'normal' group and 33 percent of the time among the schizophrenics,
whose responses cannot otherwise be classified: decider, disparaitre, crever,
flageoler, tituber, se pamer, renaitre, ne pas venir au monde, qui n 'est pas,
mort, deces, absent, le neant [to pass away, to disappear, to croak, to sag at
the knees, to stagger, to pass out, to be reborn, not to come into the
world, that which is not, death, decease, absent, nothingness], etc. Bon
[good] induces mauvais [bad] 78 percent of the time in the 'normal' group
and 48 percent of the time among the schizophrenics, mechant [mean] 16
percent of the time in the 'normal' group and 10 percent of the time
among the schizophrenics; the normal group gives no response 6 percent
of the time, whereas all the schizophrenics give an answer, 42 percent of
which are haineux, cruel, mal [hateful, cruel, evil], etc. The opposite of
savoir [to know] is ignorer [to be ignorant] for 90 percent of the 'normal'
group, who also respond meconnaitre [to be unaware of ] (5 percent) or
who give no response (5 percent); only 22 percent of the schizophrenics
give ignorer (to be ignorant); the others respond with ne rien savoir, etre
sot, etre illettre, Vignorance, le neant, ignare [not to know anything, to be
stupid, to be dumb, to be illiterate, ignorance, nothingness, ignoramus],
etc., or give no response (15.5 percent). The opposite of aimer [to love] is
hair [to hate] for 59 percent of the 'normal' group, who also give detester
[to detest] (36 percent), or mal aime [unloved] (2.5 percent), or make no
response (2.5 percent); the schizophrenics respond with hair [to hate] 30
percent of the time, detester [to detest] (22 percent) and mourir, vomir, se
garder a soi-meme, insociable, froid, style, indifference [to die, to loathe, to
keep to oneself, unsociable, cold, trained, indifference], etc.; 11 percent
give no answer. Doux [sweet [soft)] can have many opposites, and
provokes diverse responses even in the 'normal' group; however, in their
49 responses, there are only 11 different terms, whereas the 45 schizophre-
nics give 28 different terms.
(b) Systematic quantification through negative hypertransformation: the

first rule of schizophrenics seems to be to give a stylistically marked term,
and in particular a term quantitatively marked by the '+' sign. They set
aside the neutral term. Thus they give as opposites of grand [big]: nain,
minus, minuscule [dwarf, minus, minuscule]; as opposite of pauvre [poor];
opulent [opulent]; of bon [good]: haineux [hateful]; of doux [sweet]: brutal,
violent, cruel, colereux, intransigeant, reveche, une brute [brutal, violent,
cruel, irascible, intransigent, surly, a brute], etc.; of chaud [hot]: glacial,
terrible, austere [glacial, terrible, austere], etc.; of beau [beautiful]: moche
[tacky]; of masculin [masculine]; effemine, delicat, frele, fragile [effeminate,
delicate, frail, fragile]; of aimer [to love]: vomir [to loathe]; of savoir [to
know]: etre bete, etre sot, etre Metre, ignare [to be dumb, to be stupid, to be
illiterate, ignoramus], etc.; of pareiI [similar]: oppose [opposed]; of se lever
[to get up]: s'ecrouler [to collapse], etc. This tendency is not found in the
'normal' group. Among them, pauvre [poor] —> riche [rich] (100 percent);
grand [big] —> petit [small] (100 percent); masculin [masculine] —> feminin
[feminine] (100 percent); chaud [hot] —> froid [cold] (100 percent); bon
[good] —> mauvais [bad] or mechant [mean], etc.
(c) Preference for animates: when the suggested term could belong to
two classes, one associated with animate and one with inanimate terms, the
schizophrenic almost always chooses the metaphoric or figurative term; that
is, the one associated with the animate class. Thus, doux [sweet/soft] has
for the 'normal' group the following opposites: rugueux, reche, amer, aigre
[coarse, rough, bitter, sour]; the schizophrenics prefer: rigide, colereux,
cruel, austere, intransigeant, brusque, reveche, brutal, une brute [rigid,
irascible, cruel, austere, intransigent, brusque, surly, brutal, a brute], etc.
As opposite of chaud [hot], the 'normal' group gives froid [cold] (100
percent); the schizophrenics give froid [cold] (ambiguous as to its lexical
class) 70 percent of the time, but their other responses are associated
principally with animates: terrible, repoussant, austere, severe, agresif, glacial
[terrible, repulsive, austere, aggressive, glacial]. For beau [beautiful], the
schizophrenics give vilain [nasty] (14 percent), a term referring mainly to
animates, and, moreover, stylistically marked, as is moche [tacky] (15
percent); these responses are not found in the 'normal' group who all
answer laid [ugly]. The schizophrenics give as the opposite of comique
[comic]: triste, taciturne, or serieux [sad, taciturn or serious], rather than
tragique [tragic], the former associated with animates, the latter with inani-
mates. This tendency to prefer animates, to understand the terms figura-
tively, also explains the divergence between the 'normal' group and the
schizophrenics in response to the word profond [profound]. Of the
'normal' respondents 59 percent give no answer; 12 percent give peu
profond [not very deep], 6 percent creux [concave], 5 percent plat [flat], 5
percent has [low], and 14 percent superficiel [superficial]. Only one schizo-
phrenic claimed not to know the opposite of profond [profound]: the
answers given were: superficiel, futile, leger, artificiel [superficial, futile,
light, artificial], etc., all either ambiguous or applicable to animates.
(d) Affectation of stylistically marked terms: this shows the desire,
found also in the negative hypertransformations, to give the response affec-
tive connotations. Thus, naitre [to be born] provokes absent, sterile, le
neant, flageoler, tituber, se pamer [absent, sterile, nothingness, to sag at the
knees, to stagger, to pass out], modalizations of the verb mourir [to die].
Aimer [to love] provokes insociable, froid, style, flegme, indifferent [unsoci-
able, cold, trained, phlegm, indifferent], etc.
The stylistic mark also has the effect of placing the term on a particular
linguistic level:
• either familiar: moche [tacky] for laid [ugly]; crever [to croak] for mourir
[to die]; etc.;
• or elevated, literary, administrative: deceler, disparaitre [to detect, to
disappear] for mourir [to die]; delicat, frele [delicate, frail] for feminin
[feminine]; etc.
(e) Predominance of the signifier: responses show homophonic analogy

with the cue word. There is rhyming play between the cue and response.
For example, the opposites given for naitre [to be born] are: renaitre, ne pas
etre, dispaitre [to be reborn, not to be, to disappear.]2 When this tendency is
too strong, it can provoke aberrant, or even schizophasic, responses: one
respondent gives lepot [the pot] as the opposite ofpauvre [poor].
The privileging of the signifier appears to explain the exceptional consis-
tency of the schizophrenics' responses to the cue absent [absent] (also
found for the cue masculin [masculine]). They give present [present] 90
percent of the time, and among the other responses we find presence
[presence]. Present!absent do show a certain homophony. It should be
added that present/absent are principally associated with animate terms.
(f) The tendency to operate across several lexical classes at once, with a
preference for adjectives and substantives: negative transformation divides
the terms into two classes, and their grammatical function is of only
secondary importance. From two classes related only by the negation, the
schizophrenic often chooses adjectives and nouns as opposites for verbs,
and sometimes nouns as opposites for adjectives. Thus for naitre [to be
born]: le dices, le neant, la mort, absent, sterile [decease, nothingness, death,
absent, sterile]. For aimer [to love]: insociable, froid, style, flegme, indiffer-
ence, indifferent, sterile [unsociable, cold, trained, phlegm, indifference,
indifferent, sterile]. For riche [rich]: la mendicite [begging].
Since the first words proposed in the exercises are adjectives, one might
conclude, at least in the case of the verbs, that inertia plays a role in the
choices made by the patient. However inertia is much less obvious among
the schizophrenics than among the aphasics, the Parkinson's Disease
patients, or even the senile dementia patients, whose discourse shows
massive signs of inertia, not even comparable to what is found in the
schizophrenics' discourse. It would seem then that inertia alone is not at
issue, but rather the predominance of semantic correlation over gramma-
tical integration. There is a relative indifference on the part of the schizo-
phrenic to syntactical and morphological categories as compared to the
attention devoted to the establishment of semantic relations.
(g) Schizophasic responses: at least two different meanings must be

assigned to the word schizophasia:
• it can mean singularity, or improbability, in the correlation established

between a suggested term <a> and the given opposite <a-l>: vrai/irreel;
chaudlagressif, masculinlfrele\ profondlartijicieb, naitreltituber, se pamer
[true/unreal; hot/aggressive; masculine/frail; profound/artificial; to be
born/to stagger, to pass out], etc. Such slippages in meaning, interpre-

table in the context of the study, are the origin of the elaboration of
neo-codes and can appear as neologisms in the freer context of sponta-
neous discourse.
• it can be understood as the creation of neo-forms elaborated from
phonemes, or syllables, in the learned code, that are not part of the
lexicon. One single response of this type was given: [kats] as opposite of
poor. The stability of the class of opposites, and the artificial nature of
the study, undoubtedly helped minimize the creation of neo-forms
among the respondents whose spontaneous discourse contained many
more.
(h) The tendency to substitute morphological negation of the predicate

for lexical negation is found among certain catatonic or hebephrenic
respondents. Naitre [to be born] is assigned the opposite pas naitre [not to
be born] (8 percent); savoir [to know]: ne pas savoir [not to know] or ne
rien savoir [to know nothing] (22 percent); aimer [to love]: ne pas aimer
[not to love] (9 percent). Once again the verbs are the terms selected for
this procedure. It can be attributed to inertia - the response that takes up
the cue and the predicative negation are very frequently employed - and to
the economical character of this type of negative transformation. It is not
actually necessary to find a term from the lexical class A-l, but simply to
add the quantifier no/not to the given term. This type of response, not
found among the 'normal' respondents, is found among the aphasics and
even more frequently among the senile dementia patients.
(i) A relative lack of differentiation in the types of transformations can

at times be found among catatonic and hebephrenic respondents. It would
seem to be explained in the same way as the responses using the morpholo-
gical negation of the predicate. Inertia induces a patient to give belle
[beautiful] as the opposite of beau [handsome]; masculine [masculine
{feminine form)] as the opposite of masculin [masculine form],3 la verite
[truth] as the opposite of vrai [true], etc. The responses of the catatonics
and the hebephrenics show similarities in this area to those of the senile
dementia patients and of certain of the aphasics.
An interpretation of the collected results leads first of all to the conclusion

that there is no one grammar for all types of schizophrenics. Sticking to
psychiatric nosology, one must distinguish between the grammar of
paranoids, and the grammar of catatonics and hebephrenics. The former is
characterized by the importance of neo-structurings, the latter by a

deficiency evocative of deterioration. That is still simplifying too much,
however, because one can go on to isolate several different grammars for
paranoids alone.
Furthermore, the most frequent responses and their dominant character-
istics allow us to conclude that what differentiates the responses of the
schizophrenics from those of the 'normal' group or from the other patho-
logical groups, is the relation between the subject of the enunciation, the
subject generating and producing the sentences, and his or her text, the
utterance produced. What the exercises require of the schizophrenic is that
she or he experience the researcher's utterance, and her or his own, as
proposed objects of communication, objects on which transformations can
be carried out. However, one constant distinctive feature of the responses
of the schizophrenic seems to be the difficulty of assuming responsibility
for the utterance produced.
This can be detected in the way that schizophrenics leave to the
researcher the task of resolving ambiguities in the exercises presented to the
respondent, as well as in the messages they themselves produce in response,
which comes down to leaving the responsibility for the utterance to the
researcher.
Regarding texts for which responsibility is not assumed, another inter-
pretation is to consider them as a play of signifiers, possible only insofar as
respondents do not invest in them as their own. The responsibility for the
statement is left to language itself, viewed as a free activity of generations
and transformations. This also explains the schizophasic neo-forms elabo-
rated according to patterns of language freed from rules of derivation,
suffixation, etc.
Modification of the relationship between the subject of the enunciation
and the subject of the utterance is also perceptible in the way schizophre-
nics modalize their statements. The almost constant modalizations can take
different forms: questioning of the code or of the utterances of the
addressee, hypertransformation, using stylistically marked terms, using
attenuating modal expressions, etc. Whatever the means used, the goal is
always the privileging of the moment of enunciation.
The schizophrenic preference for human animates is also due to an
inability to dissociate the producing subject from the utterance produced.
The schizophrenic identifies the answer with its production, and has great
difficulty positioning the text as a finished product subject to objectiviza-
tion, which is somewhat easier to do in the case of a sentence with a non-
animate subject. Metaphorization of the utterances appears thus to be the
result of the predominance of the subject of the enunciation who mediates
all lexemes.
The lack of differentiation of grammatical classes, and the predominance
of nouns over adjectives, seems to result from the fact that, at the time of
the generation of the messages, it is the semantic components that deter-
mine the sets of words from which the appropriate terms will be selected.
The fact that naitre [to be born] —> absent, le neant [absent, nothing-
ness]; aimer [to love] —> froid, style, indifferent [cold, trained, indifferent];
savoir [to know] —> nul, Vignorance [nil, ignorance], etc., do not belong to
the same grammatical classes does not bother the schizophrenic because
semantic correlations take precedence over grammatical correlations. It is
enough for the schizophrenic if the terms are related semantically. In the
experimental production of sentences, the schizophrenics reject semanti-
cally inappropriate utterances [the horse sees red] and produce semantically
correct sentences, requiring great grammatical complexity, and even
anomaly. 'Normal' respondents, on the contrary, prefer syntactically
correct and simple sentences, accepting any semantic anomalies. These
results, which seem curious at first, can be explained by the subordination
of syntactical patterns which are part of the utterance produced, to the
establishment of semantic relations at the level of the enunciation.
9
Analyses of performances of schizophrenics raise the question of their
ability to carry out negative transformations. In fact, since schizophrenics
do not assume responsibility for their utterances, transformations of utter-
ances become problematic. What does the use of these morphological
methods mean? How can these apparently negative sentences, generated in
the same way as affirmative sentences, be explained?
The experimental transformation of predicative sentences can be used to
verify that what occurs is not actually a negative transformation of the
utterance, but the generation of a new utterance. For example, when
schizophrenics are given the sentence he ate apples, and asked to carry out a
negative transformation, with specific indications about the morphological
procedures for doing so — did not — they invariably respond: he ate
bananas-, he ate pears-, he ate oranges-, etc., despite the examples given and
the insistence on using the morphological procedure. In fact, the respon-
dent generates a new sentence characterized by a relation of exclusion to
the given sentence, the researcher's utterance. Such responses can be found
in the 'normal' group or in other control groups, but are not common —
far from it. Their consistency among the schizophrenics can be explained
by the fact that, in response to the directions to make a negative transfor-
mation, the schizophrenic generates another utterance, with which he
himself is in a direct relation of enunciation. This sentence can then take
on the appearance of a negation, insofar as it excludes the researcher's
utterance, and perhaps even the researcher as well.
10
It would be appropriate in this context to raise the question of negation

itself. Three different levels where affirmation and negation are opposed
should be distinguished. Both affirmation and negation have, at each of
the three levels, a different purpose, and yet we erroneously designate them
all as the same concepts.
The utterance, and even the behavior, of the subject can signify inclu-
sion or exclusion of the world. At the first level, 'yes' and 'no' are implicit.
They can be revealed through analysis of the message and of the attitude
of the locutor, but are not given as such in the utterance, which is situated
with respect to the subject of the enunciation in a direct relation of
immediacy, or even of affirmation. The subject is merged with the utter-
ance, in pure inclusion or pure exclusion. The 'yes' and the 'no' are
absolute, mutually exclusive, and permit no dialectical play of acceptance
and refusal, which becomes possible only when each is able to turn into its
opposite without canceling itself out.
At the second level, 'yes' or 'no' are explicitly expressed in the statement,
and they mark the assumption, by the locutor, of his or her acceptance or
rejection of the world, in particular as it appears in the utterance of the
addressee to which the subject refers. The actual presence of affirmation or
negation in the utterance allows the subject of the enunciation to distin-
guish herself or himself from the utterance produced, and not to merge
into the movement of inclusion or exclusion of the world expressed
therein. This first dissociation of the subject who produces the message
from the message produced is correlative to the distinction of the subject
from the world, and of the subject from the other. This can be seen parti-
cularly well in the fact that (I say) yes or (I say) no presupposes the possibi-
lity of (/ do not say yes), (I do not say no), demonstrating the ability of the
subject to sustain himself or herself beyond an immediate adhesion to or
rejection of the world, and beyond the addressee's utterance. Out of the
subject's distance from the utterance comes the ability to carry out partial
dialectical inclusions and exclusions of the world, expressed notably in (/
say) yes and no. It should be noted that at this level the acceptance or the
rejection have the world as their object as it is manifest in the utterance of
the addressee.
The negative transformation - in the form of morphological procedures
using no/not, and lexical opposites and inversions - would constitute the
final level. With the negative transformation, the subject actually turns the
utterance into its opposite or its inversion. The transformation does not
really represent acceptance - either implicit or explicit, total or partial -
of the world, but rather the expression of the relation between subject and
utterance. It demonstrates even more clearly the dissociation of the subject
who produces the message from the generated utterance, a dissociation

that is not just a simple instantaneous drawing back from the world, but
the manifestation of the split between the subject of the enunciation and
the subject of the utterance. The latter appears as one manifestation,
among others, of the speaking subject that can be modified with time, or
even inverted, and presupposes, at the moment of speech, the possibility
of turning into its own opposite. Thus, / love requires the possibility of /
do not love, and vice versa. It is only with this potential reversal in place
that the subject can truly assume the statement as an actual sanctioned
choice.4
11
With respect to the utterance produced, the schizophrenic always appears

to be situated in a direct relation of enunciation, incompatible with the
assumption of responsibility for the utterance as such, a necessary condi-
tion for the realization of a true negative transformation. Affirmation and
negation are present in the schizophrenic's discourse only in the form of
immediate inclusion or exclusion of the world, of an implicit 'y es ' o r <no -'
Just because the schizophrenic is capable of using the morphological or
lexical processes of negation does not mean that when she or he does so,
they are being used to express a negative transformation of the utterance.
Certain sentences taken from schizophrenics' spontaneous discourse are
significant from this standpoint: Que Von mange ou que Von ne mange pas,
c'est la meme chose [Whether one eats or doesn't eat, it's the same thing];
Que tu paries ou pas, c'est la meme chose [Whether you bet or not, it's the
same thing]; Que Von soit ici ou que Von soit ailleurs, ca sera pareil [If one is
here or somewhere else, it'll be the same thing]; Qu'on sache ou non, c'est la
meme chose [If one knows or doesn't know, it's the same thing]; // veut
m'interdire que j'en parle ou que je n'en parle pas [He wants to forbid me
from talking about it or from not talking about it]; C'est une these que je
dois defendre ou pas defendre [It's an idea I have to defend or not defend];
Un faux geste, meme si c'est un geste regulier, il m'est interdit d'en parler [A
false gesture, even if it's a regular gesture, I am forbidden to speak of it]; Je
peux parler ou le contredire, dire cette verite ou ce mensonge [I can speak or
contradict him, tell the truth or tell this lie]; Ce que je peux aussi bien
supporter chez moi que chez vous, ici qu'ailleurs [What I can stand just as
well at my place as at your place, here or somewhere else]; etc. Such state-
ments, where negative phrases are posited as equivalent to positive phrases,
demonstrate clearly that the morphological procedures of negation are
represented principally as a formalistic play of signifiers, as a deployment
of the virtualities of language, or as concretized ambiguities which
ultimately carry no message besides the one for which the addressee might
care to take responsibility.
Aside from raising questions about all negative transformations, such an

attitude on the part of the schizophrenic vis-a-vis the utterance produced
suggests a problem concerning the structures of communication. It is the
referent, the world as it is supposed to be assumed by (I) and (you) in
their utterances, that regulates the exchanges of the partners of enunciation.
This third term seems to have no basis for the schizophrenic, and the rules
attempting to define it are always contested. This justifies our thinking
that the relationship of (I) and (you) - barely distinct at this level - can be
reduced to the play of mutual inclusion or exclusion, beyond, or foreign
to, that which we call linguistic communication.
IV
Toward a Grammar of
Enunciation for Hysterics and
Obsessives
Analysis of linguistic forms decodes, behind the message the neurotic expli-
citly seems to want to send, another message revealing the real import of
his or her discourse, despite the fact that the carrier of this second message
is unaware of it. Beyond the impressions of a first reading or a first
listening, analysis can uncover the true identity of the subject who assumes
the utterance, the identity of the addressee, and the nature of the proposed
object of communication. Who is speaking? To whom? About what?
Distributional analysis of utterances is insufficient to shed light on the
schema of communication underlying the discourse of the speaking
subject. Utterances should be approached through their dialectical relations
with the partners of enunciation, insofar as they constitute a means of
apprehending the subject in the very act of enunciation. In other words, it
is not another grammar of the utterance that is needed, but a grammar of
enunciation. Such a project, requiring us to rethink the grammar of
'normal' subjects, will be sketched out here in reference to neurotic
languages. I will attempt to show that the functional systematizations
found in the singular structures of the languages of neurotics can be inter-
preted in terms specific to a grammar of enunciation.1
*
Reduced to three fundamental terms, the schema of communication can
be understood as an exchange between the partners of enunciation - (I),
(you) - about an object, the world or the referent - (he/she/it). It is impor-
tant to emphasize that the three basic terms of enunciation cannot simply
be assimilated to their realizations in the utterance. The subject generating
the message cannot be equated with the subject of the message produced.
This appears clearly in such statements as (I say) you love, or (I say) he
loves. On the other hand, confusion is possible when the subject of the
utterance - I - seems to refer to the sender of the message. In fact, the
subject assuming the message can be inferred only from an analysis of the
discourse in its totality, notably in the transformations the utterance under-

goes prior to enunciation. For example, the interrogative transformation
can turn the one who, in the utterance, is the designated addressee, into
the sender of the message. It is necessary to work back through the chain
of transformations in order to designate the addressee of the message and
its object. The point is to reduce discourse to its essential model, and
uncover the form of the kernel sentence and of its constituent parts hidden
by the play of transformations; a kernel sentence revealing the structure of
communication: (locutor?) <— (NP1? + V? + NP2?) <— (addressee?).2 I will
attempt this analysis using two corpora of spontaneously produced
language: one hysterical, the other obsessive.3
From a text approximately 20 pages long produced by the hysteric, I

extracted at random three fragments of 42 lines. To begin with, I analyzed
each clause as a whole, and broke it down into its constituent parts. The
classifications established were: NP1, V, NP2, NP3, adverb, adjective. The
goal was to find out how the hysteric filled in the categories, and if it
would be possible to distinguish, for him or for her, the specificity of the
constituent parts and of their dialectical relations, permitting the establish-
ment of a model of the utterance.
Regarding NP1 - the subjects of the utterance — / and you play almost
equal roles in the hysteric's discourse, with you being somewhat more
numerous, however (40% > 34.5%). I f / i s the subject, the responsibility for
the utterance can still be left to (you), either due to the interrogative form, or
to the fact that the subject of a completive subordinate clause is you and the
real utterance is expressed there. I will come back to this. In a dream narra-
tive, which is part of the corpus, it was noted that the predominance of you
over / was even more marked. In the dream, or at least in the telling of it,
you appears to be virtually the only subject of the utterance: vous aviez votre
vrai visage; vous me racontiez ca\ vous aviez un mari\ vous aviez un apparte-
menp, vous avez sorti unefourrure [you had your real face; you were telling me
that; you had a husband; you had an apartment; you took out a fur], etc.
Other subjects of the utterance can be divided up into 5.1 percent human
animates, 5.1 percent non-human animates (animals), 6.5 percent concrete
inanimates (material objects: dresses, coats, rose, paintings, etc.), 6.5 percent
demonstrative pronouns (this, that) expressing a precise situational reference,
and 2.55 percent relative pronouns referring to a material object. The deter-
minants and the linguistic or extra-linguistic contexts allow us to conclude
that the representatives of the world are mediated by (you). In fact, it's all
about votre mari, le furet, le renard [your husband, the ferret, the fox],
evoked by an animal skin belonging to (you), vos robes, vos manteaux [your
dresses, your coats], etc. (You), whether explicitly stated or masked as itishel
he, animate or inanimate, dominates as subject of the utterance.
TOWARD A GRAMMAR OF ENUNCIATION 45
The verb phrase, in the hysteric's discourse, has specific characteristics.

Action verbs are frequent, especially in the cases where you is the subject of
the utterance: vous aimez\ vous restez; vous avez; vous faites faire\ vous
demandez\ vous mettez\ vous regardez; je supprime\ j'achetais [you love; you
remain; you have; you have made; you ask; you put; you look at; I elimi-
nate; I was buying], etc. In addition, incompleteness prevails over comple-
tion, which can be seen in the morphological procedures as well as in the
choice of verbs; the present or the future are more common than the past,
the active than the passive, action verbs than verbs of being. When the
verb expresses a condition, it most often appears to be either in process -
in the process of elaboration within /, brought about by the actions of you,
rather than established, stable, or the result of a prior development - or
presented as established without reference either to a development or to an
agent. The narrative, utterance of the utterance, although morphologically
marked by the past tense, translates incompleteness: vous racontiez', vous
parliez\ j'ecoutais; vous mettiez [you were telling; you were speaking; I was
listening; you were putting], etc. The action is ongoing, not complete.
Only rarely would an action or a condition be shown as definitively over
and done with. It should also be noted that transitive verbs predominate
significantly over intransitive verbs.
The object of the utterance is often integrated into the minimal sentence in
the hysteric's discourse as NP2. The most remarkable feature is the chiasmus
established between subject and object with respect to the partners of
enunciation. When you is the subject of the statement, me comes in as direct
object, and even more often as indirect - vous m'aimez [you love me]; vous me
racontiez [you were telling me]; when / is the subject of the statement, the
object is you: je vous ecoute [I listen to you];jai reve de vous [I dreamed about
you]. Frequently, (you) can also be implicitly reintroduced into the sentence
because the animate and non-animate NP2s are related to (you). Among
non-animate direct and indirect objects in the analyzed discourse, 80 percent
refer to (you). The insertion of she/he/it, of the world, into the hysteric's
discourse, appears to be directly dependent upon the partner of enunciation,
as if the hysteric had no objects of his or her ov/n, as if the world only
presented itself as mediated, possessed, valorized by (you), even merged with
(you). This evidently raises the question of the referent in the hysteric's
discourse. What object of exchange can be proposed to the addressee if the
world is neither assumed nor assumable by the hysteric? It should also be
noted that the referent/world shows up in the hysteric's discourse more
frequently as concrete inanimates (75 percent), than as abstract inanimates
(25 percent). The world is actualized in the form of material objets, always
exterior to the subject of enunciation, whose character establishes an
equivocal relationship of possession. A dress, an apartment, these are not so
much possessions as they are worries in the hysteric's discourse.
Adverbial phrases, NP3, also introduce the world into the statement.
The hysteric most frequently uses precise spatial references (62 percent):
dans le metro; dans une grande maison-, dans une piece tres claire-, dans un
fauteuil [in the metro; in a big house; in a very light room; in an
armchair], etc. Explicit or implicit reference to (you) is found in this
context as well, because it is all about votre bureau, votre appartement [your
desk, your apartment], or, at the least, la piece tres claire, le fauteuil [the
very light room, the armchair] appear only insofar as they evoke, or as they
can be compared to, your lodgings or your furniture; it is as if the hysteric
had no spatial references besides (yours), and as if she or he were trying to
orient herself or himself in space with respect to the addressee. Most of the
other adverbial phrases (28 percent) express temporal references, which are
precise in cases where they are related to moments of exchange with the
interlocutor - la nuit derniere, Vautre jour [last night, the other day [of the
preceding meeting)], etc. — and very vague in all other cases — de temps en
temps, ily a x temps [from time to time, x amount of time ago].
It is noteworthy that the hysteric's adjectives most frequently describe
the object NP2, although they can also come in as attributes of a concrete
inanimate subject. Adjectives specify the object quantitatively and always
suggest a comparison with another object, or with another condition of
the object itself: a grande [big] house; aussi net, aussi range [as clean, as
neat] as here; apareil [similar] coat (the same length), assorti [matching]; a
tout petit [tiny little] fox; a tres claire [very light] room; etc. Other adjec-
tives convey either quasi-sensorial qualities of the object - soyeux, doux
[silky, soft] - or, in the rare cases where they refer to an animate entity,
qualities relating directly to the partner of enunciation - sympathique,
attachant, interessant [nice, appealing, interesting] (for you). As for the
adverbs, they also express quantitative or comparative modes of verbs of
action or being: trop, tres, aussi, tout, beaucoup [too much, very, also, all, a
lot].
After analysis of isolated clauses, each considered as a whole, I moved on

to analysis of larger fragments of utterances, like sentences, in order to
reconstitute, through reduction of transformations, the minimal sentence.
Completive subordinate clauses occur mostly in cases where / is the
subject of the utterance of the main clause. The completive's subject is you,
and it carries the message, the main clause being not really much more
than a dictum introducing the subordinate — je me dis que vous aimez les
roses [I say to myself that you like roses] — or a modalization of the state-
ment giving it an interrogative nuance - fai vu que vous deviez aimer le
jazz [I saw that you must like jazz] —• do you like jazz?; fai Vimpression
que vous etes debout [I have the impression that you're standing up] —> are
you standing up? The chiasmus of the subjects of the two clauses ends up
reproducing the order NP1 = you —> NP2 = me. The division into two
clauses appears to be an attempt to establish mediations between / and
you: faipeur que vous partiez en voyage [I am afraid you'll go away on a
trip] -> your departure frightens me; fai peur que vous preniez de ^impor-
tance pour moi [I am afraid you're becoming important to me] —• your
importance worries me; ca m'agace que vous aimiez le jazz [it irritates me
that you like jazz] —> your liking for jazz irritates me; ca ne me plait pas de
vous sentir la [I don't like to feel your presence] —• your presence bothers
me. It is significant in this context that in the dream narrative, the nearly
consistent order NP1 = you —> NP2 = me is undisguised; you is explicitly
the one who assumes the statement and carries out the action, me being its
object. In cases where / is the subject of the completive clause, the main
clause is reduced to a modalization expressing either constraint - il faudra
que je passe par la [I will have to come to that]; il faut que je me retrouve [I
will have to find myself] - or the virtual and incomplete character of the
action, evoking in turn an outside obstacle or pressure - ga me plairait de
faire le foutoir ici; je voudrais envoyer vos feuilles en I'air, favais envie de
dormir [I'd like to make a real mess in here; I would like to throw your
papers around; I felt like sleeping].
The object is expressed with clearly significant frequency in the form of
an indirect interrogation: je me demandais pourquoi vous m 'en parliez\ je me
demande si je vous suis sympathique ou si je vous suis antipathique; je me suis
demande s'ily avait longtemps que vous etiez mariee\ je ne sais pas si vous me
Vaviez donnee ou si je Vavais prise [I was wondering why you were speaking
to me about it; I wonder if I am agreeable to you or if I am disagreeable to
you; I wondered if you were married a long time (if it had been a long time
since you were married); I don't know if you had given it to me or if I had
taken it], etc. It seems as if the first clause is there only to conceal the
indirect interrogation which would more explicitly leave to (you) the
responsibility for the utterance, and if necessary, the assumption of the
negative transformation. When (you) does not intervene to make decisions,
alternatives remain balanced in never-ending oscillation, the perplexed
subject being unable to make a choice, which consequently means that the
action or the condition remains incomplete: je ne sais pas si je dois me coucher
ou si je ne dois pas me coucher, je suis incapable de savoir si c'est un true a
acheter ou pas [I don't know if I should go to bed or if I shouldn't go to bed;
I can't tell if it's something to buy or not.] It is interesting to note that in the
dream (space for the expression of desire?), it is (you) who asks the
questions, positioning / as subject of the utterance: vous me demandiez si
faimais les bijoux; vous me demandiez ce que fen pensais [you were asking me
if I liked jewels; you were asking me what I thought about it]. Would the
fundamental project of the hysteric, always concealed in ordinary discourse,
be to get himself or herself recognized as valid subject of the utterance?
Subordinate relative clauses often specify or make explicit the relations

of the object - NP2 - representative of the world - to (you): tout ce que je
peux deviner de gout que vous pouvez avoir, dans votre metier, vous devez
avoir des gens qui vous sont plus ou moins sympatiques, qui vous attirent plus
que d'autres-, j'aime vos tableaux, saufcelui qui est sur votre bureau [all I can
guess about what tastes you might have; in your profession, you must have
people who are more or less agreeable to you, who appeal to you more
than others; I like your paintings, except the one that's on your bookshelf].
Determinative rather than qualifying relative clauses predominate, speci-
fying above all the conditions of the object's existence, its spatio-temporal
co-ordinates.
Conditional sentences are found in the form: if A then B, with the
chiasmus of the subjects already pointed out, the action of you appearing
as a necessary and even indispensable condition allowing / to carry out an
action or experience a condition. This tendency to make you responsible
for all actions and conditions is even more exaggerated in the cases where
potential or hypothetical actions on the part of you are presented as what
could have avoided actions or conditions for /: si vous aviez mauvais gout,
je ne me sentirais pas d'affinites avec vous; si vous faisiez comme X, j'aurais
moins peur de m 'attacher a vous [if you had bad taste, I wouldn't feel an
affinity for you; if you did as X, I would be less fearful of becoming
attached to you].
In cases where causals show the chiasmus of / and you, they can be
reduced to the same schema as the conditionals, leaving you the responsi-
bility for fs condition or action. Otherwise, they indicate the motivation
which causes the subject to defer action or to leave it unfinished: je ne le
fais pas parce que ga coute cher, je ne pouvais pas parce que je ne voulais pas-,
je ne dois pas m'acheter ga parce que je m'apercevrais que c'est une erreur [I
don't do it because it is expensive; I couldn't because I didn't want to; I
must not buy that for myself because I would realize that it's a mistake].
The impact of comparatives is often similar to what was noted for adjec-
tives; they create a parallel between two objects, less frequently between
two conditions, one of which is related, either directly or indirectly, to /,
and the other to you, or to a he/she/it assimilatable in some way to you
(husband, colleague, etc.): ga {votre vie) meparaitplus interessant que ce que
je peux penser ou faire; si vous aviez de vieilles peintures comme celles qu 'a ma
tantc, vous avez la meme que j'aurais voulu avoir [that (your life) seems
more interesting to me than anything I can think of or do; if you had old
paintings like the ones my aunt has; you have the same one I would want
to have].
Adverbials of time most often express an attempt at orientation on the
part of the subject with respect to the temporal co-ordinates of (you),
notably to the moment of his or her speech: quand vous me dites au revoir,
avant de vous rencontrer, avant que vous me parliez [when you say good-bye
to me; before knowing you; before you spoke to me].
*
The most frequently used subject in the obsessive's utterance is /; expli-
citly 66 percent of the time, or disguised as she/he/it or who/that 4 percent of
the time. It is remarkable that you is never represented as subject, at least in
the three fragments (of the same length as those taken from the hysteric)
that were analyzed. Other subjects can be divided up into 3.6 percent
human animate indefinites {quelqu'un, on, les auteurs, le monde des gens
nerveux [someone, one, the authors, the world of nervous people]), 10
percent abstract non-animates, distinctive also because of their general,
indefinite character {des choses, quelque chose, un grouillement, un mouvement,
la notion, la distinction [some things, something, a seething, a movement,
the notion, the distinction]), 10 percent demonstrative pronouns (this, that)
and 6.4 percent relative pronouns. It should be noted that the abstract non-
animates, or their pronoun substitutes, are for the most part related to (I).
They allude to (I)'s condition, or else they are notions mediated by (I)'s
conceptual system.
The obsessive's verb phrases do not express any action regarding the
world or the addressee, but rather the enunciative process itself, or a condi-
tion of the subject: je me disais', je me suis demanded j'ai entendu dire, j'ose a
peine affirmer, je suis etonne-, je me suis libere-, je ressentais [I was saying to
myself; I wondered; I heard tell; I hardly dare state; I am surprised; I freed
myself; I was feeling]. Most of the verbs indicate completion, marked by
morphological means — a good many of them are in the past tense — or by
the paradigm class they belong to. They are verbs of condition. For the
most part, verbs of that class express a passive state and have no direct
object. One is immediately struck by the number of pronominal verbs
included in the discourse of the obsessive. Looking closely, one might even
say that the pronominals have often been turned back into reflexives: je me
suis trouve gene-, je me suis trouve bien; je me demande la raison d'une telle
evolution\ je me demande si vous viendrez\ je me sens libere', je me sens une
envie de chanter [I found myself troubled; I found myself well; I asked
myself about the reason for such an evolution; I ask myself if you will
come; I feel myself liberated; I feel myself wanting to sing]. It should be
noted also that a significant number of verbs carry the morphological mark
of unreality or potentiality.
The object of the utterance is more frequently found to be a completive
clause than a word integrated into the kernel sentence. If it is represented
as NP2, it does not introduce the world itself in its materiality, but an
imprecise abstract image of the world (74 percent): un monde de notions',
mon discours; des difficultes; le reflexe; ma possibility, mon desir; Vimpression
[a world of notions; my discourse; difficulties; the reflex; my possibility;

my desire; the effect; the impression]. Moreover, these abstract conceptions
of the world are most often related to the subject, or at least mediated by
him (66 percent). It is all about his desire, his possibility, his impression,
the affect on him, etc. Ultimately, it is always a question of his own image,
relayed through an image of the world, and thus more elaborate, more
carefully concealed. And even this image is presented imprecisely so as not
to convey any clear information about the subject himself, or about his
apprehension of the world, and so as not to appear to be a veritable object
of exchange. The subject can be objectivized as me in NP2 (24 percent).
However, this occurs only in clauses where the subject is / or a non-
animate, never you: je me sens comme libere d'une tutelle; je me suis trouve
assez gene\ ce qui me frappe; ce qui m'ennuie [I feel as if I'm liberated from
supervision; I found myself rather troubled; what strikes me; what bothers
me]. In the case of non-animate subjects, the obsessive still manages,
through passive transformations, to put / back in its place as subject of the
utterance: / am struck, I am bothered. It should be mentioned that me is
used more often as indirect than as direct object of the utterance, notably
with verbs expressing the process of enunciation itself: je me demande; je
me dis; je m'interroge [I ask myself; I say to myself; I question myself).
Thus, you appears neither explicitly nor implicitly as addressee, and the
subject designates himself as receiver of his own message.
NP3, another possible space for the appearance of the world, can essen-
tially be reduced, in the obsessive's discourse, to temporal indicators
situated in the past, the reference point always being the moment of the
subject's own discourse: les deux derniers entretiens; tout a Vheure; depuis
quelque temps; il y a quelques jours; en classe de philo [the last two meetings;
in a moment; for a while; several days ago; in philosophy class]. That is to
say that the world actualized in NP3 is still the world of the subject,
mediated, interiorized by him, and related to his conditions or enuncia-
tions. This is opposed to social time, but even more opposed to spatial
references, which always presuppose a certain exteriority with respect to
the subject.
Adjectives specify conditions or attitudes of the subject, in cases where
they are not specified in the verb phrase by a passive voice or a verb of
being: sceptique; nerveux; fier> embete; malade [skeptical; nervous; proud;
annoyed; ill]. When they qualify a non-animate, it is still in relation to the
speaking subject. In particular they mark the relations of the subject to the
object, and sometimes even the evolution of those relations, implying a
comparison with a time gone by: je la trouve plus difficile; tout cela me
parait plus comprehensible [I find it more difficult; all of this seems more
comprehensible to me]. Adverbial expansions show up most often as
modalizations of the utterance, aimed at softening its decisive character,
either through the introduction of doubt - peut-etre, sans doute (maybe; no

doubt) — or through attenuating expressions — tout au moins; a peine encore;
petit a petit, enfin! [at the very least; hardly yet; little by little; finally!] - or
through negative transformations, or through temporal references signifying
that even if the utterance had been assumed at some moment in the past,
that is no longer necessarily the case, and even if it is assumed at the
present time, that is not definitive either, and could be called back into
question. All of these modalizations fundamentally express doubt, and a
questioning of the utterance, the only means the obsessive has of preventing
himself from being completely objectified in the utterance, and of keeping
open the possibility of getting the discourse moving again.
In the obsessive's discourse completive clauses often constitute the object
of the utterance. Not integrated into the minimal sentence, completives
take the place of NP2. Frequently they carry the message, and actually
constitute the utterance itself, which was introduced by a clause that was
nothing more than a representation of the process of enunciation, usually
not made explicit in the discourse of others: je dis; je demande; j'interroge [I
say; I ask; I question], etc. This objectivization of the enunciation, almost
always found in the obsessive's discourse, gives it its deferred or indirect
character, and reveals the steps interposed between locutor and discourse,
as well as those between the sender and the eventual receiver of the
message. The latter is often even bypassed by the reflexive form of the
introductory clause: I say to myself, I ask myself, I question myself, etc. The
obsessive's utterances begin as an objectivization of the enunciation, and
then continue by referring to the subject of that enunciation. In fact, the
subject of the completive is still I, and the verb expresses a condition, most
often passively experienced, of the subject of the enunciation. The subject
takes note of this fully accomplished condition in the way a spectator
would, not as one who is or was the agent: je suis pousse par; j'eprouvais;
favais tendance-, fignorais; je me sentais oblige [I am pushed by; I was
experiencing; I had the tendency; I was ignorant of; I was feeling myself
obligated], etc. The completive thus expresses a quality of the subject that
he would like to be the unique witness to and beneficiary of. It is not
proposed to the interlocutor, to (you), as a term of exchange, as an it, an
object of communication. The object expressed in the form of indirect
interrogation shows the same characteristics. The subject questions himself
and reserves the right to respond. The question is not formulated for the
partner of enunciation who has been evicted, as already indicated, by the
transformation of the pronominal into the reflexive: je me suis demande ce
qu'etait ce true, je me demande si e'est ca qui . . . [I asked myself what this
thing was; I ask myself if it's that . . . ] .
Conditionals are another type of subordinate clause in the obsessive's
discourse that have distinct characteristics. They do not take the form: if A
then B, but rather indicate the possibility that the realization of the condi-
tion remains hypothetical, suspended. Confusion between the potential
and the unreal is maintained. This is another way for the obsessive to
express doubt, and its function is to keep the utterance open, not closed in
on itself. All the more so since this potential-unreal is proposed as that
which would allow the obsessive to say, to affirm, to think, what is given
in the text. The decisive assumption of the message thus remains proble-
matic, susceptible to eventual remanipulation. The interlocutor has no
grounds to contest that which the sender reserves the right to call into
question. The hypothetical character of the condition can be expressed by
as if, which accentuates the nuance of unreality. As if, as substitution for
because, also serves to call the condition of the subject into question: je me
suis trouve mal a Vaise comme si se produisait une sorte de grouillement
interne\ je me sentais gene comme si je ressentais une panique devant toutes les
possibilites [I found myself uncomfortable as if there were some sort of
interior seething; I was troubled as if I was feeling panic faced with all the
possibilities]. The rare causals are generally introduced by as, rather than
because, or since, which attenuates their constraining character: comme la
notion avait Vair appuyee par des auteurs valables [as the notion seemed to
have the support of valued authors].
There are a large number of subordinate relative clauses in the obses-
sive's discourse. Their function, and that of most of the adjectives as well,
is to relate the subject of enunciation to non-animate subjects or objects,
and to specify the type of relationship he has with them. In other words,
relative clauses do express qualities of the world, but they are dependent
on the subject of enunciation, and are only valid insofar as they express an
interaction between him and the world. They translate a personal imagery
of the world, preserved in its singularity, and, as such, relatively incommu-
nicable: je decouvre un monde que j'ignorais; un grouillement interne que
faurais du mal a comprendre; je me souviens des notions que j'avais sur ga en
classe de philo; ga me parait quelque chose de tres grave et qui a du mal a
passer [I discover a world I was ignorant of; an internal seething I would
have trouble understanding; I remember notions that I had about that in
philosophy class; that seems to me something very serious I would have
trouble getting out (= I have trouble saying)].
Temporals in the obsessive's discourse convey the attempt to situate,
most often in the past, the utterance, or his own condition, in relation to
another: il me venait des choses tout a Vheure avant que farrive [things were
coming to me just now before I arrived [= before I began to talk to you)];
. . . depuis que fai commence a vous parler [ . . . since I began to talk to
you]; . . . quand ga allait bien [ . . . when things were going well]; . . .
lorsqu'il me vient une image et que fessaie de passer [ . . . when an image
comes to me and I try to move beyond it (=not to tell it)].
*
It becomes clear from this rather brief analysis, which will be developed
further elsewhere, that specific models of enunciation correspond to the
discourse of hysterics and obsessives. The typical utterance of the hysteric
is: (I) <— do you love me? —> (you). The hysteric leaves it to the addressee
to assume the utterance, the interrogative form making the message ambig-
uous, incomplete, in a word, non-assumed. It is the yes or the no of (you)
that underlies the message, and constitutes the addressee as the only
subject of enunciation. Responsibility for whatever is expressed in the
utterance is also left to its subject, you. The subject apparently producing
the message only intervenes as possible object of the addressee, an object
which is not the point of convergence for the two partners of enunciation,
not an object of exchange, because the unique subject is (you). The typical
statement can have such variants as: / love what you love. We should not be
taken in by the it (what) in this example. Whatever it may seem to be, it is
the object only of (you), and is not the hysteric's own object, any more
than the action expressed by the utterance was the hysteric's own action.
Even in cases where the utterance is not in interrogative form — / love what
you love - the fact that the world, the referent, appears as mediated by
(you) implies that the utterance is only a carbon copy, a duplicate, of an
implicit or explicit statement of (you).
The typical statement of the obsessive would be: (I) <— / tell myself that I
am loved —> (you), which can also take the form of a double negation (I)
<— / don't tell myself that I am not loved —• (you), the expression of a doubt
that will eventually show up as: / tell myself that I am perhaps loved, I
wonder if I am loved. The statement here appears to be assumed by the
locutor, accompanied nevertheless by the quasi-constant precaution of a
doubt that authorizes questioning and reworking, and is in a way a kind of
incompleteness. However, incompleteness also shows up elsewhere in the
lack of agent. The locutor is not the problem here, but rather the
addressee. His or her function as receiver of the message is in fact called
into question by the reflexive character of the enunciation, and by the fact
that the object of communication is so utterly mediated by (I) that it is
relatively incommunicable. In addition, the addressee is also left out of the
utterance where she or he functions neither as subject of an active verb,
nor as agent of a passive verb, nor as object.
Incomplete with respect to either the locutor or the addressee, utterances

of the hysteric and the obsessive raise the problem of the differentiation of
the two poles of enunciation. (I) and (you) are distinguished from each
other through their individual relationships to the world, transmitted in
the message. However, the hysteric is shown to be lacking his or her own
experience of the world, while the obsessive lives his experience in a way
that is so elaborated by his own imagery that it cannot be directly under-

stood. This does not mean that we are back to a total confusion of (I) and
(you), a hypothesis valid for psychotic languages. We do, in fact, see a
kind of differentiation interior to (you) itself or to (I) itself - (you') —»
(you); (I) —> (I')> a system of mediations which becomes the basis for the
future emergence of (I) and of T in the hysteric, as well as of a resurgence
of the past (you) in the obsessive. The trace of such a system of mediations
can be detected at the level of the partners of enunciation, and at the level
of the proposed object of communication.
No doubt the objection will be made, with reason, that what were
sketched out here as models of enunciation for the hysteric and the obses-
sive are still very close to models of the utterance. Although the enuncia-
tion is conveyed through the utterance, it cannot be considered isomorphic
to it. The enunciation is asymmetrical to the text, and this asymmetry may
even go so far as to require that these models be reversed. Thus, one
cannot exclude the hypotheses that the hysteric might be afraid to grant
reality to the addressee, and that the obsessive might be the pure object of
the addressee, and unable to assume an utterance as its subject.
It would be necessary, in order to come to a conclusion, to analyze
larger corpora, collected over a period of time. Study of a large body of
texts will clarify the rules governing them, rules that, from the structuring
principle specific to discourse, to its deficiencies and lacks, will allow us to
construct models of enunciation. It is also conceivable that analysis of the
discourse of phobics, or even of psychotics, will be necessary in order to
refine the models proposed for the hysteric and the obsessive. They would
then undoubtedly lose their almost caricatural antithetical character.
V
On Phantasm and the Verb
In the utterance, discourse fails as realized structure; in the enunciation, it

is always infinite, unfinished. The inadequacy of utterance to enunciation
makes all discourse incomplete, unendingly taken up and taken back,
unstable in signification. Enunciation is not a system of relations among
defined units, but rather a relationship among structures - subject, code,
world, co-locutor. It is the permanent questioning of already spoken
discourse. As dynamic articulation underlying the programming of the
utterance, it can never be totally realized therein; nor can it ever be
perfectly isomorphic to it.
IN T H E BEGINNING IS T H E VERB
Postulating the existence of a relation, verbs dominate the enunciation,

whereas substantives, the becoming-explicit of terms, govern the utterance.
What corresponds most precisely to the structuring that founds discourse
is the verb in the infinitive, not that it designates the act of enunciation,
but rather that it functions in the space of enunciation itself. Devoid of
any mark of person or number, the verb in the infinitive expresses only the
establishment of a relationship, the existence of compatibilities. It implies
neither subject nor object, but rather defines their place and the way they
function, and establishes the type of relationship that unites them.2
Furthermore, the dissociation of subject and object has not yet been
finalized. The subject, at this level, does not really carry out an action,
contemplate a spectacle or articulate a discourse; the subject is included
within the action, the spectacle, and the discourse themselves. We are
indeed at the stage of phantasm?
And yet, at this point, the 'subject' is already specified, marked by
anterior discourses - the other's, and the world's. It is acted as much as
actor, structured as much as structuring. That is no doubt why the articu-
lation of the utterance varies from one <subject> to another. This is not to
say that the <subject> is substantialized in some way, but that, through its
most irreducible phantasm, it is situated in a system of relations
constraining the realization of its discourse. Thus the various types of verbs
that are given as examples should be considered not for their meanings,
but to the extent that they presuppose a specific structuring, a unique

mode of interdependence.
Listening to various types of discourses in psychoanalysis leads to the

hypothesis that, for each individual, at the site of enunciation, a phantasm
governs the realization of the utterance. An effaced verb in the infinitive
corresponds to that phantasm: to live, to grow, to grow up, to absorb, to eat,
to breathe in, to reject, to give, to communicate, to retain, etc. This enumera-
tion has only exemplary value and makes no claim to exhaustivity. A
linguistic analysis, even a summary one, of these different verbs, reveals
what types of subject-object relation they presuppose.
To live implies an animate subject, not necessarily a person, who would

undergo the activity more than carry it out. To live, in fact — as well as to
exist, to grow, to grow up . . . - can be taken as a passive form.4 It expresses
a condition that the subject experiences, that she or he might take respon-
sibility for, or assume, but with respect to which she or he would not,
strictly speaking, be the agent. The status of the subject means that a
partner of enunciation is not in position, at least not in his or her indivi-
duality and actuality.5 Undoubtedly it can be inferred as 'subject' of an
anterior utterance, necessary cause of the current action or condition. It
can also be assimilated to all that will not be the subject, to the world not
yet defined as such. But it does not at this stage appear to be differentiated
as co-agent or co-locutor. Furthermore, to live excludes all action, or all
transference, of the subject onto an object. It is intransitive, and incompa-
tible with the existence of a relation between a subject and any given
animate or inanimate playing the role of object, direct or indirect.
To absorb - or to eat, to breathe in, to consume - usually takes a human

animate subject, or at least a metaphorically animate or personified subject
(the sand absorbs the water). The action appears to be actively accom-
plished by the subject. An individualized unit in the world carries out the
action on an inanimate or a metaphorically inanimate object. To absorb
excludes any relation between the human animate functioning as subject,
and another animate functioning as object. To absorb implies that
something in the world, exterior to the subject, is brought into its sphere,
or its space. What was exterior and foreign becomes interior and part of
the subject, assimilated by the subject. The inanimate becomes animate
insofar as it is identified with the subject. The partner of enunciation can
be merged with the world, an object to be absorbed. In that case it is
inanimate, or non-differentiated, as least as (you). If it has animate status,
it will eventually be the one under whose gaze the action takes place, and
who participates in it - to co-absorb - or favors it - to give (oneself) to be
ON PHANTASM AND THE VERB 57
absorbed^ to be eaten. If the partner of enunciation more effectively resists

letting herself or himself be reduced to an inanimate object than the
subject itself, this co-agent could remain as the only agent, and to absorb
changes for the subject into to be absorbed. The action actively assumed is
always liable to transformation into a passively undergone condition, due
to a link of dependence between the inanimate and the animate. Finally, at
the level closest to the differentiation of enunciation from utterance, closest
to the co-locutor, (you) will be the one to whom the action is reported.
But the status of (you) as such is still insufficiently defined, relatively fluid,
oscillating between that of an object-wo rid capable of being incorporated,
and that of an animate co-actor, or even of the unique agent or subject of
the enunciation.
To give - or to communicate, to transmit, to give back . . . - also presup-

poses a human animate subject who would assume the action in question.
The action is more elaborate than is the case for a verb such as to absorb,
and puts a more complex system of relations into play, since it moves an
inanimate or metaphorically animate object-wo rid out of the sphere of the
subject into that of another animate entity - to give something to someone.
It is a question of a transfer from interior to exterior which presupposes an
anterior moment when the subject would have appropriated the object.
The simple opposition subject-world, in evidence for to absorb, becomes
an act of transformation of a previously defined object-world. In the
present, to give establishes a relationship between two animate entities with
respect to an inanimate object. The identity of the partner of enunciation
is difficult to establish, at least unequivocally. Strictly speaking, the partner
of enunciation is the one to whom the action will be announced, for
whom the utterance itself would be the transferred object. But that would
already be marking a clear-cut separation between enunciation and utter-
ance. At the level of the infinitive, the partner of enunciation would more
likely be the one to whom one gives, to give expressing the dynamic inter-
dependence between two possible actors. However, (you) can also be
identified with the one - assimilated to the world - from whom something
has been taken, or with the one who was constituted as object capable of
being possessed. Hence another system of relations between the one who is
supposed to have formerly participated in the action, and the one who is
actually included in it in the present.
As verbs in the infinitive, and expressions of phantasms, to live, to

absorb, to give express above all a dynamic and not a true temporality.
However, while to live seems incompatible with a temporal scan, that is
not the case for to absorb or to give. To live implies a constant actuality
that cannot be assimilated to a present whose existence is thinkable only
through the separation from a past or a future. The action is always in the
process of happening; the condition is always in the process of coming
about. Neither is ever repetitive or able to be anticipated, because neither
is ever complete. To absorb and to give, as infinitives, do express incomple-
teness, but they are not incompatible with a temporal scan related to the
object. It is the presence of the object that means an action can be consid-
ered complete, and therefore repeatable, and predictable. It also means that
the action can be contested, modified by a questioning of or a change in
the object. What is important is that the space of the object be marked
out, that its function be required by the verb. The possibility of the
existence of a present, past or future character of an action is posited only
on that condition. What appears to be the impossibility of rupture or of
reiteration in the pure dynamic of to live comes from the absence of the
object. On another note, the temporal movement of to absorb differs from
the one implied by to give. Incompleteness is suggested more by to absorb,
in that what is expressed in it is above all a tension between the present
and the future. The act would be in process, with no assurance concerning
its eventual accomplishment. Only from its repetition do we gather that it
has been accomplished. To give presupposes a double temporal reference,
from the present to the future, since a transfer of an object must occur,
and from the present to the past since that would be possible only thanks
to a prior appropriation of the object. In the case of to give, it is undoubt-
edly the anterior functioning of the object that makes the temporal scan
more obvious, evoking a quasi-ongoing present, the accomplishment of a
quasi-immediate action.
Another trait, related to the existence, or lack thereof, of the object, and
to the status of the subject, individualizes these three types of verb. No
transformation can be carried out on the verb to live, except in the
metaphorical, or figurative, sense of the term. Regarding the negative trans-
formation: to live or not to live are not really alternative choices. That is
not the case for to absorb or to give. Not to absorb something, to refuse to
give some object to someone, or to refuse to give an object to such and
such a person, are possible choices. One can even differentiate further, in
the sense that while not to absorb anything is not a viable option, that is
not the case for not to give anything, which brings us back to a previous
time when the subject-world relation was already articulated.
These characteristics relative to temporality and to negative transforma-

tions clearly distinguish between to live on the one hand, and to absorb, to
give, on the other; one could point out other distinguishing characteristics:
for example, passive/non-passive, injunctive/non-injunctive, emphatic/non-
emphatic. One could sum up by saying that to live is comparable to to be,
whereas to absorb and to give belong to the domain of to have: tendency
toward having, or toward acting in order to have, in the case of to absorb',

and transfer of a 'had' thing, along with the possible constitution of
another as 'having,' in the case of to give.
. . . IDENTICAL AND NON-IDENTICAL T O THE SUBJECT
Whichever one of these verbs underlies the discourse of a subject in

psychoanalysis, it has an effect on the structuring of this discourse. There
are specific characteristics in the utterance which demonstrate this. What is
at stake here is the dynamic of enunciation which, either converging with
or diverging from what is actually said, is actualized in transference.
It would seem that what has been theorized about transference, and even
what has been improperly called counter-transference, has been elaborated
almost exclusively using the verb-phantasm to absorb. The transferential
dynamic can no doubt be clearly detected and analyzed with respect to the
verb-phantasm to absorb. In the case of so-called positive transference, the
analyst functions as an object to absorb, to eat, either as a whole, or in
certain of her or his attributes or productions that are preferentially
delegated for absorption. This transferential phantasm can call up an echo
in the analyst: phantasms such as to feed, to stuff with food, to be eaten, to
wean, etc., often accompanied by the specification of that which, on his or
her part, would be particularly appropriate to be given up to be absorbed,
or to be threatened with being devoured. This phenomenon can converge
with, but at times also diverges from, the unconscious aims of the analyst.
It is therefore appropriate to speak of transference on the part of the
analyst. When that transference does occur, what may prevent the develop-
ment of a positive transference in the analysand,6 is the connotation of the
analyst as something bad to eat, something poisonous, or the fear of the
'law of an eye for eye,' dictating that to absorb implies the possibility of
being absorbed. Resulting in the refuge in anorexia, or even in the
attempt, on the part of the analysand, to reverse the phantasm, to feed the
analyst. Feed the analyst what? All the already assimilated objects. That,
however, is nothing more than an avoidance decoy, and it reverts back to
giving oneself to be eaten, to be absorbed.
The analysis of transference is relatively delicate, in that both the analyst
and the analysand, rightly or wrongly, feel directly implicated in it. The
action is transitive and without the mediation, or at least the actualized
mediation, of an object of exchange. That is where the risk occurs of
getting stuck in what can be called the co-phantasm, a type of behavior
not symbolized by those involved, whatever words they use to conceal it.
The traditional principles of interpretation of transferences of the to absorb
type are well known. One supposedly proceeds to locate and then to
analyze the object. Who or what is it? Not I; it is he, or she. Why good?
Why bad? Etc. In the end, that means nothing more than the elimination
of an artificially born transference neurosis. Or possibly the naming of the
object included in the phantasm, creating obsession where there was
anxiety. It is the phantasmatic dynamic itself that requires attention, minus
the permutable object that the subject-object relation unavowedly makes
out of discourse. Interpretation would need to be applied to the junction
of the enunciation and the utterance, and would articulate the link
between them, the movement back and forth from one to the other. The
analyst is an object to be eaten, at the site where the patient is not yet the
<subject> of her or his speech, and is still spoken more than speaking.
Playing on silence and the word, his or her own and not that of some
doctrine, the analyst marks the passage from phantasm to utterance, from
acting to saying, raising the question of the status of the object. The
analyst interprets, through multiple comings and goings from the state of
object to be eaten to that of speaking subject, creating the patient as co-
locutor, and not exclusively as absorbing subject or as object to be
absorbed. Thenceforth the utterance can function as object of exchange.
Interpretation thus conceived is work, action, and not just speech. But this
action takes place inside the laws of discourse. The phantasm is irreducible
to the word; it is acted out in another register from the utterance. Made
from language, it understands it not. The word of the analyst would go
unheeded, a dead letter or a swallowed letter, if it were only spoken, and
not also acted, as articulation, from one register to the other, from
enunciation to utterance.
If the phantasm underlying the analysand's discourse is of the to give

type, the structuring of the transference is different. First of all, it presents
as bifid. To give presupposes a dynamic relation between the subject and
the one to whom the subject gives, but also between subject and gift
object. This relation must be analyzed, unfolded, differentiated within a
network of relations. Although transference seems less problematic because
the object already has a status, and because the third term has already been
established, it is complicated by the multiplicity of relations implicated. It
is also made difficult by the apparent symmetry between the phantasmatic
structure and that of linguistic communication. In both cases, an inani-
mate object is transferred from one human animate to another. The artifi-
cial character of this analogy calls for analysis. Although the object does
exist, it is not easily exchangeable, since it is partially identified with the
<subject>, and is an object-world integrated into the subject's phantasmatic
universe: an object whose symbolization escapes the subject — lived as non-
mediatable, non-verbal, not even capable of being verbalized. The human
animate implied in to give is also caught up in an imaginary network, and

not positioned as <subject>-addressee. He or she can undoubtedly be
experienced as co-actor, as the one who wants to take, the one who asks,
who is ready to accept or to reject, who appears as possessive rival, as
demanding beggar, as dangerous ravisher, or as indifferent, belittling every-
thing proposed. This transferential experience is capable of calling up in
the analyst complementary opposed phantasms, in counterpoint. The
action of to give is structured in a unique global field, according to the
types of organization of the phantasm. Subject, object and partner are
caught up in this unique construction. The analyst will have to work at
breaking it up. The laws of discourse, and of all symbolized exchange,
imply fragmentation. If the speaking <subject> tends to produce a global
utterance as the metaphor of this phantasm, she or he is forced, in order to
be understood, to accept its suspension, its splitting, its metonymic
postponement, of which the code, the world, and, most of all, the co-
locutor must be the guarantors. Interpreting this verb-phantasm comes
down to coming in out of synch, off the beat, not in the space of the cause
of the gift, where the phantasm of the analysand expects someone, but
rather in the space of the guarantor of the metonymic movement of the
utterance, where the analysand awaits no one.
The phantasm which, in analysis, causes the most problems, is certainly to

live. It effectively excludes all transitive action on an object, and indeed all
objects, which is the same as saying all transference, if one defines the latter
as an objectival relation. The subject is caught up in a phantasm that is
closed in on itself, without dynamic striving toward an outside pole, at least
a differentiated one. If the subject comes to analysis, he or she has been
brought in by a word. This type of subject expects nothing, asks for
nothing, seems a stranger to the meaning of, or even to the possibility of,
taking such a step. They speak sometimes, but in the same way as one lives
or grows, a solitary expression without any particular appeal to the other,
any definite relationship to the world. Speaking becomes the equivalent of
keeping quiet, prior to any alternation with the word. Or better yet of
murmuring, pure manifestation of life. Undoubtedly nothing would happen
without the profound anguish such a <subject> inspires in the other, in the
analyst, for example. In the register of to have, the register of the object,
which is familiar, and where the analyst is forewarned and awaits the
patient, nothing is requested of the former. He or she feels useless, non-
existent. It is now the analyst's turn to be disconcerted, unless he or she
defends himself or herself by taking the analysand as object, as had, thereby
aborting for the latter any possibility of access to actively assumed action, or
discourse. Perhaps that is the only function the analyst is asked to have.
However, when the latter accepts this anguish and lives this transference, he
or she will be confronted with death. Not only familiar death linked to
objectivization, against which the analyst is relatively armed, and which she
or he might happen secretly to call upon to escape from herself or himself,
or to give free rein to her or his own aggression. Not even death implied by
the divisible character of the object. The death in question here is death that
is loss of all identificatory process, the fall into the unrepresentable, where
the unique mysteries of birth and death can be felt in ways both undefinable
and heavy with meaning. Having come through the silence that founds his
or her story, through that intimacy with his or her own death, and not the
always contestable death imposed by others, the analyst can find the patient.
The analyst must summon the patient to an encounter with death. Not in
some acting out together, where the analyst would be executioner or victim.
It is not the latter's place to put to death, or to be put to death, but to recog-
nize death and to have it be recognized as the first master. The acceptance of
death designs for each of us a unique and solitary destiny. For the indefinite,
for the passively undergone, for to live, it substitutes the contours of one's
own life, to be assumed or rejected. It makes the living being into a
<subject>. Perhaps the register of to have will remain inaccessible or indif-
ferent to that subject. That does not stop her or him from being brought to
act, even to make something, an object perhaps, or at the very least to trans-
form her or his life into a work. The only valid non-deadly transference for
such <subjects> is sympathy, provided it excludes all merging together of
individuals, and all pity.
There are many diverse verb-phantasms underlying discourse. I could
isolate verbs implying non-individualized objects - to breathe; cite those
that exclude any transitive action between subject and object - to please;
differentiate those implying an animate object from those implying an
inanimate object - to seduce/to make. An exhaustive study would also allow
us to analyze and formalize the links of interdependence between subject
and object, and the typical transformations corresponding to them.
The case of to desire is different. To desire should be interpreted above all as
a modalization - such as maybe, no doubt - or as a modal verb - such as to
want to, to be able to, to have to. Of course, it seems to be the primordial
modalization, the trace of the appearance of the speaking <subject> itself,
negation of an accomplished present, and assertion of a non-accomplished
future. For this reason, it should not have to be analyzed in isolation. It
should be treated as to desire to absorb, to desire to give. In the case of to live, to
desire would be situated in the place of enunciation, exterior to the <subject>,
to whose marking it would submit, or whose marking it would assume.
Whatever the case may be, this desiring can be interpreted as the site of inter-
rogation of the always possible functioning of the other, the partner of
enunciation.
VI
Linguistic Structures of Kinship
and Their Perturbations in
Schizophrenia
The lexical micro-system of words designating kinship relations within a

linguistic community lends itself well to the type of componential analysis
whose principles were established by H. Conklin ('Lexicographical treat-
ment of folk taxonomies,' International Journal of American Linguistics,
April 1962), and effectively applied to kinship by Lounsbury ('A semantic
analysis of the Pawnee kinship usage,' Language, 32, 158-94). The essen-
tial factor in the success of this type of analysis is the potential to produce,
within a limited field, conjunctive definitions of a body of terms, an
exhaustive list of which can then be constituted.
The fundamental problem posed by these structural analyses is to distin-
guish what belongs to the register of linguistic structure and its use by the
'speaking subject,' from what belongs to the socio-cultural structure
formed by kinship relations among members of a defined community.
There is the risk of describing the social structure, i.e. the structure of the
signified objects {denotata), rather than determining the system of lexemes
themselves. Thus, linguistic analysis must take care to discriminate
between the two levels, and to base itself on the morphological rules
governing the lexical structure of kinship terms.
Obviously, this linguistic structure exists only because it is used by
speakers; it is defined by the way it functions in discourse. Problems of
linguistic description are inseparable from their use by speaking subjects.
In this field, as in others, the study of dysfunctions can constitute one
approach to the analysis of linguistic functioning. Description of the
lexical organization and usage sheds light on 'types of errors,' and on the
psycholinguistic hypotheses that can be formulated concerning senile
dementia (cf. Le Langage des dements, Paris: Mouton, 1973) and schizo-
phrenia.
DESCRIPTION OF THE LINGUISTIC STRUCTURES OF KINSHIP
Lounsbury's principles and method will be used as theoretical reference for

the analysis of kinship vocabulary in French. It is important to note that
this linguistic structure is defined not only by a limited number of
semantic dimensions, but also by reference to the speaking subject.
REFERENCE TO THE SUBJECT AS FOUNDATION OF THE SYSTEM
The system is founded on the referential subject, ego, who is actually using
the linguistic structure. Kinship terms refer to ego implicitly. Ego has no
fixed place in the linguistic kinship structure, but, without ego, the structure
does not exist. It is therefore the speaking subject who founds the system
and gives meaning to the relations established among the terms. The basic
question in the study of kinship structures is: how does ego situate himself
or herself as reference point in the linguistic structure, of kinship in parti-
cular, and how does ego convey this referential function in discourse?
Furthermore, it should be noted, from the standpoint of the lexical
micro-structure, that for ego there is a fundamental double opposition:
• ego, as opposed to relatives within the kinship structure;

• ego and relatives included in the structure, as opposed to strangers.
These fundamental oppositions bring out:

(a) referential ambiguity at work in the kinship structure:1 thus, the French
word parent can designate any type of kinship relation, and it also has a
specific referent in the structure: the parents of a child.
(b) Semantic ambiguity: the same term can apply in several different lexical
structures (that is, it can have several different distributions), or within
the same structure at different levels of specificity. The same example
can be used again: the polysemy of the term parents.
THE STRUCTURAL DIMENSIONS
The system of kinship names is founded on several dimensions, used in

French either jointly or separately, whose pertinent traits constitute the
relationships defining the morphological structure. Each dimension can be
represented technically by a dichotomous operation. The structural dimen-
sions of the system of kinship names are:
(a) consanguinity: the group of family members united by bonds of blood,

as opposed to the group of relatives united by alliance;
LINGUISTIC STRUCTURES OF KINSHIP 65
(b) generations: within the system defined by the differentiating trait of

consanguinity, generations - that is, the relationship instituted among
parents and their children across ascending and descending generations
- constitute the fundamental dimension of the French system;
(c) Sex: male as opposed to female;
(d) collaterality: within each generation, with respect to ego, there is an
opposition between immediate family relations (direct) and non-
immediate family relations (indirect) that constitutes the dimension of
collaterality; for example: father as opposed to uncle, son as opposed to
nephew;
(e) relative age: the relative age dimension characterizes age differentials
between persons corresponding to the same basic designation. It is
limited, in the French type of kinship, to immediate consanguineal
relations in the direct line; for example: eldest son as opposed to
youngest son.
(f) generic terms: generic terms are those that, in one of the previously
indicated dimensions, neutralize or suppress one of the other dimen-
sions, in particular the sexual dimension. Thus parents designates father
and mother, children designates sons and daughters.
Remarks concerning the linguistic specificity of the kinship structure of

French have been developed in Luce Irigaray and J. Dubois, 'Les structures
linguistiques de la parente et leurs perturbations dans les cas de demence et
schizophrenic' Cahiers de lexicologie, I: 8.
THE PSYCHOLINGUISTIC SURVEY
In order to study the types of error in the manipulation of kinship struc-

tures found among patients with senile dementia and among schizophre-
nics, a survey was drawn up giving respondents definitions of kinship
relations and asking them to supply the corresponding term. They are
asked: What do you call a sister's husband? The expected answer, and the
only one possible according to correct usage, is brother-in-law.
The survey includes several questions:

• What do you call a sister's husband?
• What do you call the children of someone's children?
• What do you call a brother's child?
• What do you call an uncle's children?
• What do you call the children of two brothers?
The survey given to a control group (neurological ward patients at the

Hopital Sainte-Anne who had no mental problems or problems with

language) was completed without errors.
The instructions and examples presented as illustrations included the

precision that the answer given was to be the kinship term, and not the name
of a person who was related to the respondent in that way (Peter, Paul, etc.).
In cases where the general instructions did not elicit an appropriate first
response, further directions with increasing linguistic precision were brought
in. Precision is increased through references to the pragmatic context:
• emphasizing the relation with ego, and references to the actual situation
of the respondent: What is your sister's husband's name? What do you
call your children's children?
• emphasizing relationships defined in the survey by dividing each of the
distinctive traits into a separate question, always referring to the
pragmatic context. For example: Do you have a sister? Is she married?
What do you call her husband? Etc.
For the schizophrenics, since the results of the first survey indicated that
almost all their errors concerned the generational axis, a second survey was
elaborated where certain items from the first were differently formulated,
deliberately emphasizing the generational dimension, and in particular the
relationship of ego to father. The point was to study the relative stability of
the term 'father' in relation to ego, and vice versa, as well as the ability of
ego to identify, if necessary, with the term father in the structure.
The questions are formulated as follows:

• What is your father's father to you?
your mother's father?
• What is your father's brother to you?
your mother's brother?
• What is your father's wife to you?
• What are your father's children to you?
• What are your children for your father's father?
Refer to Table VI:2 for the results of this study.
ANALYSIS OF RESULTS AND TYPES OF ERRORS
REACTIONS TO THE INSTRUCTIONS
(1) This exercise is not so well received by respondents as exercises

permitting a metalinguistic type of response. In this case, the speaking
subject is implied as privileged reference point of the structure in question,

which makes it more difficult to answer using the merely formalistic play
of language. There is more reticence, a longer period of hesitation. There
are reactions of astonishment, irony, and non-comprehension, and
sometimes even reponses of 'I don't know,' more indicative of refusal than
of ignorance.
(2) The questions on kinship structures, implicating ego, intersect with

the family history of the respondent. Hence, in this exercise, the far greater
prevalence of 'hallucinatory' comments interfering with the response. The
other exercises make simple language games easier, and leave the 'halluci-
nations' to spontaneous or to semi-induced language.
(3) Metalinguistic comments take a specific form. Respondents call into

question the validity of kinship denominations, the stability of family
structure, the way ego comes into the structure, etc. Along the same lines,
one observes responses illustrating what could be called a neo-code of the
familial micro-structure, as well as attempts by the schizophrenic to
restructure an individual language.
(4) In most cases, respondents know the term that answers the question,
but first responses are often inexact, in the various ways analyzed below.
TYPES OF ERROR
Preliminary remarks
In 30/60, or 50 percent, of the cases, the incorrect responses are corrected

by the respondents, and end up as correct answers after one or two repeti-
tions of the question. It is possible that there is not a higher percentage of
error corrections because, for a certain number of respondents, the
question was not repeated, and there was only one answer given.
Counting all responses obtained - all responses to each repetition of the
question - there are 79 'right' answers and 79 'wrong' answers; the latter
also consist of comments on the instructions, on kinship structures, etc.
Out of 79 incorrect answers, 53 (53/158) can be considered errors, the
others being comments of various types.
Generational errors
Most of the errors (36/53) concern generations. The respondent makes a

mistake about generations, 'skipping' one or two. Two, sometimes three,
generations can be merged. Ego's and his or her father's generations,

sometimes those of ego's son and her or his father, are not distinguished.
For example: A brother's children? Des cousins [Cousins]. An uncle's
children? Des neveux etlou des nieces [Nephews and/or nieces]. The
children's children? Des freres [Brothers]. The children of two brothers?
Neveux [Nephews]. Your father's brother to you? Un frere; un beau-frere [A
brother; a brother-in-law]. Your grandfather's grandchildren to you? C'est
mon fils [It's my son]. Your father's nephew to you? Petit-neveu [Grand-
nephew] . Your children to your father? lis seraient ses enfants [They would
be his children]. Your mother's father to you? Un beau-pere [A father-in-
law] . Your father's father? Un pere [A father].
Some might want to object that the incorrect responses are due to the
difficulty of these genealogical or familial subtleties. However, besides the
fact that the respondents themselves often correct their own answers, it
should be noted that there are not fewer errors when the questions are easier,
and imply only the direct filial relation. On the contrary. For example:
'What is your father's wife to you? or 'What is your mother's husband to
you?' seem to be difficult problems to solve for schizophrenics. One obtains
responses such as 'A wife,' 'I don't know,' etc. And the respondent is
perplexed by such questions as 'What are your father's children to you?',
questions concerning in particular the father —• ego, ego —• father relation.
Confusion about distinct kinship lines
Alliance and collaterality

A sister's husband? Un oncle, un cousin [An uncle, a cousin]. An uncle's
children? Les petits-filsy mes files [Grandsons, my daughters]. Etc. This can
be interpreted to mean that collateral relations by alliance are confused
with consanguineal collateral relations, the latter often preferred in the
response. It should also be noted that this error is accompanied by an error
in generations.
Generations and collaterality

Your father's father to you? Un oncle [An uncle]. The children's children?
Your children's children? Des freres [Brothers]. Your mother's father to
you? Un oncle [An uncle]. Collaterality seems to prevail over generations
here, or more precisely, it seems that responding with collateral relations
offsets the difficulty of having to position oneself in the genealogy. Two
responses, however, contradict this interpretation: Your mother's sister to
you? Unegrand-mere [A grandmother]; response subsequently corrected to:
tante [Aunt]. A sister's husband? Gendre [Son-in-law]; subsequently
corrected to Beau-frere [Brother-in-law].
Neutralization of distinct kinship lines, or response with a generic term

A relatively rare type of error, whose low frequency can be compared to its
high frequency in the responses of brain-damaged patients or those with
senile dementia (cf. Le Langage des dements). For example: Your father's
children to you? C'est des enfants, et puis c'est tout; je n'en sais rien, c'est des
enfants [They're children, and that's all; I don't know anything about it,
they're children]. Your father's wife? Une epouse [A wife]. Your father's
children to you? Des filles [Daughters]. Etc. Extremely simple questions,
from the standpoint of the manipulation of kinship structures, result in
such responses as this because the respondent is implicated very seriously
in direct filial relation: relation either to the father or the mother. The
problem does not lie in the difficulty of producing the appropriate terms,
because it can be verified elsewhere that the respondent can recall them.
Designation type responses
These responses show confusion about the relation between the structural
terms and their content, or even their attributes, and confusion between
the designation and its various possible realizations. For example: The
sister's husband? Robert, Andre [Robert, Andrew]. The responses are
modified after repetition of the question. It cannot therefore be the result
of ignorance of the appropriate term.
Neo-code of kinship structures
One might hesitate between rubrics 4 and 5 in classifying these responses.

They have been put into a category suggesting remanipulation of the
kinship structure - the same type of restructuring of the mother tongue
that has been observed in other areas - because the response provided does
not correspond to the name of the person in question, but corresponds to
what might be called a symbolic overdetermination of the requested term.
The respondent is really manipulating the code here, and elaborating a
sub-code for kinship structures. For example: Your father's father to you?
Abraham [Abraham]. Your father's brother? Cain [Cain]. Your father's
child to you? Esau [Esau]. These are answers given by one respondent.
Also from the same respondent: Your father's father? C'est Judas [It's
Judas]. Your father's brother's children to you? C'est Judas [It's Judas].
The following responses can also be interpreted in the same way. Who
are you to your father? Bouillastre, un true comme ga [Bouillastre,
something like that]. Your children to your father? Des poussins [Baby
chicks]. Your mother's brother to you? Un Dieu [A God]. Your sister's
husband? Un beau-frere . . . et un frere quelquefois. Quand c'est un vrai beau-

frere, c'est un frere. [A brother-in-law . . . a brother sometimes. When he's a
real brother-in-law, he's a brother].
Errors in the direction of genealogy
For example: What are your children to your father? Ben, c'est le grand-pere
[Well, he's the grandfather]. What are your father's brother's children to
you? Ah ben, c'est mon oncle [Well, he's my uncle].
It's the same type of mistake that makes one respondent answer: 'Great-
children' for 'grandchildren,' a response that shows confusion about the
morphological marks of ancestry and descendance. This mistake was
corrected by the respondent.
Schizophasia or aberrant responses
The children of two brothers? Des ormeaux (Elm striplings). This response
can be understood as a paraphone of twins,2 a kind of schizophasic neolo-
gism.
INTERPRETATION OF ERRORS
(1) Schizophrenics know the terms for kinship structures. They can
summon them easily as terms of the language, often with an excess of
precision and of information. For example, the precision of 'first cousins,'
or of two genders given for a term instead of the generic response
(nephews and nieces),3 etc. They experience no deficiency with respect to
the lexical micro-structure.
(2) Most of the errors concern the generational dimension. Two,

sometimes three, generations are confused. The supplemental survey (cf.
Table VI:2: another series of questions formulated after the first responses)
indicates that the problem for the schizophrenic lies in the filial relation.
The ego-father relation.
Responses given as comments on the proverb 'Tel pere, tel fils' [Like
father, like son] confirm that it is direct filiation that is perturbed in the
manipulation of kinship structures. For example: 'Le pere et le fils sont
pareils,' 'Le pere est semblable au fils,' 'Tel pere ressemble a tel fils,' 'Papa et
Guy [= ego] sont des feres,' 'Le pere, c'est le fils; le fils, c'est le pere' ['The
father and the son are similar,' 'The father is like the son,' 'Such and such
a father resembles such and such a son,' 'Papa and Guy [= ego] are
brothers,' 'The father is the son; the son is the father'] etc. (cf. the
comments on proverbs in 'Idiolect or Other Logic'). In utterances like
these, the filial relation is denied, inverted, neutralized, or flattened out.
Spontaneous or semi-induced discourse also contains affirmations such as
'Dans ma proprepersonne, je suispere' ['In my own person, I am a father'].
One particular respondent indicates his father's date of birth as his own.
One effect of this perturbation in the filial relation is to destabilize the
fundamental dimension of the kinship system in French - the generational
axis. It also problematizes the referential function of ego.
(3) The question that is apparently the most difficult for the other
respondents, 'What are the children of two brothers to each other?', is the
one to which schizophrenics respond with the most ease. This seems to be
due to that fact that it implies a lesser degree of involvement on the part
of ego, and to prove that the problem is not the integrity of the lexical
micro-structure, but rather the way ego functions in the relation of
enunciation to utterance, in relation to the conversion of linguistic forms
into discourse, into asserted utterances. The above question is paradoxically
easier for them than 'What is your mother's husband to you?'
(4) Concerning the lexical micro-structure, one notes reactions parallel

to those shown for the language function: questioning the learned, or
imposed, structure (cf. the comments, for example), attempts at neo-
structuring, neo-formation of the kinship organization, a kind of neo-code
which can consist of symbolic overdetermination of the existing structure
(cf. responses given in B5), but which can be just as incomprehensible as
certain schizophasic neologisms if the cipher, the key, is too cryptic or too
inconsistent.
(5) As for the question of the relation of the schizophrenic to kinship

relations in general, and specifically to genealogical relations, some
elements appear in the analysis of spontaneous and semi-induced utter-
ances about family, relatives (or parents), children, birth, etc.
Table VI. 1 Kinship structures
Respondents A sister's A brother's The children's An uncle's The children of Comments or

husband? children? A children? children? two brothers? remarks
sister's
children?
Baro. That's an Second or third Great-children Great-nieces They're Commentary

uncle//* I cousins . . . . . . // Yes, and nephews. cousins. on how this
thought that it Nieces and rather than (Q. relates to the
was an uncle. cousins // 'great', family tree:
My relatives, Cousins or 'grand'children. difficult to do if
I've never seen nephews. the relatives are
them. // Cousin dispersed, if
. . . I don't they are dead.
know.
Bege. A brother-in- Cousins. Brothers (C). First cousins. Uncles and That's related
law. nephews/ to the last
nieces// First sentence. Don't
cousins. you think?
Beno. A brother-in- Nieces and Grandchildren. First cousins. They're first
law. nephews. cousins.
Bria. - - - - -
Cabr. - - - - -
Carr. - - - - -
Cayr. - - - - -
Note
*// indicates an additional presentation of the cue. C indicates a comment in response.

sister's
children?
Cham. I have the . . . // Hmm. Theoretically, I Frenetic

feeling that I I'm their don't have an commentary.
should say mother. // uncle any more.
nothing, They're my I've only got an
absolutely grandchildren. aunt. {Some
nothing.// (C) Anyway, clearly aunt?). There's
// ( Q . there are males. only one of
I don't know them (C).
anything about
it, am
abstaining to do
it.
Chan. - - - - -
Char.
Choi. My brother-in- My nephew. My grand- My cousins. ?
law children.
Cohe. — — — — —
Dali.
Daud. A brother-in- Nephews. Grandchildren. Nephews.// No, H m m . . . hmm
law. cousins. . . . cousins.
Dave.

sister's
children?
Deno. That's the son- Ah well, they're They're . . . They're They're elm Commentary
in-law.// That's nephews. grandchildren. cousins. striplings. about
the son-in- They're called consanguinity.
law.// The son- cousins, aren't
in-law, i.e. my they?
brother-in-law.
Desc. - - — - -
Dhui.
Fabr. That's more
complicated,
that // Cousins
. . . cushions .
Baby chicks
. . . I don't
know . . . You
could take it
much further
. . . Chickens// I
can't find the
word.
Fleu. A brother-in- Nephews (C). My My cousins . . . . . . You see, Frenetic
law. grandchildren. that's the same commentary.
again.// Well,
first cousins.

sister's
children?
Foug.
Graf. (C)// I could In other words, (C) I hope Mustn't ask me Oh, that that's Frenetic
never figure out a nephew. they're too much asking me too commentary.
how fam.. .ilies grandchildren. because I'm the much. OK,
work. I source// they're
couldn't get my Nephews and nephews,
head round my nieces, there are they're all the
sister having the both. same.
same cousin as
me . . . I wanted
to have him all
to myself.
Nobody ever
managed to
make me
understand that
we had the
same relatives.//
I hope that it's
the brother-in-
law . . . because
I don't call him
that anymore.

sister's
children?
Hard. The brother-in- Nephews and Grandchildren. Female cousins. Nephews again,
law. nieces. nephews and
nieces. //
cousins.
Hare. The brother-in- My Nephews. Cousins. Commentary
law . . . and grandchildren. about his uncle.
sometimes the
brother. When
he's a true
brother-in-law,
he's a brother.
Here. . . . brother-in-
law.
Hera. Make a I don't have a They would be They would be They have to be
sentence out of brother.// They my . . . my cousins.
it? Make the would be my grandchildren. nephews as
sentence . . . nephews. well. //
longer?// I Cousins.
don't know
anything about
it, an uncle,
obviously.//
That's a
brother-in-law.

sister's
children?
Kame. The brother-in- The nephew. Grandchildren. Nephews. Cousins?

law. Nephews and Cousins.
nieces.
Lebr. - - - - -
Led. These are our
nephews or
nieces or male
or female
cousins.
Lesu. What do you I don't know.//
call a sister's I don't know.//
husband? . . . I I haven't got a
don't clue, a family?
understand// I
don't know.
I've never
visited my
family. // A
brother-in-law.
Marc.

sister's
children?
Migo. My sister's So that would Nephews. The children of

husband, you be the cousins two brothers?
mean? Andre// from . . . Also nephews.
Hmm . . . a Brittany. Our
brother-in-law. cousins'
cousins. Still,
there our
cousins' cousins
are our cousins.
Not always
though, since
there are many
who claim to be
cousins but
aren't.
More. That's the Nephews and Grandchildren. Cousins. First cousins.
brother-in-law. nieces.
Pers. Robert.// A Ah, well ...III Grandchildren. An uncle's? The children of
brother-in-law. don't know, Cousins. two brothers? //
nephews? Cousins.
Pier. That's my That's my That's my Cousins? Brothers-in-
brother-in-law. daughters . . . grandsons. law? No.
my nephews. Hmm, I don't
know//
Cousins.
Respondents A sister's A brother's The children's An uncle's The children of Com-ments or

sister's
children?
Pill.
Pore.
Preb. - - -
Quer. . . . Moses . . . . . . Esau . . .
Note
i
Translators note. The words "orrneaux" (elm striplings) and "jumeaux" (twins) rhyme in French; their English translations do not.
2
Translators note. The words "cousins" (cousins) and "coussins" are clearly closer in sound and appearance than their English
Counterparts.
3
Translators note. "Poussins" (baby chicks) is one step further in the word play link from "coussins".
Table VI.2 Kinship structures (Part I)
Respondents Father's father? Father's Father's sister? Father's Grand-father's Father's

Mother's brother? Mother';s sister? children? grand- nephews?
father? Mother's children? Mother's
brother? nephews?
Asse. Grandfather. . . . That's my That's my son My mother's

uncle. . . . the nephew? That's
grandson, that's a little nephew,
my son// Ah, I think . . . a
no, that's me, cousin// A
well . . . my cousin.
father . . . no,
it's me.
Dave. Grandfather. Uncle . . . I Brother and Little cousin . . .
don't like that sister. cousin to be
uncle more precise.
because ..
Fabr. That's a Brothers and
brother. sisters.
Foug. An uncle. My An uncle. That's a
mother's father brother.
is a father-in-
law// That's a
grandfather.
Lesu. Oh, that? Well, it's the
Those are same// It's
uncles// That's grandmother?
the uncle// Ah, Your mother's
that's the sister . . . Ah,
grandfather. that's an aunt.
Note
II indicates an additional presentation of the cue. C indicates a comment in response.

Mother's brother? Mother';s sister? children? grand- nephews?
brother? nephews?
Preb. My father's I've always got I know

father? My mixed up with absolutely
grandfather. that. I didn't nothing about
understand that. They're
anything about children and
it// I don't that's that. I
know anything don't know
about it. That how closely
has to by my they're related//
father-in-law.// I don't know
I don't know anything about
how close a it. I swear to
relation that is. you// I don't
I've never put know anything
that question to about it, they're
myself. children. What
do you want
them to be?
Quer. Abraham. . . . Cain. . . . Adelaide? (Long silence,
15 seconds)// 5
orders// Girls.

Mother's brother? Mother' s sister? children? grand- nephews?
brother? nephews?
Cohe. It's a particular The father's My father's? //

Judas (C) // (C) brother? The he laughs // My
// Well, it's the brother . . . my father's
grandfather. uncle who's in children, but
Israel and who's because it's my
a great guy, father's child it
that's my could very well,
father's brother. he will say: I
am . . . for
example,
Habib, and
there you have
it.
Hebe. . . . Grandfather. . . . Uncle
Lecl. That's my That's my My father's
grandfather. uncle. children . . .
wait . . . well,
my father's
children, that's
us! thank you
very much.
Table VI.2 Kinship structures (Part II)
Resondents Your children Brother's Father's wife? Mother's brother You for your Comments and
for your father? children? Mother's for the father? father? remarks
Father's husband?
children?
Asse.
Dave.
Fabr. If I had children. . . . a God // a Bouillartre, one
Well, that's the God. like him. // I
grandfather // don't know. Oh
The great-great- yes . . . a little
children. baby chick.// Me,
I'm his son.
Foug. The grandfather, That's a nephew,
the godsons that's a little
between the nephew.
grandchildren.
Lesu. Husband? // your
mother's
husband ...III
don't understand
// the mother's
husband? . . .
father?
Preb. To the question
about the your
mother's brother,
respond
immediately with
an uncle.
Table VI.2 Kinship structures (Part II)
Respondents Your children Brother's Father's wife? Mother's brother You for your Comments and
for your father? children? Mother's for the father? father? remarks
Father's husband?
children?
Quer. Esau. A wife. // A wife

// That depends
on that person's
fidelity.
Cohe. Oh boy, that's My brother's Commentary
because I didn't children? // My about his
have any (C) // father's brother's relations to
For which father? children. Well, members of his
Ah, for my I've already lost family.
father. Ah, well, one of them. But
they would be his I do have another
children. // Something like
Muriel // Oh,
yes, Judas, or
Lissia.
Hebe. Grandchildren. . . . Cousins.
Led. . . . // Hmm,
well, it's their
grandson or their
granddaughter,
it's my boy.
VII
Sentence Production among
Schizophrenics and Senile
Dementia Patients
In order to establish models of performance for sentence production

among patients with senile dementia and schizophrenics, analysis should,
strictly speaking, be done using spontaneous, as opposed to induced, utter-
ances. However, divergences among spontaneous utterances are so great
that they do not allow for easy isolation of the various factors contributing
to the singularity of the sentences produced. Therefore, a survey was
created using linguistic material that is restrictive and standardized, and
allows dissociation of the various factors at work in the production of
utterances, particularly the attitude of the speaking subject vis-a-vis the
competence model. Indeed, giving such a survey to respondents presup-
poses the inevitability of a common competence model, even if it means
taking note a posteriori of its non-integrity, or dysfunctionality. The under-
lying hypothesis of this study, a hypothesis that has proved pertinent, is
that particularities or perturbations in the utterances produced, are, for the
most part, a function of the subject's use of the combinative linguistic
function. The variations in performance, corresponding to the diagnosis of
senile dementia or of schizophrenia, do not invalidate the stability of the
competence model, but rather can be explained as divergent behavioral
modes vis-a-vis linguistic rules, and as diverse strategies adopted vis-a-vis
the model of competence.
*
In the sentence production study, two, three or four morphemes were
presented to respondents in a definite order, along with the instructions to
integrate them into a minimal sentence pattern: 'Make a sentence, the
shortest and the simplest possible, with the words I give you.'
The given terms correspond to various syntactic functions, belong to
different lexical classes, and can be combined with varying degrees of ease
or difficulty. The exercise requires that three types of linguistic rules be put
into play: syntactic (intuition of the minimal sentence, with possible
expansions); lexical (respect for syntactic-lexical correlations, disambigua-

tion of the proposed morphemes, and possible selection of a functional
verb); and semantic (understanding the compatibilities and incompatibil-
ities between the given morphemes and certain messages, and among the
given terms themselves).
The cue is always accompanied by an example demonstrating the
minimal sentence, and implicitly suggesting that the respondent rectify any
possible agrammaticality or anomaly in the message constituted by the cue
words. Thus, for the item door—nurse, the response 'The nurse opens the
door,' re-establishes the canonical order animate -> inanimate, which is
not demonstrated in the cue.
The items are: maison—mere\ enfant—hopitah maison—chafi, lampe-lumiere\
pere—enfant—absent, feuille-detacher-voler; rouge—voir—cheval [house-mother;
child-hospital; house-cat; lamp-light; father-child-absent; leaf-detach-fly;
red-see-horse], etc.
*
The groups of respondents were chosen by neurologists or psychiatrists
using extra-linguistic criteria: confinement due to behavioral problems,
clinical examination, or various psychometric tests. The population of
senile dementia patients includes 52 respondents: 32 in the neurosurgical
service at the Hopital Sainte-Anne (Drs H. Hecaen and R. Angelergues);
and 20 examined in the university psychiatric clinic of Geneva (Hopital
Bel-Air: Drs Ajuriaguerra and Richard). The schizophrenic population -
45 respondents, paranoids for the most part - was studied at the Hopital
Sainte-Anne (Drs Daumezon, Boige and Melman).
*
The strategy adopted by the speaking subject vis-a-vis linguistic rules can
be analyzed in two ways: explicitly, in the behavioral reactions to the
exercises, and implicitly, in the analysis of the actual responses.
How do senile dementia patients react to instructions to make a

minimal sentence integrating the imposed terms? Just as for all other
exercises carried out on language-as-object (for example, word or syllable
repetition exercises, transformation exercises), senile dementia patients
frequently respond with reactions of silence, refusal, opposition, protests of
inability to carry out the instructions, or of having forgotten the cue.
Negative reactions to the cue also show up in paraphonic or semantic
confusions of the terms, for which more familiar terms tend to be substi-
tuted. The most consistently observed reaction is the 'idiosemiological
comment': the patient relates the terms of the cue to a familiar situation,
integrates one, or at the most two, of them into previously transmitted
SENTENCE PRODUCTION 87
discourse, and tries to situate the morphemes in a familiar context. For

example: 'Ma mere n 'est pas ici, elle est aveugle, elle est dans le milieu de la
France\y 'Quand nous etions petits, ma mere mettait la soupe sur la table pour
mes soeurs et moV ['My mother is not here; she is blind; she is in central
France'; 'When we were small, my mother put soup on the table for my
sisters and me'] (for house—mother); or J'ai trois enfants3 ['I have three
children'] (for child—hospital); etc.
The various types of reactions to the instructions show the inability of
the senile dementia patient to perceive the proposed morphemes and the
syntactic models as linguistic objects to be manipulated. Patients in the
state of advanced senility seem incapable of metalinguistic behavior, of
establishing enough distance from linguistic rules to assure their mastery
over them, or to play with them to generate messages. This interpretation
can be easily verified through repetition exercises. Although the senile
dementia patient is willing to repeat items consisting of meaningful words,
either sending them out as messages or integrating them into utterances,
he or she refuses to repeat meaningless syllables - pure phonic objects.
Analysis of sentences actually produced by the senile dementia patients

also allows us to determine the attitude of these respondents vis-a-vis
linguistic knowledge.
In the recorded performances, one notes that syntactic patterns are resis-
tant to change. Phrasal schemata are carried out properly, syntagmatic
sequences most often respected, and the parts of speech correctly used.
Therefore the syntagmatic and transformational models appear to be
intact. However, there are frequent incoherencies. The laws of implication,
inclusion, exclusion, and even of non-contradiction, underlying gramma-
tical categories, are no longer respected, which results in unacceptable,
anomalous messages that look syntactically correct as minimal sentences.
The correct usage of the syntactic rules raises the question of whether what
we see is automatic functioning of patterns of previously produced utter-
ances, or linguistic material actually used for the purpose of generating
new messages. The inappropriate intervention of transformations, even of
what appears to the receiver to be their lack of differentiation, can be
explained according to the same principle. It should be noted that the
sentences produced by the senile dementia patients are syntactically
complex. Although the instructions make specific reference to simple
linguistic models, the senile respondent does not respect them, and his or
her utterances take on the appearance of an idiolect. Insistence on action
and on references to personal experience most frequently explain the multi-
plicity of transformations and the length of the sentences produced. Also
noteworthy in the responses of dementia patients is the difficulty they have
in putting syntactic programs into operation. If at least one of the terms of

the cue cannot be easily integrated into an idiosemiological discourse, the
initiation of the utterance is often left to the researcher. This initiation is
most effective when it eliminates the syntagmatic constraints, and thus
almost automatically produces the rest of the discourse.
Since the studies of J. Seglas (1892), K. Goldstein (1933), and M.
Critchley (1964), we know that the lexical stock available to the patient
with senile dementia diminishes in proportion to the degree of deteriora-
tion, the first terms affected being proper names and highly specific terms.
However, analysis of recorded performances also illustrates loss of lexical
stability. Words, for the dementia patient, do not seem to be defined by
systems of correlations, by dependencies that differentiate them, put them
into opposition with each other, or specify them with respect to other
units of language, but rather seem to have variable meanings which would
be a function of the situation or of the idiolectical context where they
appear. Their meaning is essentially determined by previously produced or
heard discourse, or by lived experience. The lexicon no longer appears to
consist of the defined units of a code that can be appropriately mobilized
and manipulated with a certain distance. Hence, the difficulty in estab-
lishing relations of compatibility among the morphemes proposed by the
researcher: the responses of the dementia patients frequently seem like a
series of clauses, each one of which integrates one of the terms of the cue
into a familiar context. For example: 'Je suis allee chez le docteur et, quand
fetais chez lui et que fetais assise, je voyais que c'etait bien' ['I went to the
doctor, and when I was at his office, and I was sitting down, I saw that it
was'] (for docteur—fauteuil—asseoir [doctor-armchair-sit]); 'Dans la cour, ily
a des arbres qui sont bien verts et on voit tres bien a Vinterieur* ['In the court-
yard, there are some trees that are quite green, and one sees very well
inside'] (for arbre—vert—feuille—voir [tree-green-leaf-see]); etc.
Because the lexemes are reduced to only some of the semantic traits that
constitute them, one can conclude that they are relatively undifferentiated.
It is the neutralizing of distinctive traits that, in fact, explains semantic or
syntactic-semantic anomalies resulting from the patient being unable to
recognize ways in which the morphemes can, and cannot, be combined.
For example: 'Le cheval voit rouge* ['The horse sees red']; 'Larbre vert met
sa feuille au printemps* ['The green tree puts out its leaf in the spring']; 'Le
crayon ecrit sur une feuille' ['The pencil writes on a sheet of paper']; etc.
The fact that the words are defined only by association partially explains
this type of error. Since associations vary from one patient to another, and
are furthermore dependent upon the extent of the loss of lexical avail-
ability, the elements of the lexicon have no stable reference points which
would allow them to be grouped together, substituted for each other, or
appropriately combined.
Although utterances transmitted by dementia patients are ambiguous

due to the absence of any precise reference to the language, the ambiguity
and potential polysemy of the terms given in the cue for the sentence
production exercise seem to escape the respondent. Thus, to give a very
simple example, when the researcher proposes the morpheme [mer] to be
integrated into a minimal sentence pattern, none of the dementia patients
notices that he or she could choose sea, mother, or mayor.1 The automati-
cally chosen term, undoubtedly the only one heard, is 'mother,' clearly
because it belongs to the idiosemiological context of the respondent.
The availability of terms of the lexicon varies according to which
grammatical class they belong to. Verbs, especially auxiliary or generic
verbs, pronouns, and linking words, are more resistant to deterioration
than nouns or adjectives. In senile discourse, words expressing a relation,
those that are more closely correlated with the syntactic function, subsist.
On the other hand, the selection of terms capable of bringing specific
content to a current message is perturbed. This results in serious semantic
and syntactic-semantic anomalies when the components are, like adjectives,
related less to norms of syntactic integration than to rules of selection. In
senile dementia, the framework of the utterance is intact, but the patient
cannot make use of it easily, manipulate it in order to generate new
messages. The rules in operation in the production of sentences subsist,
but the senile dementia patient has no more than a relative mastery over
them.
The lack of distance between respondent and linguistic knowledge can

also be detected in the points of intersection between subject and code, or
between subject and utterance, in particular in the analysis of the shifters
and of the modalizations of the text.
It is the pronoun T that holds the subject position in the sentences of
the dementia patients, which points up the minimal distance between the
subject producing the message and the utterance produced. Indeed, the
context indicates that it cannot be the generic T of the speaking subject,
but is rather an T demonstrating the adherence of the locutor to her or to
his own experience, which hinders the process of formalization, or abstrac-
tion. The generic subject 'he' that refers to the class of human animate
subjects never appears. As for other subject noun phrases, they consist of
human animates or specified inanimates (mother, child, pencil, etc.) whose
position in the idiosemiological or pragmatic context of the speaking
subject is emphasized by the determinants used: my mother as opposed to
the mother; this child as opposed to the child; etc. The shifters and the
types of subject phrases used in the sentences of the dementia patients
show a lack of aptitude for formalization, a minimal distance between
subject and linguistic production.
Modalizations such as maybe, no doubt, etc., traces of the relation

between speaking subject and text produced, are not found in the analyzed
utterances. The only modals used specify a situation - often, always - or
mark adherence to the context, rather than demonstrate the subject's
ability to distance himself or herself from both the utterance and the actual
experience.
Analysis of sentences of senile dementia patients seems to demonstrate that

the means of production or of reception of utterances do subsist as
materials subordinated to the message, and, more specifically, to previously
transmitted messages.
*
The reactions of the schizophrenics to the instructions to make a
sentence are very different from those noted among the senile dementia
patients. There are almost no refusals, no opposition to the instructions,
no negative reactions. On the other hand, comments are very frequent,
and also very specific. Comments by schizophrenics often emphasize the
ambiguity of the received message. For example: 'Le maire ou la mamanV
['The mayor or the mama?' ]; 'Le maire? Une mere ou la mer? Parce qu'il y
a maire de la ville et ily a mer, Vocean' ['The mayor? A mother or a sea?
Because there is the mayor of a city and there is the sea, the ocean'] (for:
maison—mere [house-mother]); 2 'Pere? P-e-r-e?' ['Father? F-a-t-h-e-r?'] (for:
pere—enfant—absent [father-child-absent]); 'Volet? Le volet ou le verbe?'
['Shutter? A shutter or the verb?']; 'Qa peut etre les feuilles d'un arbre, ga
peut etre des feuilles de papier, ga peut etre bien different' ['That could be the
leaves of a tree, that could be sheets of paper, that can be very different']
(for: feuille-detacher-voler [leaf—detach-fly]); etc.3 These comments seem to
indicate that the schizophrenic is leaving responsibility for the content of
the message to the researcher. The respondent underlines its ambiguity
and non-acceptability, and asks the researcher to disambiguate it, to fix the
contents. In addition, the response itself is often accompanied by such
comments as: Par exemple' ['For example']; 'On pourrait dire' ['One could
say']; 'Comme ga, c'est en ordre' ['Like that, is that in order?']; 'C'est banal,
nonV ['That's banal, no?']; 'Disons ga' ['Let's say this']; 'Un true comme ga
vous suffit?' ['Is something like that good enough for you?']; etc. These
comments seem to indicate that the schizophrenic's message is transmitted
as a game played with linguistic rules; the sentence constitutes an object
that the speaking subject does not assume as message; its content, there-
fore, is never made clear. This attitude on the part of the schizophrenic,
vis-a-vis the text produced, can also show up in the interrogative transfor-
mation, which explicitly leaves the message to the researcher, or in a series
of transformations on the first utterance transmitted that seem to demon-
strate that, for the schizophrenic, the sentences are, above all, a manipula-
tion of the linguistic function and have no significant specific or stable
content. Thus: 'Ma femme a une recompense si elle a un enfant. Elle recom-
pense Venfant ou Uenfant a une recompense' ['My wife gets a reward if she
has a child. She rewards the child or The child gets a reward']. Even more
obviously: 'Detacher la feuille d'un volet? ou Les feuilles s'attachent au volet'
['Detach the leaf from a shutter? or The leaves are stuck on the shutter'];
'Le pere louera les petits enfants absents a moins que ce ne soit le contraire:
les petits qui loueront plutot le pere absent' ['The father will praise his absent
children unless it's the opposite, rather the children will praise their absent
father'].
Analysis of sentences produced by schizophrenics demonstrates the
durability of syntactic schemata. However, grammatical rules are used in
specific ways. Thus, unlike the utterances of the senile dementia patients
where syntagmatic constraints appear to determine the contents of the
message, schizophrenics' sentences often aim at defining classes of equiva-
lents, and even, at times, at creating some, whether it be equivalences
between lexical morphemes, between phrases, or between clauses. For
example: 'La mere est la reine de la maison' ['The mother is the queen of
the house']; 'Le chat est le gardien du foyer' ['The cat is the guardian of the
hearth']; 'Uenfantpeut etre une recompense de I'amour' ['The child can be a
reward for love']; 'Avoir un joli bebe est une recompense' ['Having a pretty
baby is a reward']; etc. Verbs of attribution replace the action verbs, more
appropriate to reporting lived experience, preferred in the sentences of the
senile dementia patients. Unlike the utterances of the senile dementia
patients, which are long, narrative, and most often unfinished, constituting
only part of an idiosemiological context, the schizophrenics' sentences are
like utterance-discourses; they are composed of paradigmatic elements, and
are sometimes reduced to a single word-word-discourses: 'Chapiteau,'
'Tabellion,' 'Infanticide,' 'Maison—mere,' 'Stylo-bille' ['Capital,' 'Legal Eagle,'
'Infanticide,' 'House-mother,' 'Ballpoint pen'], etc. The relational
elements are fragile here, or, more precisely, less prevalent. Sentences
without verbs or determinants are found: 'Mere absente de la maison'
['Mother absent from the house'], 'Feuille rouge' ['Red leaf], etc. On the
other hand, the emphasis is on nouns and adjectives. The schizophrenics'
sentences include fewer transformations than the senile dementia patients',
but the pronominal and negative transformations in particular serve to
resolve the problems of compatibility and incompatibility established in
the cue, which require the mastery of the formal schema itself: 'Le tiroir du
bureau s'ouvre' ['The drawer of the dresser opens'], 'Je ne vois pas un cheval
rouge' ['I do not see a red horse'].
From the lexical standpoint, the insistence on specificity contrasts with
the use of generic terms in the sentences of the senile dementia patients:
'On va donner a la mere la table d'orientation' ['They will give the mother
the orientation table']; 'La lumiere doit etre diffusee par une lampe assez
douce' ['The light must be diffused by a rather soft lamp']; 'Les lampes
phosphorescentes donnent une lumiere assez douce' ['Phosphorescent lamps
give a rather soft light']; etc. However, this insistence on specificity could
signal the rejection of the banal message of the researcher, or the refusal to
transmit a banal message, or the intention to create a beautiful or
surprising sentence. It is not caused by concern for the appropriateness of
the message to lived experience. It is the rejection of banal messages that
also explains, in the schizophrenic, the fact that the sentences produced are
far from being modeled on the minimal sentence pattern required by the
instructions: 'Dans la maison, il y avait un chien et un chat siamois' ['In the
house, there were a dog and a Siamese cat']; 'La maison au bord de la mer
est tres ensoleillee' ['The house by the sea is very sunny']; 'La feuille s'est
detach ee et elle volait dans le ciel et elle a disparu avec les reves' ['The leaf
came off, and it was flying up in the sky, and it disappeared with the
dreams']; 'Prendre un crayon et decrire une chose reelle' ['To take a pencil
and describe something real']; etc.
Schizophrenics do notice the ambiguity of the morphemes proposed by
the researcher. This has already been observed in their reactions to the
instructions, and their requests for disambiguation. Furthermore -
contrasting with the responses of the senile dementia patients - for the
cue: house--mother\ the schizophrenics produced sentences where the terms
were understood as sea and mayor\4 The term mother even seems somewhat
neglected. This can also be understood as a rejection of banality, or as the
refusal to give the sentence a too personal content, or as the rejection of
affective connotations: the latter two hypotheses are in any case related.
Do we find neologisms, schizophasic expressions, in the sentences
produced? There are very few neoforms: 'Je ne crains pas le mur du son,
sonade' ['I do not fear the wall of sound, soundage']; 'Avenue, temporaire,
subsistaire, partial' ['Avenue, temporary, subsistary, partial']; for example. It
should be noted that these two neologisms are elaborated from an existing
foundation, according to linguistic principles of derivation and suffixation.
They appear to be a formalistic game played with the categories of
language. On the other hand, singularities and improbabilities in semantic
compatibilities, in established syntactic—semantic correlations, are more
frequent. Such slippages in combinations of terms, which can more easily
be interpreted within the framework of the study, are undoubtedly at the
origin of neo-codes, and can appear as neologisms in the freer context of
spontaneous discourse. It would be tempting to relate these singularities of
word association or selection to the instability and lack of differentiation
of lexemes found in the discourse of the dementia patients. However, what
demonstrates lesser mastery of the language model caused by degeneration
in the senile dementia patients, appears to be, among schizophrenics, an

effort to stand out, to transform, even to reconstruct the code itself.
Subject noun phrases are most often specified animates in the schizo-
phrenics' sentences; however, respect for the instructions almost always
exercises control over selection of terms. These subject noun phrases are
not determined by the possessives and demonstratives my, this, that one
finds in the utterances of the dementia group, but rather by definite and
indefinite articles: the, a, an. The preferred shifter is still 7,' but it cannot
be interpreted as adherence or reference to a lived personal experience.
Accompanying comments that attenuate or even annul the utterances
demonstrate this: J'ecris sur une feuille blanche avec un crayon bleu, je dis ca
mais je n'ecris pas du tout' ['I am writing on a sheet of white paper with a
blue pencil; I say that but I am not writing at all'], etc., as do the types of
sentences introduced by 'I,' and its eventual transformation into imper-
sonal 'one.'
Modalizations in the sentences produced differ from maybe and from no
doubt, ways of expressing the way the subject of enunciation assumes the
utterance; they can be interpreted as a sign of the radical exteriority of the
speaking subject with respect to the message sent: 'Par exemple,' 'On
pourrait dire,' 'Eventuellement,' 'Probablement,' Je dis comme ga mais je
pourrais dire autrement' [Tor example,' 'One could say,' 'Possibly,'
'Probably,' 'I say it this way, but I could say something else'], etc.
*
After analysis, it is possible to conclude that there is minimal distance
from linguistic knowledge in the sentences produced by the senile
dementia patients. Although the rules underlying the production of
discourse seem to be resistant to degeneration, the senile dementia patient
cannot manipulate them as objects, master them to elaborate new
messages. They are only material for idiolectical messages already trans-
mitted in the past. The adherence to experience, to the content of the
utterance, determines the functioning of discourse. At the most extreme,
the senile dementia patient is no longer an active subject of enunciation;
she or he is spoken by language, and is only the passive emitter of a corpus
of already completed verbal productions. But that is a limit case. The fact
that sentences are produced from the imposed morphemes bears witness to
the ability to receive and send new utterances, provided that they carry
well-known, familiar messages. What governs linguistic production in the
senile dementia patient is the message itself.
The attitude of the schizophrenic vis-a-vis linguistic knowledge is practi-
cally the reverse. For schizophrenics, there is not - this is also the limit
case - any content in the message beyond a formalistic play on the
linguistic rules. Their language is no longer a set of rules or laws serving to
transmit experience; it itself is legislator, creator, a language-object.

Whereas the dementia patient has no distance from the message, and is
pure object of the utterance, in the schizophrenic, the subject of the
enunciation and the utterance do not intersect, and what is said can be
understood as manipulation of the code itself.
*
Analyses of sentences of normal respondents (cf. Dubois and Irigaray,
1966) - assuming all the caution required by the notion of a norm —
demonstrate the use of a double strategy vis-a-vis the model of compe-
tence: one strategy considers language as the pure material of a message the
subject wants to transmit; the other, more formalistic, consists in consid-
ering language as object to manipulate, a set of rules the speaking subject
can master and play with. T h e passage from the first strategy to the second
takes place for children around the age of 15 years (Dubois, Assal and
Ramier, 1968). Nevertheless, the two strategies always remain available to
a 'normal' locutor. T h e systematizations and singularities, and even the
perturbations, detected in the verbal productions of senile dementia
patients and schizophrenics should consequently be understood as the
result of exclusive recourse to one of these strategies, the other strategy
having been lost through lack of, or deficiencies in, the model of subjec-
tivity, or through having become unavailable, due to a dysfunctional
relationship between the speaking subject and the addressee, or the world.
A U T H O R ' S BIBLIOGRAPHY
Critchley, M. (1964) 'The neurology of psychotic speech,' British Journal of

Psychiatry, 110, 353-64.
Dubois, J., G. Assal and A. M. Ramier (1968) 'Production de phrases dans une
population d'age scolaire,' Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, 2,
183-207.
Dubois, J. and L. Irigaray (1966) 'Approche experimentale de la constitution de la
phrase minimale en francais,' Langages, 3, 90-125.
Goldstein, K. (1933) 'LAnalyse de l'aphasie et l'essence du langage,' Journal de
psychologie normale et pathologique, 30, 430—96.
Irigaray, L. (1973) Le Langage des dements. The Hague: Mouton.
(1967) 'La Production de phrases chez les dements,' Langages, 5, 49-66.
'Negation et transformation negative dans le langage des schizophrenes,'
included in this volume, Chapter III, 'Negation and Negative Transformations
in the Language of Schizophrenics.'
Seglas, J. (1892) Les Troubles du langage chez les alienes. Paris: Rueff.
VIII
The Utterance in Analysis
Psychoanalysis can be a technique for subverting the utterance. In several

different ways.
• Even taken literally, the utterance is always understood as a symptom of
some particularity in the function, or the dysfunction, of the structuring
of discourse.
• The definition of an utterance, constituted as object of analysis, implies
the possibility of isolating it as a discourse-unit. Psychoanalysis simulta-
neously insists on both the fragmentation of the text, and its insertion
into a network, into networks, of utterances, from which it cannot be
isolated. Always contested as a unit, the utterance in psychoanalysis is
interpreted according to its polyvalence, its ambiguity, its plurality.
• Any analysis of the utterance refers more or less explicitly to a typology.
Various types of discourse come to be expressed in psychoanalytic treat-
ment; however, their forms and figures are called into question as forms
and figures, uncovered as metaphors on which the speaker is dependent.
• Finally, analysis of the utterance, its formalization in models, makes use,
either intentionally or unintentionally, of the schemata of communica-
tion. And the analyst, even as she or he utilizes these schemata, must
question them as possible phantasmatic correlates of the one defining
them. Because the phantasm1 is irreducible to discourse, discourse turns
out be in-communication [non-communication], with the speaking
subject unable to express what he or she means, with the interlocutor
unable to understand what the utterance conveys. Nevertheless, all kind
of efforts are made in order to work out, or to work up, the unrecei-
vable non-said, or the mis-understood, mis-heard. Even when denied,
the phantasm reveals its importance.
Whoever practices psychoanalysis must therefore target the production
of discourse. Psychoanalysis, a situation of experimental enunciation
unavailable to linguists and psychologists, puts the analyst in the position
of being able to zero in on phenomena the former two are unable to
isolate; in psychoanalysis, everything is actually set up so that the very
production of discourse can be investigated. Whatever functions as variable
in 'worldly' discourse - referent, addressee, context - is defined (to the
extent that this is possible) as invariable in the psychoanalytic situation;
this allows us to grasp the functioning - always covered over, always

hidden - of enunciation itself. How then is the analysand's enunciation
articulated within this elimination of the 'worldly' context, which corre-
sponds to a removal to another scene, the scene of analysis?
*
Patients are no longer naive. Should we mourn over it? Rejoice in it? It
matters little. That's the way it is. As soon as the trappings - or lack
thereof - of psychoanalysis are in place, patients take up their life story,
illustrating it with sexual landmarks. They are hardly at all disconcerted or
concerned about doing this. They inscribe themselves into what they
believe to be the project of analysis, of the analyst. They speak from the
position of an other, or of a theory, leaving the decision about what to say
to the analytic field. They perform no act on their own, but insert
themselves into the analytic act. And this debriefing does indeed provide a
certain satisfaction, a certain comfort, eventually translated into reduction
of symptoms.
They avoid action in another way: by uttering what has already been
uttered. For themselves, they pose as a he, a she, or an it, exhibit
themselves as a he, a she, or an it, presenting themselves deliberately as
alienated within an anterior, and relatively mastered, intentional discourse.
They play around a bit with the already said, the already thought, going
back over the same paths whose traces they have (re) covered, a kind of
treasure hunt, a challenge for the perspicacity, or rather for the complicity,
of the analyst. But all of that is nothing more than avoiding speaking.
At this stage, waiting for something to say, punctuating it, interpreting
it, establishes a kind of connivance in deception. The first dupes are the
patients, caught up in their alibis, believing in the illusion of gaining
access to a meta-discourse, to a meta-story, in a place where they certainly
cannot be suspected of any crime, being outside the domain where acts are
carried out. If encouraged even ever so slightly in their duplications, their
retrenchments, they end up with 'logorrhea,' or at best with a case of
logomachy, changing their forced takeover by articulation into the pseudo-
struggles of arguments and quibbling. Good talkers, good souls, happy to
be getting off so easily, they are completely taken in.
However, there was something taking place in this discourse that was, in
spite of the patient, worth listening to - its emptying. Because utterance of
utterance - retelling oneself, retelling the other - hems in if taken up as
text, but reopens and empties out, if received by another ear, an ear that
solicits, or, rather, as fallen 'object' does not solicit, but functions only as
pre-text, small change in a parsimonious economy of death. Undoubtedly,
repetition as such does have an effect on the repeater, for the reason that it
is, in fact, impossible, and that from this impossibility results abreaction. It
THE UTTERANCE IN ANALYSIS 97
is repetition only for whomever wants to think of it that way, and not for
the analysand whose only intent is to master it in narrative, utterance of
utterance. Taking the time to look for some lost text, some unheard
fragment, in what is re-cited, would be the way to make this exchange at a
profit.
As for sex, so lavishly provided in the discourse, it merits questioning,
not in its forms, particularities, or aporia, but rather insofar as it, like
enunciation, is produced in a dehiscence of the utterance. Silent
questioning. Because the speaker is not about to hear. She or he speaks
from the place of analysis, and listens with the analyst's ears.
In other words, the utterance itself may here evoke its cause, its stress
point; the patient, however, is busy denying it, burying it inside. It is the
silence of the analyst that will bring this enterprise toppling down. That
silence is the act, neutral insofar as the poles of enunciation2 remain undif-
ferentiated - ne-uter, neither the one nor the other - that could be the
pledge of a redefinition, or, more exactly, of a remodeling of their
economy.
One day, this lack of differentiation becomes obvious to the analysand
as being the threat of a death more implacable than the one he or she is
trying to annul; promise of infinitude, maybe, but also effacement of all
limits, and abolition of all form, articulation, and representation. A death
by drowning, where some envelope, some pocket, some air bubble protects
the speaker from total fusion, confusion, at the same time as it isolates, or
even puts him or her to sleep . . . A turning inside out of the very thing
whose exclusion, rejection, or splitting ensures the discontinuous
functioning of the speaking subject; metaphor of the mythical unity, conti-
nuity, identity to itself, of the lost subject, or better yet the impossible
subject . . .
Here the pathways diverge. In reality, that's the way it has always been.
And pathway is already saying too much. Any linear discourse about
analysis implies that it cannot be used to mark off a path, but only at best
to indicate motion. Predicting the figures of enunciation - some of which
will be evoked here - runs the risk of becoming a more or less concerted
effort of indoctrination, of suggestion, of subjugation, from which patients
must be protected, occupied as they are with seeking it out, preferring any
form of centering at all, no matter how cumbersome, to their own irredu-
cible decentering.
Will patients speak from the bathyscaphe? From beyond the grave?
Unknowingly rearticulate the discourse that marked them? Addressing it to
the Other, the great inscriber presumed scriptable, the one in charge, the
accomplice? Or will they try to inscribe this scrawl onto the inert, virgin
expanse, the opaque continuum that surrounds them, trying to animate it,
bring it to life, appropriate it as lost flesh, missing skin, stolen text? Good
for plugging up all orifices, for the restitution of the integrity of the body
and of discourse. Or they might impute this enveloping explicitly to the
analyst, chalk it up to indifference, only possible representation of the
analyst's neutrality, of his or her non-difference; transforming the support
into an obstacle.
Whatever the case may be, and it could be otherwise, some act, different
from avoidance or emptying, is shaping up, and some other is taking
shape. The point is that the patient perceives the place where she or he is
called, sought, denied as other. That is not to say that the patient responds
in any way to the inquiry, but that he or she discovers his or her right to
be implicated in it.
Since deceitfully we have to spin some yarn, to fake some story, let us
suppose that the patient takes the very silence of the analyst for a story,
that the patient takes the latter to task for the non-sense of her or his own
utterance, evanescent since it apparently produces no effect at all on the
one who is listening. Forgetting that up till then nothing has been
addressed to the patient at all, that all he or she has received from analysis
so far are some pretty theoretical and impersonal ears (maybe not even ears
at all), on the outside of a supposedly circular discourse.
However, the utterance of utterance is interrupted. We move on to
another figure. Interpellation, interrogation, prayer even. Experienced as all
the more formidable for having been eliminated up until then, and thus
situated right where the impossible loop doubles back on itself, the analyst
is requested to begin to speak. Not in just any terms, it's true. The analyst
is not asked to tell her or his own life story, or challenged to see where
that might lead, but rather to assume another role with respect to the
functioning of the discourse. Confronted with the precariousness of the
status of 'speaking subject,' even as he or she tries to reassure himself or
herself about it with 'I already said, or did this, so I am,' the patient would
like to leave it to the analyst to revive the utterance, now emptied out. It is
an interrogation, however formulated, that conveys this abdication, an
interrogation whose subtlest form will be to impute it directly to the other.
Not only, 'What do you think of it?', 'What do you have to say about all
this?', or in other words: 'Can you take the position of the guarantor of
the discourse, take the role of the "subject," so that we can co-produce an
utterance?'; but even more so: 'What do you want me to say?', 'What
precisely are you asking of me?', or: 'Point out an "object" for my
remarks, "your" object that I will make the thread of my discourse, that I
will envelop with my statements.'
This bargaining, although it seals the failure of the allegedly solitary
production of the discourse, seems to define the roles a bit too clearly not
to be covering up some trap. What is at stake here, if not the preservation
of unity in the locutor, at the price of being willing to function as
supposed subject and object of a unique discourse whose verb would be
provided by the transference? In doing this, patients miscalculate the
extent to which they are committing themselves; or, at the least, they
evaluate the profitability of this operation at too short a term. Because
once put in place, this operation irreversibly dramatizes the split in the
speaking subject. Even if it is articulated at the very heart of the sentence,
it will one day fracture the cohesion of the fabric of discourse, in the same
way that it will puncture the sentence.
The analyst is always silent — neutral. Which could be understood as ne
utra pars. As for requests — the analyst has none to make, except the one
already expressed for payment, all the more extrinsic to the functioning of
the discourse for being in some ways parallel to it, relaying it, linking it up
somehow to the outside, a transition between the within and the without
of the scene. But . . . should the analyst not express some opinion, some
judgment, concerning the utterances already transmitted, given that the
patient appeals to what she or he knows, or to what she or he has, or to
what she or he sees?3 The request that the analyst enter into the circuit of
production of discourse is also an invitation to quit the register of the
word, and to enter into the domain of the gaze, where, whatever the
premium that has to be paid, the speaker is assured of receiving a certain
form, coherence, or unity, truncated to be sure, but unity nevertheless,
that no ear would ever be able to guarantee, except if desired as or desiring
to be eye or . . . mouth, or hand. Interrogated, or at least implicated within
the field of interrogation, the analyst has no business responding.
The aim of the analyst's apparent non-receptiveness is to carry the
questioning right into the heart of the utterance of the patient, without his
or her knowledge; the patient's questioning might take the form of a silent
scanning, or of a quavering voice, or of a fade-out in intonation, or even
of a suspension of the discourse. The assurance of the re-citer fails; the
utterance loses its coherence. And sometimes the discourse stops, freezes
up, comes up against the opacity of a question, a silence, a question that
cannot be translated, except as real silence.
The analyst might have to intervene and bring the patient out into the
open with 'What comes to you?' or 'What are you thinking about now?',
displacing the silence in order to open up the possibility for it to be articu-
lated in the discourse.
Thus taken by surprise, you can bet that patients will produce some
such utterance as: 'This wall is white,' 'Your painting is beautiful,' 'I was
listening to the children playing,' 'I wonder what that noise is,' 'I wonder
if I am intelligent,' etc., in a vexed, even an aggressive, tone of voice.

Because they think that responding beside the point is breaking the
analytic rule. But one is always inevitably within the domain of some
discourse, and it is enough to hear, to point out, where the utterance is
functioning, to get it to develop or to change directions.
In reality, the patient speaks from several positions. At the simplest
level, at the first listening, the analysand is producing an assertion about
the world, indicating an object in the world, naming it, perhaps describing
it, affirming that a thing is, or, eventually, how it is. That is the most
common type of statement in worldly exchange, the type that in some
ways even constitutes its framework and support. But with another ear, the
analyst can hear how the patient is reassuring, and even defending, herself
or himself. Through a judgment expressed about such and such an object
in the world, through the designation of its reality, the analysand is
making sure of his or her right to speak, of his or her own existence, and
of his or her own existence as speaker. This time, it is the world, and
neither the story nor the analyst, that the patient takes as guarantor.
To hear is not to intervene. Focusing on the reality of the world, or on
anyone's aptitude to judge it, would run the risk of provoking a quarrel
where the analysand would be only too happy to come back to what she
or he actually knows, and provoke an only too intentional confrontation.
The analyst - who will so often be asked to be guarantor of a deception -
has no business confirming, or invalidating, the exactitude or the veracity
of an utterance, nor even judging its acceptability. The analyst's role is to
play on the ambiguity of the text, to emphasize its irreducible polyvalence,
its equivocations, its density, and not to examine the so-called referent of
the utterance, or its constitution as message, except to take note of their
status, and the status their designator, their producer, would like, through
them, to enjoy.
The analyst is really there to investigate the very structuring of the utter-
ance. In the articulation of the forms of discourse something is expressed
without the knowledge of the one who speaks. 'This wall is white,' 'Your
painting is beautiful,' 'I love this room,' 'They're shouting in the court-
yard,' would be inaccurately interpreted, or grouped together, as direct,
and in some way isomorphic, utterances. The category of 'direct' utterances
is a mythical one, in any case, and it here creates deceptive groupings. As
subjects, 'this wall,' 'one,' 'I,' 'your painting' imply different articulations
between enunciation and utterance, in each case a more or less complex
shuttling back and forth from enunciation to utterance, from the weaving
of the discourse to the grammatical grid, and to the implied discourse of
the analyst or the world. Furthermore, the enunciation does not insist4
within, or delegate itself to, some personal or impersonal other, or to the
utterance constituted as object, or to the world, all at the same time. One
could on several accounts oppose 'They are shouting' to 'I love'; 'this wall'
to 'your painting'; 'white' to 'beautiful'; and also 'is' to 'love' or 'shout,'
where the prevalence of the complete over the incomplete signifies a parti-
cular mode of integration of the always infinite, unfinished process of
enunciation, with the defined structures of the utterance - not to mention
the inaugural function of 'is' in the coming of the speaker to discourse.
This type of utterance, where the patient was hoping to be on firm
ground, on some foundation, and not on shifting sands, must be under-
stood as a series of transformations whose order and suspensions deserve
some attention. By the same token, the analyst will have to collect utter-
ances which at first seem more complex, more deferred, or indirect: 'I was
listening to the children play,' 'I wonder what that noise is,' 'I wonder if I
am intelligent,' etc.
Moreover, it cannot escape the analytic ear that certain patients may
have become, at least for a time, all ears, or that others may have become
all eyes, or all affect, nor that patients imagine that, speaking in that way,
they will be able to leave the domain of treatment, transgress its bound-
aries. Where do they mark off that space? How? For whom? If they cross
over some line, what do they say while doing it? Are they imitating what
they perceive as the analyst's response?
Thinking furtively to recover coherence through simply designating or

naming a unique object in the world, the analysand is thrown back upon
her or his complexity, upon the plurality of networks interfering in that
one utterance, upon the multiplicity of sequences woven together there,
themselves evoking other texts, either already transmitted, or potential,
waiting to be produced. The patient had been resigned to being an
indicator, even an index - but for whom? or for what? - and finds he or
she is a network, summoned by the analyst - neutral, ne uter - at each
junction, each crossroads, each fork in the road. The patient intended to
answer off the subject, and is shown that when it comes to discourse, it
cannot be otherwise, that whatever one tries to say is always irreducibly off
the subject. What will the next retrenchment be?
At times, patients end up holding forth in the recitative mode, in the past
tense or the present, all the while watching over their own utterance,
commenting on it, criticizing it, pointing out mistakes, peculiarities and
contradictions. Even making a case against the utterance, re-uttering the
utterance, rearticulating it. They act out, in their own way, the interven-
tions of the analyst that have hit the target. And that is what must be
understood. Most often, they are on the watch for a meaning, a message.
It is meaning they want to discover, uncover.
As they watch for coherence in the text, try to stretch it out, refine it
under the gaze of the analyst, their talk takes refuge, converges, in certain
words that repeat, insist, intervene in unedited contexts, crossroads of sense
and non-sense. Marker words for the analyst, who has to track them down,
and can punctuate, underline, question them. Thus 'to know' can hide
'too, no,' or 'two, no;' and to know what? For whom? 'Understand,' is
'stand under,' and who stands? Who is under? 'Guilty?' No doubt, but gilt
on what?5
After a period of defeat, of wandering, patients turn toward language

itself, ask for some guarantee, place the accent on what seems to hold the
analyst's attention. Pausing at words, examining them, playing with them,
making an effort to inhabit the very thing that inhabits them, to bend to
their own game what they have begun to feel makes a plaything of them,
spelling out the discourse that they are learning spells them out. Thinking
maybe that they will, after so many detours, come back to some element,
some non-divisible utterance, some master-word whose capture would
guarantee a reconstruction of language, word by word?
They were playing with, making light of, the very law that presides over
their coming forth, their functioning, which is also in some ways that of
the analyst; they bewitch themselves, ensnare themselves as they listen.
Why start with such and such a word rather than some other? Where does
it get its power when removed from the context of the discourse, from a
network of differences? Does it not have it any more? So then why that
one? The supposed arbitrariness of the choice of word covers over some
encounter that, as fortuitous as it seems, is nonetheless signifying the
game, and the jouissance. What contexts are then summoned up? What
occurrences become possible? What does this word evoke, what does it
recall or call up? This word, is it onel It too deserves to be spelled out.
And the pleasure taken by the patient results perhaps from some collusion
of syllables, or phonemes, similar, different, associated with other chains,
calling up various emotions, that the player repeats, knowingly or unknow-
ingly. It is up to the analyst to invite the patient to find the threads, mend
the fabric, because what the latter had intended as a whole piece of cloth,
gets frayed, and threatens to end up as a gaping hole.
And if the patient should get all the way back to the phoneme, the
element presumed ultimate, he or she could be shown that it is a bundle
of differential traits articulated on a field of absence, the empty space on
the game board necessary for their formation as network, permitting their
permutations and associations. No need for a course on phonology to
make the analysand understand that the phoneme itself is plural, not only
in that it refers to other phonemes, but in that it is itself the structuring of
differences. All that is needed is to ask the patient, the way the cat might
ask Alice: 'Did you say big or pig?' using, of course, and as many times as
necessary, the terms of the patient's own utterance.
The phoneme is one only for someone who subverts it with the gaze,
constitutes it as - acoustic — image, or for someone who transcribes it,
represents it, which is also a way of submitting it to the formalization of
the eye. For the one articulating it and the one receiving it, it is multiple
from the beginning, the articulation of differences. Whatever is simple,
identical to itself, always slips away, is from the beginning outlawed,
unpronounceable, unreceivable, relegated to silence.
Thus are revealed the effects of the submission of humanity to the snares
of language. We find no simple element, either at the origin of a construc-
tion, or at the end of a deconstruction; nor do we find the field of
discourse, the totality of the text, inclusive, absorbing all differences. Our
entry into discourse, and we have always been implicated in it, provokes
our splitting. We will be the void, the blank, the place of exclusion permit-
ting the functioning of combinations, articulations, and differences, as well
as network, bundle, sedimentation of differences. If we come to analysis
with the desire to find or recover some elementary or some totalizing
discourse, a kind of summative theory or system, of which we ask the
analyst to be the guarantor, the pedagogue, the hermeneut, or even the
magician, it will be shown that there is no guarantor of discourse, that the
analyst can be only the support, or the reminder, of the law of differences
which presides over the functioning of language. As such, the analyst,
unrepresentable, unspeakable, working the word from the inside, consti-
tutes an outside-the-text, that does not encompass, that cannot be located,
at work everywhere and nowhere.
One might, no doubt, understand castration in that way. Whereas what
the patient expected from analysis, from the analyst, was the reconstitution
or the constitution of a discourse-unit (either an element or a field), or of
an indivisible or totalizing utterance, the covering over of lacunae, the
resolution of splits, contradictions, divergences, what he or she ends up
being confronted with is the status of the speaking subject, pure
functioning, pure play of differences one can articulate, insofar as they
articulate one. There is no finished text, either at the beginning, or at the
end; the utterance is always arbitrarily closed off, and yet always polyva-
lent, and thus elliptical and ambiguous. Discourse, and therefore analysis
as treatment dependent on its laws, is in-terminable.
But we resist explosion, fragmentation, nothingness, death. Animality,

the body — inadequate names, notably because they are inscribed in dichot-
omous oppositions, delegating the neutral to whom? - loathe ex-centricity
and spatial and temporal dispersion. They continue always to strive toward
restoration at some center, which can happen only when an original, or a
supplemental, unity, whether it is called return, reappropriation, commu-

nion, narcissistic delegation, or jouissance, is projected as an end. Those
are some of the other names of the object of desire that will (a)rouse us as
speaking subjects, pulling us ever farther away from our origins, and
engaging us in some impossible communication with the other, for whom
we will be required to be all that we are not, to whom we will be required
to give all that we have not, and whose sole utterance will be heard only at
the price of a misunderstanding, an appropriation that is improper.
If one gives in to the temptation to stage our entry into language, one
might gain insight into the privileged place of the functioning of this
object of desire. The one who already speaks stands out as cause of evil;
she or he is the one who is the thief, at least the possible harborer of stolen
goods, the one from whom we have to take back our own. It is that which
is spoken about that we must find beyond the diffractions of language -
the safe, palpable, material object, the body perhaps, whose substance
compels, is resistant to the mischief of language. Or should we look to
discourse itself for explanations? Although it spirits us away from ourselves,
it does so in order to give us back our integrity. It is right we should take
it as the goal of our quest, take stock of it, invest in it, investigate it.
The privileged trajectories within enunciation and within transference
come together, deceptively transformed into entities - addressee, referent,
code, utterance - that function as causes of polarization, but also of
diffraction and distortion. These trajectories themselves form the network
whose dynamic underlies the programming of the utterance; they
punctuate it, mark it with retroactive effects, constrain it in what it says
and what it leaves out. This network does not lack logic, even if this logic
escapes the one who articulates it - the patient, for example. As effect of
the patient's story, of the manner of her or his integration into language,
this logic repeats itself, whatever twists and turns it may take, and has an
effect on transference and discourse. It implicates the patient, the analyst,
and the utterance, attributing to them certain variable, permutable
functions that always obey a certain law, and articulate themselves in a
certain field whose structuring can be detected in the avatars of transfer-
ence, either the patient's or the analyst's.
It could be called putting the phantasm into play or into action. A
discourse that does not explicitly speak itself, but is rather an effect of
language: of the articulation, the split, the parceling up, a phantasmatic
residue or rejoinder that is always an attempt at subversion, at transgression
of the law of discourse, a stab at reinstating a continuum. However, it is a
continuum only for someone included, enclosed, on the inside, whatever
the illusion of a passage from inside to outside, metaphor where the
subject comes forth and then fades away. It is the analyst's job to detect,
and to question, still and always, the closures of the enclosure. . . .
Through work on the utterance itself, whose coherence is ceaselessly

interrogated, disavowed, fractured, put into perspective, put back into a
network of relations. These interventions show patients they cannot expect
any guarantee of cohesion from the text, or any object to seal off their/its
openings. There is no doubt that such a quest animates the project of
discourse and its pursuit, but discourse shows itself to be the aim of a
matrix, of a form, that always slips away, remains on the horizon, heteroge-
neous to discourse and yet the cause of its metonymic movement. Many
objects try to get into it, to fit in there, but none conforms; hence the
referral from object to object, from utterance to utterance. The formaliza-
tion of language exposes, contra-dicts, the restitution of the phantasmatic
shaping that tries to express itself therein. Such is the paradox of discourse:
saying contravenes meaning. However, there is a between-the-two of enuncia-
tion where the aim of the object of desire is displaced, a movement
resulting from the exclusion of the speaker from the utterance and from
his or her ever renewed attempts to get back in, displacement whose
process, or progress, is guaranteed by the analyst, who unleashes its suspen-
sions and its stases.
The analyst - representing the function of addressee, among others -

can be caught up in the domain of the phantasm on several accounts. He
or she must rearticulate its limits in various ways, by functioning now on
the inside, now on the outside of its closure.
Analysis, the analyst, will be, for example, the place of discourse, place
where one can inscribe oneself, eventually as predicate. The analyst's
silence can substantiate this phantasm; but her or his interpretation will
say that discourse as such is a no-place. Putting differences into relation, it
has the effect of circumscribing places as outside-the-text, as sedimentation
of the functioning of language, articulated by it but irreducible to
discourse. The analyst determines the 'place' of discourse in a process that
inscribes, but into which it is impossible to inscribe oneself, notably
because it inscribes the exclusion of the inscriber.
The analyst theoretically functions as master, guarantor of the discourse
— analytic discourse, for example. The analyst is supposedly the one who
knows, guarantees and legislates, and as such, is desirable; what the analyst
supposedly possesses - knowledge, theory, law - becomes the object
targeted by the patient. As gratifying as this postulate is, the analyst must
expose it as a deception, or at least subvert the terms. No one knows better
than the analyst that 'knowledge' and 'theory' are phantasmatic correlates
where one is included, from whence one is excluded, and that they cannot
function as attributes of any subject. As for the law, it is pure articulation
of relations, references. Even though it is the condition of possibility of

weavings, of networkings, indeed, of systems (although transgressed
therein), it is itself neither matter nor form: never perceptible, never
present, at work everywhere. And if the analyst can become its technician,
and not its representative, it is because he or she has paid the price of
submitting to its effects, to its manipulations, beforehand, during the
course of his or her own treatment. On that condition, the analyst can in
turn become reference.
The patient also brings phantasmatic desire of communication, commu-
nion and co-locution to the analysis. The patient and the other are suppo-
sedly speaking from the same place, from the same field, each understood
by the other, accomplices, curbing misunderstandings, ambiguities, and
breakdowns. When the other says nothing, how can the subject not be
taken in? When the other speaks, how can the subject escape the evidence
that the other speaks irreducibly from elsewhere, whatever the play of
repetitions, intersections, and implications among her or his utterances
may be? The subject can only act out the effects of his or her entry into
the grid of language in transference, and in the aim and very structuring of
discourse. Articulating, they are not strictly speaking articulatable. Speak-
able, however, is the result of the impact, the imprint, of the other's
phantasm on one's own network. Hence, this ambiguous discourse where
everyone is stuck, and where one's phantasm acts itself out, repeats itself,
and where, in its own field, is uttered, or realized, the inscription of the
other's phantasm, provoking the difference indispensable to collation of
the two, and to speaking.
Thus the impasse and the well-spring of all communication becomes
obvious: what one intends to say is unspeakable, and what one utters,
against one's will, is unintelligible to the other. Discourse collides with this
not spoken and this not heard, but takes off again. To each his or her own
phantasm - to the patient, but also to the analyst.
Included in the field of the phantasm, the analyst will be able to inter-
vene in the object position, targeted in and through the phantasm. It is the
type of logical relation determining the functioning of the object that will
have to be interrogated, and more specifically, the mode of its relation to
the other's phantasmatic field. Can it be defined as a relation of equiva-
lence, of implication, of disjunction, of deduction, etc.? Is intersection
preferred there? In other words, what is the logical copula that articulates
these phantasmatic fields, and what are their eventual points of intersec-
tion? It is up to the analyst to be vigilant and detect the functioning of her
or his own transference as well as that of the patient. However, it is not
the analyst's job to designate those transferences, or to make them explicit;
that would lend credibility to the possibility of getting outside the
phantasm — to the possibility of access to some meta-phantasmatic - and
would favor only its displacement, if indeed it did not double-lock it down
in closure. The phantasm is irreducible to the utterance, and
it is through acting, non-verbalized as such, which is not to say non-
symbolized, that the analyst can designate its horizon. Playing on silence
and on his or her own word, the analyst suggests the word's limits,
functioning now on the outside, now on the inside, of its field; complicit
with the other's phantasm when saying nothing, contravening it when
producing an utterance, where, no matter how aware she or he is, the
analyst betrays her or his own phantasm. Unless the very adept analyst
attempts to speak in turns of the other's phantasm and of her or his own,
imitating their articulation and their demarcation. This endeavor may be
able to induce a very pertinent question to take shape in the patient.
However, it is a step that requires the highest prudence, even suspicion,
because, beyond a certain limit, deceptions are not so easily detectable.
As for the relation to the function-object implicated in or by the
phantasm, it can still be detected in the specificity of the constraints, in
the violence and the distortions that it imposes on the structuring of the
utterance, as it provokes systematizations, anomalies, slips of the tongue,
etc.
The referent is also worth looking into as a pole that supports the
phantasm. Its status as object, its so-called objectivity, presupposes a
certain opacity or closing off that should be investigated, articulated.
Defined by the functioning of language, it is erroneously credited, despite
language, with identity to itself. It is itself determined by a network of
differences whose game is ensured by the analyst. The anchoring, the fixed
and safe guarantor the patient intended to find in the referent, would also
constitute a closure from which he or she expects, even if at the price of a
postponement, a kind of centering. . . . A sealing off, in the place of the
referent, of the blanks and articulations of discourse, deferring its process
and the efficiency of its laws.
This concept of the referent as counterpoint, counterweight to the
always meta-stable articulation of enunciation, must be challenged,
demobilized. 'Guaranteed' as outside-the-text by its belonging to a past, as
well as by its pro-jection in the future, it must be retransformed into
synchronic functioning by the underlining of its effects on the actual struc-
turing of the utterance. 'Guaranteed' by the existence of some other, the
referent must be unmasked as propping up the discourse of the patient
onto the unpronounceable of the other's phantasm; which is to say, it
must be unmasked as leftover from the profit the other derives from the
interaction of the phantasmatic fields; unspeakable, of course, but whose
action can be detected in the shaping and the realizations of the utterance.
Founded on the materiality of some object, of some body, the stability, the
recurrence, of the referent must be interpreted as an effort to check the

processes of differentiation and elision of the speaking subject, at the price
of fixing the schism, or of foreclosing the play of enunciation. Analysis will
no doubt again be needed to solve the problem of too exact, too intimate,
a complicity between the referent and the image, the referent and the
concept.
*
'But what about sex?' you'll object.
'Yes. But what about the neutral? And why does the one need the other
to be articulated?'
'And Oedipus?'
'The synchronic functioning of discourse puts into play what the myth
stages.'
'And what about the unconscious?'
'A hypothesis concerning the process of discourse, its sense and its non-
sense, and its failures, and concerning desire, as well as the deception of all
communication?'
IX
Class Language, Unconscious
Language
The Marr-Stalin debate concerning the existence, or the non-existence,

of class language is undeniably marked by the theoretical and political
imperatives of Marxism, but also by the state of linguistic methodology of
the period. The position taken on this issue seems inadequate today; this
should not be understood as a decision to intervene in the name of
Marxist criteria, but rather to examine the linguistic approach to the
problem.
The following are the essential points of Marr's theses.

(1) The search for a universal basis for language: Marr situates this
search at the lexical level. He isolates four components that he defines as
roots functioning as the basis for any lexicon: 'sal,' 'ber,' 'roch,' 'yon.'
Using these elements, he elaborates a 'paleontology of language,' endea-
voring to find these four syllables in the terms, roots and endings of all
idioms. Marr's attempt to derive universals is coupled with a hypothesis
concerning linguistic evolution. He posits a rigorous parallelism between
economic development and the mutations of language. According to
Marr's system, monosyllabic or 'synthetic' languages correspond to primi-
tive economic formations or primitive communism; 'inflected' languages
are found in class or caste societies, with the 'agglutinative' languages
marking an intermediate phase, the beginning of the social division of
labor. This study of linguistic evolution is based primarily on an analysis
of the languages of the Caucasus.
(2) The language-economy parallel has as its corollary the existence of
class language. Language is defined as a superstructure, and is produced by
a class. One class can then impose its language on another, and a language
can disappear when its corresponding class disappears. That is why there
are 'revolutionary leaps' in linguistic evolution, languages being subject to
rapid mutations, the consequences of social and economic revolutions. In
fact, Marr made an attempt to elaborate a 'situational theory' of linguistic
production; however, the lack of sufficiently sophisticated linguistic instru-
ments, and, above all, of the language/speech distinction, caused significant
confusion in his posing of the problem.
(3) The third essential element in Marr's theory is the attempt to carry
out a synchronic study of the languages of the USSR Here also, the Soviet
linguist shows himself to be relatively 'modern.' From his synchronic
perspective, he writes a dictionary of the languages of the USSR: beginning
with a description of their current state, he works back to ancient Slav,
analyzing the successive strata that indicate the passage from one state of
the language to another. This elaboration of what could be called an
'inside-out' dictionary came later to be seen as a kind of negation of
history.
Marr's linguistic theory, which was the official linguistic theory of the
Party, was criticized by Stalin in 1950. Stalin attempted to refute the
notion of language as superstructure, and the concept of class language.
The political exigencies of the moment, particularly the unification of the
soviet countries, was probably the cause of this modification in the
regime's position vis-a-vis the established linguists. Whatever the political
imperatives of the time, and whatever the theoretical considerations
invoked by one side and the other, it seems that both Marr and Stalin
misconceived the terms of the problem, in the search for a universal or
national base for language, as well as in the affirmation or negation of class
language. These questions can be approached differently today, due to the
development of structural, distributional, transformational, and generative
linguistic theories and methods. The opposition between language and its
realization in speech acts is ill conceived in the Marr-Stalin debate. In
other words, what is missing is the articulation of the Chomskian distinc-
tion between competence and performance — based on Saussure's classic
model of the difference between language and speech - permitting the
differentiation of 'the grammatical system existing virtually in each brain'
(Saussure, Cours de linguistique generate, 1916, p. 30) ] from its various
modes of realization in discourse, which are functions of the linguistic
knowledge of the speaking subject, as well as of a certain number of indivi-
dual factors like memory, attention, emotivity, etc., and of the linguistic
and situational contexts in which utterances are expressed. It is only
through this distinction that we can begin to conceive the existence of a
universal basis of language, and the existence of a language of class.
Thus the problem of universals must be analyzed in terms of the opposi-
tion between deep and surface structures (cf. Chomsky), and not in terms
of common lexical stock, as Marr claimed. Defined by the grammarians of
Port-Royal as a function of logical/psychological steps, the question of
universals inferred from a priori mental processes is scientifically framed by
Chomsky. Using the distributional methods of Harris, he studies the
surface structures of different languages, and derives, from realizations that
are extremely variable, simple, regular structures. These 'deep' structures
CLASS LANGUAGE, UNCONSCIOUS LANGUAGE 111
are not lexical morphemes, but rather grammatical categories, functions,

and relations. Divergences between one language and another result from
variations in application of morphological/phonological rules functioning
between the underlying level of deep structure, and the level of the realiza-
tion of utterances, or the surface structures. In other words, in order to
consider the problem of universals, linguistics had to evolve away from an
atomistic, lexical, semantic concept, into a structural or, better yet, genera-
tive concept, where the syntax/lexicon dissociation, such as it had been
envisaged in the Marr-Stalin dispute, no longer makes sense, since the
semantic information in utterances results above all from 'underlying
syntagmatic indicators' (Chomsky). It is no longer appropriate to oppose
syntax to semantics; what must be taken into consideration are two levels
of syntactic information: the level of deep structures pertinent to semantic
interpretation, and the level of surface structures pertinent to phonetic
interpretation.
Debate about the existence or non-existence of a class language centers
around an exaggerated dissociation of syntax and lexicon. Stalin concedes
that there are 'class dialects and jargons' distinguished by lexical variants,
but refuses to qualify them as 'noble language,' 'bourgeois language,'
'proletarian language,' or 'peasant language.' Indeed, 'these dialects and
jargons have neither a specific grammatical system nor their own lexical
stock; they borrow them from the national language.' Marr, on the
contrary, affirms the existence of class grammars, either bourgeois or prole-
tarian, which employ the universal lexical stock in variable combinations
essentially determined by the socio-economic infrastructure.
The problem of universals can be analyzed differently thanks to new
linguistic tools that permit us inductively to establish models of utterances,
and can now be conceived in the following terms: using corpora collected
in different classes, will linguistic analysis allow us to derive different struc-
tures from the utterances, or will we have to conclude that the models of
discourse are similar, despite superficial variations in realization? This type
of research has not been envisaged up until now, and I will put forth only
a sketch.
Hypothesizing that the production of discourse is a function of the

language, and of a sender, a referent and a context — of which the
addressee represents an extremely important functional pole - in other
words, of a code or rules of production, of a speaking subject and an
object of communication conditioned by the situation — it is possible to
assume that variations in the situation, and in the context in which the
discourse is produced, imply variations in the structuring of the utterance.
I analyzed, from this perspective, corpora of recordings of spontaneous and
semi-induced discourse (sentence production exercise: integration of
proposed lexemes into a minimal sentence pattern), produced on the one

hand by working-class respondents, and on the other hand by middle-class
respondents. Quickly noticeable in the corpora are certain divergences
between the two groups: for example, variations in lexical specificity and
availability, and a noticeably different vocabulary. One can also isolate, in
the various structures of the utterance, other differences that are more
useful in defining the specificity of a class language than the lexical varia-
tions, which can be explained just as well by different criteria: for example,
rural as opposed to urban. Definition of these lexical criteria also requires
syntactic and semantic analysis.
Examination of the working-class corpus shows that the subject noun
phrases are preferentially CI,' 'we,' or 'one,' that is, shifters manifesting
minimal distance between the subject producing the message and the utter-
ance produced. Other subject noun phrases are human animates or specific
inanimates whose determinants emphasize references to a pragmatic or
idiolectic context: 'my,' 'this,' 'a/an.' Verb phrases are mostly process, or
action, verbs of the generic type 'to do.' The morphological procedures
and the types of verb preferred show the prevalence of narrative, either in
the present or the past. Human animates and specified concrete inanimates
predominate in the object noun phrases. Expansions of the noun or verb
phrases serve to clarify the spatio-temporal context and the modes of
action. Certain types of transformation, in particular those that require
distance from the syntactic schemata - pronominal or negative transforma-
tions, etc. - are rarely found; this would indicate that the problems posed
by the integration of the lexemes into a minimal sentence had to be solved
using specific strategies. For example, for the cue rouge—voir—cheval [red-
see-horse], the solution 'Ce cheval tire une charrette rouge' ['This horse
pulls a red wagon'] or 'J'ai vu un cheval avec des pompons rouges' ['I saw a
horse with red pompoms'] is more common than 71 n'y a pas de cheval
rouge' ['There are no red horses']. Also for pere—enfant—absent [father-
child-absent], performances are of the type: 'Le pere est absent, Venfant
pleure' ['The father is absent; the child is crying'], or (Lepere et Venfant sont
absents' ['The father and the child are absent'], rather than 'Le pere de
Venfant est absent' ['The child's father is absent'], or 'L'enfant souffre de
Vabsence de son pere' ['The child suffers from its father's absence']. Several
clauses - either juxtaposed or co-ordinated - had to be composed in order
to comply with the instructions. This could have been avoided, at least at
the performance level, through use of a nominal transformation. In
addition, analysis of spontaneous discourse shows that the articulation of
minimal utterances is most often effected through juxtaposition or co-
ordination, the coherence of the utterance resulting from the temporal
unfolding of the action, or of events related to it, rather than solely from
the employment of linguistic means. The cohesion of the discourse is also
ensured by redundancies within the utterance itself. This type of discourse

is predominantly metonymic, with an action verb determining the struc-
turing; the utterance is contiguous with the situation in which it is
produced. Finally, from the lexical standpoint, one might point out the
frequency of terms that are both 'concrete' and 'ambiguous,' in the sense
that they are defined only in relation to a particular extra-linguistic
context.
The subject noun phrases in the middle-class corpus consist mainly of

the generic 'she/he/it,' referring to an ensemble of human animates or
abstract inanimates. If the subject noun phrase is a specific term, it is an
abstract inanimate noun modified by 'the.' This type of subject phrase
requires distancing of the subject of enunciation from the subject of the
utterance. In addition, the shifter T itself most often functions as a generic
of the speaking subject, and not as articulation of the utterance into an
idiosemiological context. Verb phrases, for the most part, consist of verbs
of condition or attribution. Temporal modes of the past or present narra-
tive type can be found, but one more often finds verbs in the so-called
durative present, correlated with definitions of conditions or attributions.
The distance from the enunciation also leaves space for the future, and,
more specifically, for eventuality or potentiality. Due to the preferred types
of verbs of the generic type 'to be,' the predicate, although it does express
determinations relative to the subject phrase, contains few object phrases.
In the cases where they do appear in the utterance, they are of the abstract
inanimate class. Expansions of the noun and verb phrases serve to specify
the condition or the attribution when it is not made explicit in the verb
phrase, or else they consist of modalizations clarifying the relation of the
speaking subject to the utterance - 'perhaps,' 'no doubt.' The types of
transformation carried out show that the utterance functions as object to
be manipulated. Pronominal, nominal and negative transformations are
used to resolve the problems posed by the articulation of the lexemes into
a minimal utterance: 7/ ny a pas de cheval rouge' ['There are no red
horses'] for (red-see-horse); 'Le tiroir du bureau ne s'ouvrepas bien' ['The
drawer of the desk doesn't open easily'] for {tiroir—ouvrir—bureau [drawer-
open-desk]); (Le pere de Venfant est absent' ['The child's father is absent'] or
'Uenfant souffre de Vabsence de son pere' ['The child suffers from its father's
absence'] for (father-child-absent). This constitutes a statement at the
performance level alone, the only level at which there can be a response to
the cue. The articulation of the statement into discourse takes place
through the play of transformations or through processes of subordination.
Furthermore, the coherence of the utterance is established through the
structure itself, rather than through representation of, or reference to, an
extra-linguistic context. Manipulation of and play with language elaborate
new connections, produce new 'objects,' in which the verbs, mostly copula,
articulate the functioning of a linguistic logic. Underlying the cohesion of
the discourse, this logic guarantees its metonymic progress, as well as explicit
or implicit references to other texts. However, at the time of its produc-
tion, the utterance aims above all at constituting metaphors whose effective-
ness is dependent upon their particularity. From the lexical standpoint,
specific abstract terms predominate, disambiguated through reference to
the language function rather than to an extralinguistic context. The utter-
ances seem elliptical, even ambiguous, in relation to the situation, unless
they are defined as a set of linguistic productions.
In conclusion, one might distinguish between two models of utterances:

(1) a minimal sentence of the type (I, we, one, human animate, or
concrete inanimate contiguous with [I]2) + (action verb) + (human animate
or concrete inanimate contiguous with [I]); and (2) a minimal sentence of
the type (he/she/it or abstract inanimate) + (verb of condition or attribu-
tion) + (expansion of noun phrase 1, or abstract inanimate).
These different ways of structuring the utterance show a variable
distance from the enunciation correlative to the actual purpose of the
discourse. Action, or narrative of action, carried out on the 'world' in the
one case; manipulation of language with the purpose of defining linguistic
'objects' in the other. These divergent functions for the utterance seem to
be determined by the work status of the respondent. For the working class,
work remains foreign to language itself, and, at best, contiguous with the
speaking subject who can never be metaphorized in it, since he or she does
not possess it; whereas, for the middle class, language itself is a production
tool, in that its manipulation can produce grammars and theoretical
concepts, as well as ideologies, ideologies that are mediations required for
mastery over the network of economic production. The existence of
different types of discourse could then be interpreted not only as an effect
of the situation in which they are carried out and alienated, but also as a
possible cause for the creation of the situation. The question then is: what
connection can be established between a discourse linked to immediate
experience and a discourse creating socio-cultural mediations?
*
Class membership determines the structure of the utterance through the
impact it has on the situation and the object of communication. But to
what extent? Is it the only constraining factor? From a psycholinguistic, or
more precisely a psychoanalytic-linguistic, perspective, one might hazard
the guess that class determinations occur at the preconscious-conscious
level. However, locutors do not articulate 'class utterances' in a fully delib-
erate way, even if they are consciously aware of their explicit content. It
would also seem that unconscious constraints exist. In other words, there
are psychotic and neurotic levels of discourse that underlie class determina-
tions and interfere with them. This hypothesis obviously implies a
synchronic perspective.
Models of psychotic or neurotic utterance — we will here consider only
the discourse of schizophrenics, hysterics and obsessives - were established
using corpora recorded in a hospital setting or in the psychoanalytic
context. In psychoanalysis, the situational impact is invariable: one
identical situation, one addressee, always the same - silent - and no
defined object for discourse. This is the same for all subjects, whatever
their socio-economic status.
The effect of dissociation from the idiosemiological context shows up in

an almost exaggerated fashion in schizophrenic language. Whatever her or
his socio-economic background, the schizophrenic creates the same type of
utterance: an utterance which, when first heard, appears to be a predomi-
nantly metaphoric linguistic object, manifesting a concern for lexical specifi-
city and implying a complex play of transformations. For example: 'Tout
en parlanty on constate une espece d'annulation, si je puis dire d'effacement,
. . . une annulation des faits et gestes qui guident une personne' ['While
speaking, one takes note of a kind of annulment, or if you will effacement
. . . an annulment of facts and gestures that guide a person'] (engineer); 'Ce
que tout le monde recherche, c'est le zero ... Lorsqu'on fait une addition
proprement a Tecole, qu'on a fait la preuve par neuf... on est satisfait, mais
enfin pas tout a fait; il y a . . . quelque chose qui taquine. Alors, il s 'agit bien
de trouver tout de meme une issue ... c'est peut-etre comme la mort . . . //
s'agit de rechercher Tissue fatale et de pouvoir poser son ultimatum' ['What
everyone seeks, is zero . . . Doing addition at school, when one proved it
by nine . . . one is satisfied, but still not completely; there is . . . something
that is still bothersome. Then, it's all about finding a way out . . . maybe
it's like death . . . it's all about seeking your fate and being able to deliver
an ultimatum'] (metallurgical worker); 'Lorsque vous revez ... vous cherchez
toujours a bouclery a fermer . . . vous cherchez toujours la continuite; vous
cherchez a ... une espece d'ordre logiquey qui, dans le fondy euh . . . vous
empeche de rencontrer toutes les personnes du monde entier' ['When you
dream . . . you are always trying to finish off, close up . . . you are always
looking for continuity; you are looking for . . . a kind of logical order, that,
ultimately, uh . . . prevents you from meeting all the people in the whole
world'] (laborer); 'Quand je vais me promener ou n'importe quoiy les . . .
Tetat des signes, c'est-a-dire leur consideration, fait que je suis fatalement porte
a voir quelque chose se rapportant a mon moi personnel... laisser des marques
ou des signes pour que leurs semblables les recoivent et ... qu 'Us soient
persuades de la relativite du temps ou de sa novicite [sic]' ['When I go out
for a walk or whatever, the . . . the state of the signs, that is as I contem-
plate them, makes me inevitably see something related to me personally in
them . . . leave marks or signs so their peers receive them and . . . are
persuaded of the relativity of time or of its novicity [sic]') (railroad
worker); 'Je ne le connais pas habituellement mais de technique et de fonction.
Exactement ce qu 'on appelle les ... terminaisons des ... phrases. C'est-a-dire
les specialistes des signatures et des cachets. Exactement ce n 'est pas un cachet
qu'il fallait, c'est Veffacer, soit effacer le cachet, ou soit... determiner la cause
qui generait la presence des choses . . . les unes devant les autres et c'est tout' ['I
don't know him habitually; only technically and by function. Exactly what
they call the . . . endings . . . of sentences. That is specialists of signatures
and seals. It is not exactly a seal that was needed, it's to erase it, or to erase
the seal, or . . . to determine the cause that would get in the way of the
presence of things . . . . Some things in front of others and that's all']
(clerk).
Analysis of such utterances points up the superficiality of the analogy
that could be made with the discourse of the middle class. The schizo-
phrenic is spoken much more than he or she speaks, spoken notably by
language transformed into a free activity of generations and transforma-
tions, language that is no longer a set of rules or laws guaranteeing the
elaboration of a message. There might not be any message in the utterance
of the schizophrenic other than the formalistic play of language, or other
than what the addressee wants to hear. Linguistic forms function solely as
'objects,' and it would be inaccurate to qualify them as metaphors, since
the schizophrenic never really articulates enunciation to utterance. It is
interesting to note that, without any higher education, or apprenticeship in
language, the schizophrenic produces an 'abstract' and apparently scientific
discourse, at times in the third person, where complex transformations are
carried out. It must therefore be concluded that this linguistic creativity,
dissociated from the creativity of the locutor, exists in virtually every
speaking subject, and that it is either mobilized or inhibited by the situa-
tion, and by the object of communication. The unforeseen liberation —
outside a normative context - of this creativity, in the case of schizo-
phrenia, for example, is often interpreted by society, or by the family, as a
symptom.
The analysis of neurotic discourses results in a different model. In

addition to the messages neurotic subjects explicitly want to transmit, one
can detect, through examination of the forms of the discourse itself,
specific types of neurotic utterances. This requires going back through the
play of transformations masking the minimal sentence underlying the
discourse. The model of the minimal utterance can be symbolized as
follows: (locutor) <— (NP1 + V + NP2) —> (addressee).3 These symbols are
given different content according to whether the locutor is, for example,
hysteric or obsessive.
The hysteric's utterance can consistently be represented as (you, human

animate or concrete inanimate mediated by [you]) + (transitive action verb,
indicating incompletion) + (me, concrete animate or inanimate related to
[I]). It expresses an action the addressee executes with respect to the locutor,
an incomplete, ongoing action, of which the locutor is the object. This utter-
ance can often be reduced to an interrogative transformation. For example:
(I) <— do you love me? —• (you). The message is presented as incomplete;
(you)'s 'yes' or 'no' must eliminate the ambiguity. The addressee not only
appears to be the one who carries out the action expressed in the utterance,
but is also the only real subject of enunciation in the discourse. As for the
speaking subject, she or he is no more than a possible object of the addressee.
This calls into question the very existence of an object of communication,
since the unique subject is (you). The utterance, or its object, cannot there-
fore constitute a point of convergence for the partners of enunciation. Even
if'it' is represented in the utterance, it is still only (you)'s object, whether the
speaking subject explicitly refers to it as the addressee's, or whether the utter-
ance can be shown to be a copy, or a duplication, of a real or implicit
discourse of (you): I love what you love; I love that (what you love).
The obsessive's utterance can be represented as follows: (I, abstract

inanimate mediated by [I]) + (intransitive verb of condition or attribution
conveying completion) + (attribute or abstract inanimate related to I). This
utterance often includes a completive where the object of the discourse
appears, a completive introduced by (I) + (verb expressing the process of
enunciation itself)' I tell myself that I am intelligent; I ask myself if I am
loved. The message, most often actually conveyed in a completive, consists
of an elaboration of an image of the self, or of the world, proposed as
object for the subject of enunciation. The message appears to be assumed
by the locutor. It is the speaker who determines its meaning with modali-
zations guaranteeing the meta-stable character of its signification, and
allowing the speaking subject to take it back eventually, or to disambiguate
it. Doubt functions as guarantor of the incompletion of the discourse: I tell
myself that I am perhaps loved; I do not tell myself that I am not loved;
etc. The utterance is also incomplete due to the elimination of the
addressee from the message, as well as from the process of enunciation
itself. 'You' is not detectable in the utterance, either as subject, or as agent,
or as object. Furthermore, (you)s' function as co-locutor is questionable
due to the reflexive character of the enunciation, and due to the fact that
the object of communication is so extensively elaborated by (I)'s imagery
that it becomes a quasi-unacceptable message for the receiver.
Analysis of hysterics' and obsessives' utterances raises the question of the

functioning of the poles of enunciation; it leads to a grammar of enuncia-
tion.4 Lack of differentiation between (I) and (you) cannot serve as expla-
natory principle for the structuring of neurotic discourse, although it is a
defensible hypothesis, at least analogically, in the case of psychotic
languages. We see instead a kind of differentiation within (you) and (I)
themselves - (you') —> (you); (I) —• (Y) - which guarantees the production
of discourse by maintaining contact between the partners of enunciation,
whatever their masks and deceptions may be. A space for the functioning
of (I) and (you) is marked out, laid out, for an eventual emergence or
resurgence. Traces of differentiation can be detected in the definitions of
the co-locutors and in the mediations of the proposed object of communi-
cation.
Creating a model for enunciation using an analysis of utterances requires
postponing interpretation. Enunciation constrains the structuring of the
text, but cannot be unequivocally inferred from the examination of the
structure produced. Thus, the hypothesis cannot yet be eliminated that the
hysteric may exclude the addressee, while the obsessive may be constituted
as pure object, and may not be able to function as subject of discourse.
What the formalization of their utterances leads us to conclude could, in
fact, be the inversion of the appropriate model of enunciation. Extreme
example, and improbable, but it cannot be eliminated from consideration
too quickly . . .
Whatever the case may be, it seems that the structuring of the utterance
should be attributed, at the very least, to two causes. One of them,
resulting from an unconscious agency, and conveyed by the articulation of
the structures of subject, code, world, and co-locutor, determines the
dynamics of enunciation itself. In that case, the status of the object must
be examined, not as object or referent of the utterance, but as what is at
stake in the functioning of discourse itself. This structuring agency is
caused by the phantasmatic dynamic in which the speaking subject is at
one and the same time scene and actor, acted and acting.
The system of interrelations and interdependencies governing the
process of enunciation is itself constrained by another determinant that
partially masks, inhibits or represses it. Interfering with unconscious
processes, it is situational, and may be designated either as the 'object' of
the discourse, or as the context where it is produced, or as the addressee.
Pertinent to the explanation of the articulation of enunciation with utter-
ance, of the measure of their distance from each other, it also regulates the
structuring of the utterance, whether it functions as goal of the discourse,
or marks it with retroactive effects. The situational determinant is more
easily detected in the analysis of the utterance than the unconscious deter-
minant, which is obscured by the play of transformations, and by the reali-

zations of discourse itself. If it does happen that the unconscious determi-
nant manifests itself in the sentence and in its immediate components - in
psychoanalytic treatment, for example - it is oftentimes conveyed only in
the totality of the discourse, the metaphor of the unconscious model. Its
effects appear to be subjacent to those related to the situation.
Resulting from at least two factors, the unconscious factor, f(UCS), and
the situational factor, f(SIT), the structuring of the utterance owes to their
interaction the maintenance of its metaphoric-metonymic movement, and
the always meta-stable character of its signification. Psychoanalytic treat-
ment - in its attempts to constitute the situational factor as invariable -
would seem to be a privileged site for the analysis of the unconscious
determinant, its parameters currently granting us the only possible experi-
ence of the process of enunciation itself. It is the task of socio-linguistics to
isolate and analyze the effects of the situational factor, notably the class
determinant, on discourse.
Such a dissociation of the factors determining the articulation of

discourse may seem shocking, especially from an historical perspective.
History itself should be investigated as cause of the production and of the
definition of these factors. This analysis can have only synchronic import.
Interpretation of the functioning of discourse currently requires a model
making use of the operational agencies analyzed above. However, the
possibility of another explanation cannot be excluded, and to affirm the
contrary would represent an ideological position.
X
The Rape of the Letter
To read a text1 is to fold it into a foreign network, to expatriate, dispossess,

and disappropriate it. Even if the reader were nothing more than a blank
page exposed to the text's writing, as medium, she or he would already be
defined topologically, already inscribed, if not in black and white, then at
least in relief. The medium or the matrix transforms the text as much as it
is transformed by it. There is no reading or writing that is not subversion.
Furthermore, the text's imprint or writing, even unaware and even
unwilling, can operate indiscriminately because it does not convey, but
rather produces. By the same token, any resistance to the imprint will
provoke torsions and distortions in its program.2 Close attention cannot
flush out the silent efficiency of the phantasm. 3 Reading, speaking and
writing are always effects, at times attempts at effacement, or 'replace-
ment,' 4 or impossible appropriation — through mimeticism? repetition? —
of the impact of phantasmatic fields, creating the difference necessary for
representation and its articulation into utterance.
THE LETTER: U N K N O W N W I T H O U T ROOTS
The letter/phoneme opposition is perhaps nothing more than a detour, a

game, a gesture made in order to take up an issue that disconcerts theory.
The elements of the non-figurative occidental graphic code can be
defined as distinct, distanced, spaced units. Each one identical to itself,
non-identical to all the others - homogeneous, simple, and heterogeneous
to all the others. Each letter of the alphabet constitutes, if you will, one set,
or sub-set, comprised of one and only one element. The intersections
among these sub-sets are, in the proper functioning of (alphabetic) writing
and reading, null or void. At the literal level, there is no possible give and
take of same and other. Any dissociations of letters, any hesitations caused
by their possible common elements, any constitution of intersections
among the graphemes, are assessed as pathological. For example: the diffi-
culty dysgraphics and dyslexics have in recognizing £ p,' 'q,' ' d,' and ' b' as
heterogeneous; or the play of permutations they go so far as to institute
among these letters. Graphism does, however, justify the pertinence of
such questions, hesitations and waverings. Some norm requires that we
never stop to examine graphism itself: it is only a support, a medium, if

you will. A letter cannot be taken literally under pain of anomaly or
sanction. It is supposed to be one, identical to itself, non-identical to
others. Training the hand, and assistance from the gaze, or submission to
the gaze, are required in order to close off a graphic form, in order to
isolate or recognize it.
Our alphabet is thus a set - or a field - of distinct forms. These forms

are actually indifferent to each other. No law proper to graphism either
regulates their order (unlike numbers), series, groupings, or operation, or
justifies why the presence of one letter either implies or excludes some
other letter. The intersection where two letters come together must be null
and void - the void - inscriptable and virgin space-medium, containing no
literal elements. The only imperatives are convenience and non-ambiguity
in inscription. This code, close to nature, art, and religion when written
long ago, has become a useful instrument, founded on convention.
Letters must be distanced, spaced out, as well as distinct, conditions of

the directly legible cohesion of their form. However, this spacing out is
not regulated by graphism itself. The inscriptable medium, which can
consist of any imprintable matter - one can always discover new media,
new styluses, or new substitutes - is indeterminate. Nor is there an a priori
definition of the gap between the letters. It will be imposed only after the
fact and by appeal to some Other, or to some other system(s) or function-
ing^) of spacings, intervals, and gaps. Graphism can be a function of the
limits or the liberty of gesture, of the mobility of the body, of the submis-
sion of the inscriber to certain rhythms, of the gaze, of the size or nature
of the available medium, of the sharpness of the stylus, of the fluidity of
the inscripting medium, etc. When structuring a space, organizing it,
constructing it, as superimposed on the virgin or inert space of the
medium, graphism is no longer literal.
Tracing letters requires a tool, at least in some cases. A finger and some
sand suffice. However, media malleable to the finger, transformed into
instrument, are rare, not always at hand. And the finger's traces get erased,
unless the finger becomes stylus dipped in ink, paint or mud . . . Impres-
sion requires the appropriateness of the tracer to the medium, and of the
medium to the tracer, and, eventually, a supplemental substance ensuring
the permanence of the trace. In order to be memorable, the inscription
must either be violent or supported by an adequate substance; the furrow
must be either deep, or supplemented with excess surface material. There
is, however, no contiguity, no functional necessity, no formal analogy,
between the tool and the product.
THE RAPE OF THE LETTER 123
The letters of our alphabet make no sense, have no meaning, no direc-

tion, unless they are traced horizontally, from left to right. This graphic
concession is the only strictly literal sense or direction, unless one reads
into it, as non-sense if you like, the enslavement of the hand, its accultura-
tion. The letter corresponds to no gesture. It constrains with complex,
meticulous contours, the hand that stops or gets off the track; it bends it
to the loop, or the closure, to centripetal or centrifugal motion; it submits
it to the dictatorship of the eye, itself obedient to arbitrariness. Apart from
this servitude, the letter says nothing. Representable, represented, appro-
priate for representation, it represents, it figures, nothing. Simple frame,
skeleton. Trace without dignity, without truth (either logical, or material,
or formal . . . ).
But the trick, the deception, is that this variable - precisely because of
its arbitrary nature? - ends up imposing itself as the place-holder for a
constant that is defined elsewhere. Sustaining the illusion - through dupli-
cation of arbitrariness — of a background of truth, or of a simple
background, needing these strange little associates in order to appear. The
without-origin of the letter, its non-genealogy, its rupture with all conti-
guity - with 'replacement' or with deferral5 - substantiates the myth of the
origin, of the original, delegated to NATURE or to the LOGOS, first
Principle, engendering and encompassing.
Without doubt, the letter informs whomever gives it form; it is formed

by that upon which it confers form. So-called, in quid pro quo. Indefinite
alternation never switched on, never switched off, it neither produces, nor
reproduces, but is the condition of production or of reproduction, neces-
sary to the transformation of so-called raw materials into useful goods and
services. This mechanism or apparatus would remain ineffective without
earth, without productive source, both also useless without technique and
labor. The problem is in the rupture between these two resources; the code
has become arbitrary and no longer signifies its object; it creates an
uprooted subject and social body, and a nature both exploited and unculti-
vated.
The letter is thus form, one, distinct, distanced, inscribed in a medium

through a technique, and represents nothing a priori, if not the reduction
of the scribe to the training and the stereotyping of the movement, to
attention to the gaze, and to non-sense.
Unless the scribe finds in its unity, its difference, its distance, some
technique for the production of her or his unity, difference, and distance?
Tracing the letter, do I inaugurate myself as one, unique, distinct, distant?
Is this the effect, or even the goal of alphabetic graphism? At the price of
how much of a detour into arbitrariness? Does it cause us to become signs

without signification?
Is there any way to avoid relating the already traced letter to the image
in the mirror? Even if it is only to distinguish them from each other. The
specular image constitutes me as one and distinct, even if not always
distanced. It is formed at the same time as it informs me. It stamps the
body whose stamp it is. Dissociation between production and reproduc-
tion is impossible for the mirror image. It requires the contours of the
eye, the submission to the gaze, and needs a surface-medium. However,
the technique is a function of the medium; it is not manipulated by a
scribe, or at the service of a scribe. If the scribe takes advantage of it, he
or she does so entirely without tools or work. Apart from the play of the
eyelids? Gesture, enslaved in writing, is excluded from specularization;
constrained in writing, in specularization it is totally frozen, immobilized,
at least for the time of one image.6 Each movement corresponds to
another image, irreducible to the previous one. The unity of the image in
the mirror is the sole jurisdiction of the gaze, and of a technically
adequate medium.
On the other hand, it represents, requiring presence for a representation
that is erased as soon as the presence pulls away, without permanence or
temporality other than the moment, anxiety-producing in its very evanes-
cence. The specular representation has only illusory fidelity to presence,
which it steals away in incredible symmetry; it truncates it, flattens it out,
is unreadable, unacceptable in its impropriety and its strangeness. It disap-
propriates, without the pretext of arbitrariness, instantaneously subtracting
presence from itself, digging out a gaping hole in it, opening it up into
space for another eye. In this place, other eyes will come to function, but
first it belongs to a magician's eye, a magic eye, an extra eye or one eye too
many: eye open henceforth in and onto the center of self-presence. Eye of
God or of conscience? Of the other? Of the self as other? That no vigilance
can deceive?
Consequently - a plan to exorcize the spell, to evict the intruder, to get
rid of the occupier, conferring unity on the self.
By outlining it as object, closing it off. It is still gaping open, by neces-
sity.
By confronting another body? But even in darkness, or even in blind-
ness, the inverted symmetry dispossesses, ex-centers for the benefit of some
virtual, elusive, implicit axis of symmetry.
And the a tergo embrace will be even more resolvent of unity,
reimposing what was always excluded from postulated unity, reintroducing
what is foreclosed, foreign and strange, through splitting and transferring,
the back preceding the front.
Deliberately inscribing a medium, with the help of a technique, of a

gesture, gestures, giving oneself form by informing space to one's measure,
to one's rhythm, to one's color; creating space from a multiplicity of single
gestures; reproducing or rather producing a unity . . . So-called abstract
painting may elude, or at least try to elude, problems of symmetry, but it
is not clear that it settles the score with that one eye too many; it might
even grant it the starring role as inspiration for the tracings of the brush.
Thus the eye actually functions, and is not delegated to some transcen-
dence, divinity or conscience. But the painter knows very well that there is
no unity to be found there, whatever the illusion he or she may inspire in
the viewer. Or maybe the unity of the canvas lasts for just a heartbeat, a
momentary conclusion to, or suspension of, the battle he or she wages, the
wager he or she lays, against fragmentation, splitting up, dispersion. If the
painter were satisfied with repeating this unity, with a technique for produ-
cing this unity, her or his canvasses would literally be of no interest - dead
letters.
Back to literal graphism . . . Submissive to the attentive gaze, that of the

scribe, the hand traces, from left to right, finished, definite, single, unique
forms. The trained gesture inscribes the form of the unit. This behavior
can no doubt produce the unit as medium-form, empty form, arbitrary
graphism, suspension of meaning. Thus deprived of all signifying aim, of
all intent to convey a meaningful message, the scribe notices after the fact
the effect of sense and non-sense of the inscription, or rather the effect
that precedes that dichotomy. It is constituted as form, as matrix, where
meaning can inscribe itself or be inscribed. Interrupting the articulation of
the gesture, the indication of the referent, the specular game, the need, or
the desire, the letter outlines the writer as an arbitrary, distinct, discontin-
uous form, the space of suspension, space deferring time, the becoming-
space of time. This implies in-finite, unfinished repetition - the effect of
the trace is never conclusive, always to be started over - and opens up a
topos for the functioning of images, representation, and concepts. Revenge
taken on specularization, graphism has the power to produce the scribe as
form, conferring on herself or himself absence from presence, playing at
dispossessing the scribe, at engendering her or his own eclipse, at
provoking her or his own downfall, her or his own dehiscence. But only at
the price of, only on condition of, letting arbitrariness control the game,
letting it be the very play of arbitrariness itself. This freedom is all the
cleverer, and all the more resourceful, for being arbitrary; however, it is a
freedom that may run out of steam due to its own gratuitousness, that
may get bored or obsessed with reiteration, that may anguish over its own
dismemberment, or over the expanse, or the virginity, or the excess of the
medium?
THE PHONETIC PRO-LOGUE
The phoneme is not one.7 It is a bundle of differential traits. The most

elementary, the simplest, the most distinctive trait is unpronounceable,
inaudible. It can be isolated only through analysis and artifice, suspension
of articulation, of the articulator.8 In pronunciation, the phoneme is plural
from the very beginning, a combination of differences imperceptible to the
one pronouncing them, articulated thanks to an unoccupied space, a
blank, an absence, a zero, that authorizes permutations and associations,
and provides the give and take required for their insertion into a network.
This unoccupied space is ambiguous; it can be understood either as the
absence of all phonemes, silence, a non-field of phonemes; or as absence,
neutralization of distinctive traits, empty set regulating the structuring of
the phoneme-field; or even as empty sub-set, neutralization of one or of
several pertinent traits, defining the relation between two phonemes.
Absence is from then on defined and regulated, functioning within a play
of relations, even though it is the very possibility of their articulation.
However, the ambiguity of this zero is that it is played out both in turns,
and simultaneously, at the edge of a natural limit and of an arbitrary
limitation: all pronounceable phonemes are not necessarily pronounceable
in any given language. The articulation of certain phonemes can be impos-
sible or prohibited. Their silence is prescribed by nature or prescribed by
law, as is their pronunciation. Phonetics and phonology are irreducible to
each other on several accounts, but the latter comes up against the
stumbling block of the distinctive trait, and is unable to conclude if it is
natural or arbitrary. Both nature and arbitrariness contribute to it.
As set, the phoneme is defined by a network of relations with respect to

a set or to a field of differential traits, just as it circumscribes, in a play of
relations to other phonemes, other sub-sets of pertinent traits or empty
sub-sets. Bundle of differences, the phoneme is itself the knot in a network
of differences that articulate it, as a site of references, into the set of
distinctive traits, and with the other phonemes. Not one, the phoneme is
also not unique. Or at least its singularity is criss-crossed with relations of
identity and non-identity to other phonemes, with inclusion or exclusion
of differences, with their neutralization. Only erroneously could it be
defined as distinct like the letter. The intersection functions differently in
the set of letters from the set of phonemes; prohibited or prescribed, its
interventions leave nothing of its own to the phoneme, except the concur-
rence of a certain number of relations.
Nor is the phoneme distanced, spaced, or capable of spacing. It is more

like a system of switches, not pronounceable without supplementary traits,
articulatable through the implication or exclusion of certain differential

traits, which, in turn, require the activation of defined relations. No doubt
there is still give and take in articulation, where impossible differentiations
or gaps in natural requirements and arbitrary imperatives are reintroduced,
where nature slips away from the very place where the articulator thought
she or he was just submitting to nature; the articulator is already absent
from the very place where he or she thought to be most irreducibly present
- in their physiological equipment.
The phoneme is nonetheless institution of relations, actualization of
relations, much more than it is a phenomenon of rupture or of closure.
Spacing out is difficult to regulate in the phoneme. Or rather, it functions
differently. It is at work in what is defined as elementary; it operates
within what is elementary and its articulation. It is the condition of the
realization of the play of difference, of differences. It cannot be manipu-
lated as a technique for differing, but rather contributes to the process of
difference, escaping the alternation of passivity and activity, of cause and
effect (at least the way these are conceived from a certain philosophical
viewpoint), of inside and outside. The phoneme is always produced in an
almost tear-proof weaving of differences, whose origin or ending it would
be useless to question. One is always already implicated in a network
whose functioning one can try to describe through a suspension of pronun-
ciation, or through the counterpoint, the point of view, of another
language, or of another game, or of another supposed deferral. Competi-
tion or repetition inappropriately open up space for the gaze, for
graphism, for figuration, for representation, for theory. However, this
methodological opening does not check the process in which the articu-
lator is caught up. For him or for her, there is no outside the play of
deferral. She or he is located within and throughout the process, caught in
the network of relations where, even if there are crossings, intersections,
and marked paths, there is no progress, no beginning and no end - for
habitual language. The order is not at all teleological. For whoever has
entered into articulation, there are no landmarks or road signs indicating a
straight pathway, no rest stops along the way that would allow him or her
to assume that the development could one day be surveyed, recapitulated,
summed up in some unity. Unity always slips away, relegated to some
mythic silence, or to some primeval humming sound or some original
chant, before God or before death. But for the moment - and there is
only the actual moment (which is not to say the present), there is only
actualization in this process that resists temporal unfolding, that temporizes
without temporalizing - deferral is always at work. Each phoneme comes
into existence as part of a bundle of relations articulating it with the one
that precedes it and the one that follows, but also with all other possible
and impossible ones, in a strange procession evoking neither circularity nor
reiteration - even though recursivity has a role to play in it - nor linearity,

nor some dance where two steps forward mean one step back. In this
choreography each figure participates with all the others, intersects with
them, evokes them, calls them up, and implicates them, and once the
dance begins, it goes on indefinitely with no horizon. Untamed yet
regulated dance that children, in their litanies of nonsensical syllables, are
wild about, trying perhaps to make a game of the uncontrollable drift.
Such are the first effects, if not the first laws, of pronunciation:
positioning, once and for all, as part of a network; logical functioning,
where the definition of constants and of variables develops under natural
and arbitrary, but non-teleological, constraints; the impossible unit, the
zero, the unoccupied space, taking the place of what is always already lost,
eclipsed into a network of differences; non-temporal differing or tempor-
izing without measure, and without history, based on no countable unit;
imperceptible articulation of the proper with the improper; in-finite, unfin-
ished dispersion; system of referrals with no assigned goal or representable
objective; law with no legislator, no instructions and no commands, which
does not mean without order or organization; structuring outside of all
dichotomies:9 time/space, continuous/discontinuous, before/after, inside/
outside, nature/culture, etc., which should be interpreted as secondary
structures elaborated in order to master or to defend against the process of
deferral. Deferral unfolds between impossible identity to self and not yet
(possible) imaginable identification, between the two grounds, the two
bases, of nature and representation. Wanting to insert it, to integrate it,
even if only into a supposedly definable between two, into neither the one
nor the other, into neither this nor that, is already to betray its efficacy,
which cannot be conveyed.
Perhaps it should be added that pronunciation is the most irreducible,
and the closest (if degree has any pertinence here . . . ) expatriation - a
regulating function that imperceptibly produces the producer,
unbeknownst to himself or herself, as outside and as other to himself or
herself, without detectable production, without localizable displacement,
without designatable exile. However, the excess left over after insertion
into the network evokes an impossible quest, a claim, for a center.
Not counting the fact that the pronounced sound projects, diffuses, or
diffracts the one who pronounces it into an undelimited outside. That she
or he is heard does not really help matters. It is always already too late. It
is an other - x others — the pronouncer is listening to; she or he is already
not even there any more, and in truth, never was there as one or as
unique. Like the thing or the one she or he is waiting for?
Phonetic articulation also marks the 'replacement' — or better yet, fictive
deferral, the difference is not negligible - for kinetic articulation and kines-
thetics. Gesture is relegated to it, transported into it, and abandons its
games or its communications to one specific, localized type of motor
activity. Its mask as place-holder is all the more convincing in that it is
neither totally active nor totally passive. The body movements hold still in
order to let the voice speak, itself always already lost.
And the eyes go blind. There is nothing there to see: no centering object
to know or to recognize, no horizon by which to position oneself, no
world to circumscribe. Phonetic deferral works in shadow. It cannot be
controlled or delimited by the gaze. Whoever would like to meet it face to
face would find only phantoms rising up out of the rejection of this
invisible process.
One resists this elusive - imperceptible, unimaginable - articulation, this

diffraction, this explosion of polarization, with difficulty. At least that is
what one might logically infer from what follows as structuring of
discourse. One still and always tries to come back to the center: agent,
subject, object; source or project; locutor-utterance-addressee; producer-
product-consumer, etc. And if their determination, their identity, is shaky,
if the artificiality of their unity is revealed or stands out, one invents other
illusions: the referent. As if, itself the result of pronunciation (or of
whatever concurrence of other determinants), the referent could escape its
laws. Or the concept, for example, violently cut from the weave, effect - at
least by definition - of a call to graphism (and to the mirror) for help.
Their assistance will be required each time the dance or the chant is inter-
rupted and articulated into separable, spaceable, identifiable figures.
But that's going too fast. So let us review.
DEFERRAL DEFERRED
The letter is a finite, definite, single, unique, distinct and distanced, space-
able form. It is undifferentiated, except with reference to phonetics, or to
the other letters: not sequential, not numeric, not associatable, not group-
able, not operable . . . As individual member of a genus and species
belonging to no family, it has no genealogy, no filiation or alliances,
except through procuration, delegation, or artifice; it can only be
combined in a game with so-called others, and then all of them must be
taken together at the same time, all of them referring to nothing more than
neutral parts and particles, and all at the same time meaning nothing more
than a prescribed juxtaposition without polarization. Without generation?
It repeats its finite, definite, single, unique form . . . as often as one likes,
but without process, without history, without production or transforma-
tion, at least within itself.
Single and unique form . . . it represents nothing. Needing the help of

gesture and gaze, it somehow suspends both of them. It constrains the
servile hand to arbitrary gesture, without direction (except from left to
right, horizontally), without a plan. It works toward enslaving the gaze,
whose assistance is called up in order to see - nothing: images, ideas, ideas
as images, stories as idea-images, themes, subjects.
Thus logocentrism10 could be understood as the result of the castration

of the gaze, of the voice, and of gesture, by non-figurative graphism which
results in the production, or the reproduction, the representation, of hallu-
cinatory spectacles: oculocentrism by default. The eye focuses in on
phantom objects or ideals that come to occupy reality, after the forced
eviction of any real objects to look at. The gaze is overshadowed, occluded,
blinded. But it creates, from then on, the invisible.
Form that represents nothing, the letter gives rise to the presence of its
pre-scriber, the guarantor, the Other, it must function to re-present. In
back? In front? Because facing us there is nothing. Or up above? Or down
below? Head or tail? Evoking verticality, which, in literal graphism, is
annulled, desperately flat, laid out, despite the Vs (penis, violation, virgin,
filiation . . . ), despite the cries, marching in step, in ranks, lined up, coded.
Either all the way to the left, or all the way to the right, representations of
the origin and of the end, horizon without a landscape. Either in the
intimacy of the inside, on the periphery of the outside, at work in the hollow
spaces, or as justification for the hollowness opened up by the arbitrariness of
the graphemes, maintaining confusion between those neutral hollow spaces
traced without polarity, and other hollow spaces, other spaces between,
other antrums, other caverns (terms brought together by Jacques Derrida),"
fictitiously taking their places, closing them off: the hollows of articulation,
of the topology of the body, of the economy of specularization . . .
.. .Well, in another setting, perhaps, because nothing more can happen
in this one, created out of nothing by the alphabetic economy - without
gaze, without gesture, without voice, without erection. This alphabetic
economy, claiming to have regulated, through its arbitrariness, all
economic problems, jammed up the works once and for all. Imposing, for
economy's sake, cadavers or vampires (connected to so-called nature, or
presence, or source), as pawns, mediums, masks, tools, representatives - it
makes cadaver, vampire, pawn, tool, etc., out of the scribe, who plays the
scene, in an artificially framed setting, surrounded by a visually meaning-
less decor, of his or her own foreclosure. Who plays a game with real, and
not with plastic, knucklebones. Trying to resuscitate in this - fraudulent -
setting, the other lost scene that has been cut off, foreclosed by the
arbitrary cut of graphism.
Effective, no doubt: the schiz that you find everywhere, at least in

western culture. It even shows up in the utterance. As plan for its own
subversion? It might not be anything more than a sterilizing repetition of
subversion, all too fertile parapraxis, closing subversion down. Everyone is
invited to wear insignia signifying their mutilation. We are cut, cuttable,
guilty, split, divisible, etc. That doesn't mean castrated, of course. Castra-
tion is something else. However, the cut at work in these graphemes,12 that
is to say, these letters, is supposed to be able to suspend castration's power.
Steal it away, intercept it, cut off its articulation. We look forward to that
castration as if were reviviscence! Nostalgic reminiscence, put in place
where the cut took hold. The less it really works, the more it is imagined,
represented, spoken, imitated?13 That's the way it is. A question of
economics! Displaced —here to be understood as deported — into some
artificial frame, framing, or enframing, all inter-dicted (or inter-graphed)
tragedies, apologues, or fables come to be painted, projected, taken up.
Opening an always false - falsified because constructed - framework,
allowing them (only) to show themselves, provided there is an out-of-
frame, an off-stage.
This framework of the letter, whose after-effects are capable of consti-

tuting me as single, unique, distinct, distanced, empty form, form-
medium, projection screen for images, concepts, representations of all
kinds, etc., contravenes my positioning in the discourse of others, my
framing in or through others' discourse - or network of traces - that deter-
mines and over-determines my functioning as speaker, and even as actor,
imitator, repeater, writer, deferrer. This deferral might occur, despite the
graphematic mask, and its avatars, through appealing, or re-appealing, to
archi-wrking. It tries to force the barricade, the bars, of (alphabetic)
writing, through a play of spacings, scansions, splits, lines, unwritings,
overtakings or overthrowings, subversions of sur-faces or about-faces,
through broken alignment, multiplication of angles and deconstruction of
the architectonics of the (so-called) classical page of writing, through
parentheses, apostrophes, narratives, grafts, recurrences, enumerations, etc.,
insemination, or rather dissemination. However, this re-appeal, or this
appeal, to archi-writing stumbles against, breaks up on, the inert, arbitrary,
despotic armor of the writing we are talking about here - alphabetic
writing - instruments blocking archi-writing's process, its purpose.
Turning it away, knocking it off course, even neutralizing it, despite every-
thing, alphabetic writing prevents deferral, thenceforth deferred, in the
future, threatened in turn with some kind of hypostatic suspension, from
taking effect. Death, by these graphemes, comes too early, too quickly, all
at once, with no economy. And this death has always already taken place.
Even if you try to get the better of it, it has already produced asphyxiation,
paralysis, blindness, castration . . . cadaverization. It is as ghost - or soul, or

demon — that you will play it over, having already played it out in and
through the deadly experience.
Furthermore: the cut-outs and delimited spaces, topographical demarca-

tions, resulting from graphematic tracings, are competition for the frame-
works, topologies, scenic devices articulated in the crossing of the gaze and
the mirror. Or of gazes like mirrors, even blind or two-way mirrors. The
letter proposes or imposes its empty, deserted, undifferentiated, dead
support, skeleton, or framing, as aseptic substitute for all imaginable
stories - making deferral impossible. This substitution is too irreducibly
other, wholly other - with no possible play of same and other - to allow,
favor, or provoke real displacement. A necessary condition, which is not to
say sufficient, for the process of deferral. Calling for assistance, even thera-
peutic assistance, from this writing is teratogenic. Its conventional forma-
tion, arbitrary for everyone - one might as well say for no one - socializes
you only through infirmity, deformity, and the resurgence of mistreated,
unwelcome phantasms, shadows, monsters, devils.
Of course, there is fiction. This one, for example. But its articulation in
these fictitious graphemes means that you've been taken in more subtly,
more surreptitiously than you intended, wanted, or desired to take in or be
taken in. Graphematic fiction is the screen for your projections, your
programs. It covers your tracks, makes you forget (partly because it
remains), perverts you, while guaranteeing the norm, the normalcy, of
some 'symbolic castration.' It steers you into other imaginary circuits, into
the snare of fiction. It thwarts all economy, drowning it in pseudo-mirrors,
place-holders, representatives. Its trap is laid in the visibility of graphematic
tracings, which require the help of the gaze, etc., even though they present
nothing to see. The bait is tendered in their representation of your
phantasms, spectacles, scenes, whereas what these tracings really do is
eclipse them, no doubt calling up in the reader, phantasms, spectacles, and
scenes, through the play of differences, through calculation and replace-
ment of the dispossession, loss, and deviation resulting from the passage
through (alphabetic) writing-reading.
Of course, screens, instruments, tools, media, and even resistance are

necessary for any reinscription of traces or engrams. But you are always
already caught up (I'm not telling you anything you don't already know)
in mazes of mirrors, in veils, in appearances or in appearing. By the same
token, you have at your disposal (sometimes you have to make a real effort
to remember it) eyes, hands, mouths, genitals, as well as those of others, to
use for tools, instruments, media, or even resistance. Furthermore: you
have at your disposal your desire to serve as apparatus, machine, game

board, goal, and others' desire to serve as resistance. You can use them for
the work of archi-writing, for the play of deferral, recollection supposedly
still to come, twisted around an axis of the present. The present is
sometimes no more than the confrontation of your resistances and of
mine, of all current resistances. Graphematic beyond-time banishes them.
To gain what? Neither absent, nor present, nor representing, but
presenting itself as all of the above, the letter suspends them, defers them.
It grants you time, forgetfulness of time, theft of time, flight of time.
Infinite, unfinished time? In the infinitive.
BETWEEN IN PLAY OR THE PLAY OF BETWEEN 14
I fear we must come back to phonetic articulation. We are attempting the

impossible, of course. For phonetic articulation has no end to grab onto,
no handle to take hold of, no handholds - except the ones we ourselves
will make - no entry that has not allowed access without return, no exit.
Such is articulation.15 It cannot even be taken from an angle. Any joint
is already closed in its flexing - where it is jointed/joined without joining
or rejoining (together), where it bends, attaches, latches onto, or brings
close, with no chance of rebinding, reattaching, relatching onto, bringing
close again. It stays in gear, without shifting, in infinite process, neither
active nor passive. Without voice, aspect, or time . . . It is neither the one,
nor the other, it is that which prevents what is jointed from splitting apart,
and from locking together. It is the between in play, even imperceptible,
unimaginable - or precisely because imperceptible, unimaginable - that
can intervene as many times as you please; imperceptible attempts at
reiteration, at appropriation through reproduction, give rise to between,
call it, call it up, or recall it.
The between in play cannot be appropriated. It cannot be questioned.
Like life or death. The cause of all reprises, all repetitions, it cannot be
repeated, because it is not. Condition of all imprinting, it prints nothing
that can be noted. Motive for the not-ation, it slips away from its product,
is deducted from the expected profits. It incites an in-finity of not-ations,
and therefore all kinds of between: space opened up (ripped open)
between a so-called first time and its memory, between this time and the
other times, between this notation and all others, between the supported
and the supporting, between the noted and the notable, between the
manifest and the manifesting, etc. As many kinds of between as you please,
except the between in play in articulation. It forces all kinds of displace-
ments, supplements, spacings, intervals . . . and even the elaboration of
metaphors, and the establishment of all equivalences. But it is outside of
every transposition it makes possible, marked off from every result. It

remains without representation, without substitute in or through represen-
tation, no matter how many repetitions or recurrences are carried out, or
what process of recursivity is in operation.
The curious name of castration can be applied to maintaining, or to
putting back into play, the un-re-pre-sent-able of between, functioning as
copula for all articulation or rearticulation. Without present (or past, or
future), without form, without figure, without being, without substance.
Without - or better yet, neither the one, nor the other, or between - evokes
pedagogy, methodology, nostalgia or mask of a discourse postulating
negativity, only for those who would still want or need to be in the cavern,
the antrum^" or still want or need an eternal present, an infinite form, an
(if possible) absolute being, a preferentially immaterial substance. That
which confiscates, extrapolates, annuls, in some origin or some ending, all
contradiction, whose terms and motives one would do well to interrogate.
In the processes of language, and not only just in language, are affirmed
the intention and the desire, to master between games, cause of all liaisons,
copulations, associations, accords, combinations, groupings, etc. To get the
better of them through manipulations, multiplications (and also divisions,
and other calculations and operations), spacings, intervals, separations. The
strange part is that blanks or silences can still appear as almost real or
substantial, as beings in between, while, at the same time, they are split up
(and eventually sewn up), divided up, parcelled up, cut out, cut up. The
illusion, this time, is in interpreting them, reading them and writing them
as forms, as good form, great form, forming or re-forming on the quasi-
substantial white or silent background. Which suspends the game. At best,
some other limited and delimited game will be substituted for it, with
game pieces of different values, defined once and for all - king, queen,
pawn, madman . . . — with compartmentalized spaces, where the moves are
specified, regulated (once and for all), and are founded on principles (laid
down once . . . ) that cannot be ignored. The calculated and relatively
predictable - because reiterated - character of the plays limits the expected
stakes, the import of the game, and the pleasure. On occasion, this game
could be used to teach us to play the between game, which is much more
complex obviously, and never-ending. Because when we try our hand at
that game we find that no element is ever determined in any definitive
way. What is elementary or simple intervenes only as fiction that will have
to be unmasked over and over again, deconstructed. The same goes for the
always retraced frameworks, spaces, spacings, intervals, and also for the
displacements. Their regularity, stereotypicality, coding and privileges are
susceptible to innumerable remanipulations, deviations, detours, angles,
biases, trangressions, subversions, stories. If one risks it. Because what
happens afterwards - the 'afterplay' - cannot be foreseen, except if it is

confused with some other limited, delimited game. Between cannot be
taken through any kind of repetition or reiteration. One could even say
that the harder one tries to appropriate it, through reproduction or repeti-
tion, for example, the more one is taken in by the game, is caught up in
the game, puts into the game. The more one produces, the more efforts
one makes, endlessly, never slowing down, unless one gets mixed up with
some other game.
Unfortunately, we have been taught, from the very beginning of the
game and under constraint, to cheat at between games. We have even been
told that it is necessary, intrinsic, to their development and functioning.
Out of fear of losing, of losing ourselves, of being lost? Out of desire for
mastery, for definition, for representation? Or because we forget that not
all economies come from echo-nomists?
In short, we have cheated. We have cut out some units (so-called) - cut
up and not really cut out because between is not a cutting — fixed once
and for all, with which, thanks to which, we construct an infinity of other
units, and intervals, spacings, separations, etc., out of, and thanks to, the
first ones. With these units, we envelop between in a network, a net, to get
the better of it. Utopia sustained by one repetition (which is, strictly
speaking, impossible) producing oneness, even uniqueness; this fiction is
assisted by the obfuscation of that which is left over - that is, between and
its displacements - and by the deceptions of repetition, simulating replies,
responses, and redoublings. Mark (and not re-mark) drawn in black,
cutting up white, destined to last.
You have no doubt recognized the phoneme, this network erroneously

defined as one, even as unique, for the space of one repetition, network that
catches articulation in its nets. This trickery or feint, always already learned
by us, is assisted, made possible through the assistance, and not really the
substitution, of the letter. Single, unique, distinct, distanced, undifferen-
tiated form ..., it fictively represents the fiction it sustains of the Active
phoneme, or arbitrarily the arbitrariness of the arbitrary phoneme.
The privilege of this so-called — and so-called first — repetition, whose

illusion cannot be durably sustained without the complicity of alphabetic,
non-figurative writing, has jammed up the between game, cutting it off
from the between in play there.17 Fortunately, between slips out of all
networks, mesh, nets, but only after the imposition of a privileged split or
schiz that counters the efficacy of its displacements, productions of
spacings, intervals and separations, as well as its liaisons, copulations,
associations, accords, combinations, groupings, etc.
Actually, there is an analytic being between us, still susceptible to all
kinds of analyses - and by psychoanalysts too. Strange story! Let us bet it is

the unconscious that shows through; that's what happens every time we
cheat - and is it really as unavoidable as we claim it is? - at the between
game, substituting some other game for it.
XI
Sex as Sign
Speak. Say everything that comes to you. Just as it comes to you, right herey
now. Don't omit or exclude anything. And don V worry about contradictions or
conventions. Don't organize what you say. Etc.
That is what you undertake if you want to enter psychoanalysis. Which

means that you never will enter it, and also that you will never leave it, as
the joke goes. All the reiterated questions and inquiries about entering
psychoanalysis are really about something else. Because psychoanalysis
functions as a problematics of between, whether it is between two signifiers,
or a signifying between-two. Between is related to the question of entering;1
it intersects with entering from both the inside and the outside, making
dichotomies — the simplicity of dichotomies and divisions — obsolete: to
enter/to leave, inside/outside, interior/exterior, etc. The issue could provi-
sionally be formulated as follows: 'you will never enter analysis, because it
[the id], 2 was always already functioning, or it [the id] will have always still
functioned.' What is impossible in the fundamental rule is to say ity now.
Impossible to say it now, because the permission to speak, the incitement
to speak, and the perspective of speaking and saying everything - including
the imperfect, the future perfect, and their relationship3 - without interdic-
tion, paradoxically ends up in nothing to say, due to the repeal of the laws
structuring discourse (especially the law of non-contradiction). The rule
about saying everything re-establishes the inter-diction, the unpronounce-
able articulation of speaking, between that crosses from the inside to the
outside of discourse.
Impossible to say it now, because the inter-diction cannot be presented,
expressed as present, or as presence, cannot be uttered in any remark
proffered at present. The work - or play - of a machine, an instrument, is
irreducible to its formation, to what it formalizes. Which should not be
confused with one of its possible representations: the law (of functioning)
belongs to no one. The relations between inter-diction and the operation
of the law - the interdiction - evoke too much for us to evoke them only
a little. Let us just say that analysis - after the repeal of the one, at least as
far as discourse is concerned — brings us up against the stumbling-block of
the other.
It. Or it is (not). If analysands are able to formulate their request as a
wish or plan to enter analysis, it is by way of a metaphor whose terms they

would be at a loss to designate or even point to, and the same for that asI
like intervening between them, the process or procedure of substitution
having taken place in the transfer/transference from the one to the other.
The functioning of between-two, irreducible to it, or to it is (not), will
actually come to pass in analysis. In other words, the patient will have to
shuttle back and forth from between inter-vening, coming into, her or his
desire to enter, to between at play in the functioning of language and of
discourse, as well as in what is designated as object or project of desire.
The goal his or her remarks lead up to by the back way. The metaphorical
guarantee will, through the very impossibility of saying everything, and
therefore of entering analysis, be deconstructed, unveiled as illusion
masking the inter-diction, which then returns to its function of produc-
tion.
The impossibility of saying it now, particularly foregrounded by the

'fundamental rule,' and by all kinds of so-called benevolent (?) neutrality
(to be understood in its etymological sense) is the linchpin of the economy
of enunciation. However, since enunciation itself does not consist of it or
of it is (not), one can discover it only through its effects, its productions,
transformations, displacements, representations. Or in the resistances and
defenses elaborated to veil the undesignatable in speaking. These resistances
or defenses show up not only in the discourse of the analysand, but also
almost ineluctably in analytic theory. One finds in them the economic
relation between what is named or affirmed, even unwillingly, as interdic-
tion, and what must be seen as inter-diction, including negation or foreclo-
sure.
ENUNCIATING MACHINERY
Nothing is authorized here but the order of the word. This is what marks
off the analytic field. Nothing else happens there, at least nothing else is
explicitly permitted. We have nothing to say to each other, to debate, to
plan together, no defined work to carry out. We will not take each other
as confidante, and will tell each other no stories. Nor will we exchange any
remarks, conversation where the utterance of one of us might serve as
pretext, as object to understand, close in, circumvent, reject . . . for the
other. In sum, we have nothing at all to do with each other. And yet . . .
So what are you, what are we, going to say? Nothing, in some ways, except
produce the very modes of the economy of enunciation: of all enunciation,
of yours, and in particular of ours, and the conditions of possibility of the
structuring of all utterance. The merciless character of the analytic frame-
SEX AS SIGN 139
work or scenario requires it, through suspension of, parentheses around, all
that is usually given as the foundation of discourse: referent or communic-
able object, coherent utterance, presence of the locutor-addressee, specific
situation, common language, etc. With all of this suspended, the
functioning of the machine itself, the enunciating machinery, is uncovered.
Curious, complex machine, always already programmed - and a multiple
programming.
Programmed first of all by the irreducibility of its very production.
Thus, the fact that it is sexed, and determined in its sex, constrains, in
complex ways, the polarization of its circuits and its sign, opens up possibi-
lities of copulation, conjunction, intersection, exclusion, etc., and their
retroactive effects.
However, the fact that it has a sex does not exclude all sorts of other
properties, and therefore capabilities. This machine also has noses, mouths,
eyes, ears, and hands, for example. It comprises various possible entries or
exits of interchangeable use, contiguous, concurrent, interfering with each
other, implicating each other, excluding each other, etc.
Furthermore, a neuter code has been assigned to it: a language
belonging to neither sex. We are supposedly programmed by a language
foreign to sex, even though it includes masculine and feminine connota-
tions, even though sex is reinscribed in it. This coding functions only as a
play of differences, a system of references, with mechanisms of associations,
conjunctions, substitutions, etc. Nonetheless, these differences are supposed
to be neuter. One could get lost in it, or lose one's head... . Which has
certainly happened. The functional confusion functions rather well, in
theory and in practice. Not without effects, of course!
It must be added that language, neuter in dictionaries and in theories,
has been attributed to the mother tongue, or the language of the mother,
with its sexual and social determinants, with its multiple and overdeter-
mined economies. That's obviously somewhat less neuter already.
Especially since we are no longer in a network, or a net, of in-finite refer-
ences, having no organizing center, but rather in an interlacing of threads
whose weave follows a certain pattern. It is structured around supports and
a center, despite its gaps, and has defined and delimited links. This
language of the mother functions as first glossary and grammar, thesaurus
(or dictionary of one tongue), 'treasure of signifiers' (Lacan), whose circula-
tion will be finite, closed off, if it is not plugged into other circuits or
networks relaying it and ensuring innumerable, determined, vectored refer-
ences. Other languages, or rather other speech, must inter-vene, putting
neither the one nor the other, the work of difference, back into play,
through articulation of that mother tongue with another, with its other,
both same and different. This process is always already vectored, and
although permitting in-finite references from signifier to signifier, it is not
the double of the 'neuter' language (dead language?) everybody supposedly

speaks, codified in the dictionaries and encyclopedias used in schools. The
latter comes to exist at the intersection of two or of several languages, or of
types of speech; it is a question of life and death, depending on whether
the code is imposed legally as deadly counterpoint to a confusion of
languages, or types of speech, or on whether it takes hold as abuse of
metalanguage, or on whether one of the languages seizes on neutrality in
order to enact lawmaking syntax, or . . . on whether it functions as
horizon, as double background, providing the stakes for all language and
speech.
Speech - at least the one explicitly prescribed in analysis — privileges the
voice, whether it uses the voice as instrument of (re)production, or
(re)inscription, as vehicle, or as object, or whether - even unbeknownst to
its producer - it is subjugated to voice, since language, even consigned to
writing in codes, dictionaries, or grammars, is dependent on the phone,
subservient to phonetics. Everything must be done through the voice, or at
least recalculated with respect to its economy. However, the voice,
although marked by the one who speaks, is already fabricated product,
irreducible to the one producing it or to the vocal machinery. This can be
seen in its specific characteristics: accent, amplitude, range, inflection,
intensity, timbre, volume . . . contiguity connecting discourse to producer,
who is frustrated by the loss of the voice as voice, effected in its passage
through the networks of language and speech. Even though linguistic
articulation is dependent on the phone, it cannot be appropriated to it; no
language, in speech, takes up all phonic virtualities. They require an oper-
ation whose sedimentation is voice; rearticulating phonic articulation, this
operation leaves the voice left over. The voice participates in the character-
istics of air, matter whose properties should be recapitulated in an interpre-
tation of its economy, of its relationship to its other implied functions (for
example, its role as medium, as mediation, as intermediary), as well as the
effects of vocal displacement, or of vocal substitution, in the analytic
protocol.
METAPHORIZING PRESCRIBED
Speak. Say everything that comes to you, just as it comes . . . What a wager!
How to speak of the multiple stakes (here, of necessity, diminished), and,
above all, of the play of their articulation: between sex and voice, and all
their possible displacements or substitutions; between phonic articulation
and phonetic, or linguistic, articulation; between 'neuter' code and mother
tongue, not to mention the intervals between-two, neither one nor the
other, that regulate their particular and shared syntaxes; between speech
SEX AS SIGN 141
produced and speech imputed, assignation in and through speech and its
rearticulations (articulation between history and repetition, history as
repetition, and repetition as history); between emission and reception,
emission between reception and reception; between the same and other
(notably within the scene between emission and reception, eventually
turned into drama or conflict between sender and receiver), the other as
same and the same as other; between to mean and to say, the always inade-
quate realization of the program and its retroactive effects, the imperfect
and the future perfect; etc. Many different types of between in play, plus
the play of their articulation: that which is impossible to say, in analysis or
anywhere else.
Or perhaps only through a metaphoric turn, or detour, or bypass?

Through abuse of metaphors? Or through what is erroneously called
metaphors. No question here of ideas re-presented by the sign of another
idea, by virtue of a certain conformity or analogy, in order to produce an
effect of language, to speak more correctly, more clearly, more nobly, etc.
In analysis (or anywhere else, for that matter) metaphoric practice cannot
be understood as a simple stylistic procedure, unless stylistic practice is
subverted and reframed. In stylistics, metaphor translates, through an
obligatory detour, the aporia of speaking with respect to the articulation,
to the unrepresentable (inarticulatable) functioning of the copula, of sex
(of style, on the condition that it write with a stylus, a plume, or a sex).4
Which also means of copulation, or play (of) between. Metaphorizing
translates, through a show of force prescribed in analysis, sexual play into
discursive practice, thanks to a resemblance or an analogy that can only be
syntactical, and not thematic or related to content. The latter refer, or are
referred through interpretation, to some thematics, some sense or significa-
tion, that cannot be spoken or decreed.
But this transfer, or this transference, is not without risks. If the psycho-
analyst listens too complacently or too attentively, or if she or he is too
ignorant of, or deaf to, the turns of language, the jouissance of the analy-
sand will be suspended in that listening, with no way out. If metaphor is
heard as metaphor, as terminus and not as passage through the text of what
cannot be spoken, of what is impossible to say (now), if it is ratified and
interpreted only as linguistic process, simple mechanism within language
or metalanguage, and not as what always subverts its non-contradiction, its
coherence, its concordance, its identities, its accords, its differences (coded,
neuter), etc., and questions them, then the syntax, as well as the syncope,
of copulation are ossified into linguistic copula. They are immobilized in
assertion, in its eventual suspension, sometimes in its negation or denial.
'Is that links analysand to his or her discourse or text, speaker to utterance,
a subject to its attribute(s) unequivocally, even transitively, or indeed
symmetrically. The play of as/like, or, better still, of as if, is a play of

multiple mirrors, pseudo-mirrors — unless we rethink the structure of the
mirror, because there is, of course, no question here of specular doubling
through simple surface reflections in the face-to-face, but rather the
illusion of a possible translation of one into the other through repetitions
in mirrors of all kinds, as //^obliquely, from an angle, in an almost circular
way, etc., mirrors re-inter-vening where terms refer to each other; it is play
between, the stakes in metaphor (or for the analyst, in all enunciating
practice, all enunciation), being, through listening or interpretation,
included/understood in the process of discourse, as a simple, supposedly
analyzable relation between two signifiers. And not, for example: signifying
between-two.
Then trope seizes upon tropism. The turns of language capture, in their
obligatory detours and in their relations between terms, the termless oper-
ations, articulations of the sexes. The movement toward the (other) term
found in style, with its character of (positive) finality, teleology, adequacy
or inadequacy, correctness, truth, coherence, elevation, etc., inappropriately
relays and even retroactively regulates (in this context one might examine
the edicts of proper morality and their structurally perverting character)
the tropism, the tension, the erection, and the scenario of sex. It also
underlies in similar, but in even subtler, ways - that phallocentrism in its
complicity with logocentrism, and a certain structure of mirroring that
privileges the surface and the face-to-face, and at the same time, a certain
problematics of form, of phallomorphism, of castration, have kept hidden,
even foreclosed - the illusion of all substitutions for any, or for the,
hymen:5 stopper, line, between, antrum, cavern, all at once.6 The final
term including all the rest of them in its antrum, cave or womb.
That is not to say that linguistic metaphor does not represent a displace-
ment of the hymen. It even presupposes that displacement can become its
unique placement.7 If one, as, or as if, obligated, forgets its detours and
contours. Metaphor, sanctioned as such, understood as term, or as discur-
sive process, traps it (in a 'this is that' where subject, predicate and copula
must be erased in order to resuscitate as/like or as if — process without a
name), extrapolates it, per-verts it, fragments it, disintegrates it, fractures it
into associations of signifiers: pieces of mirrors, of reflections, broken and
glued back together. Or else, it is dissected by the metaphoric practice of
the analyst or of analytic theory, inter-sected by the conscious or uncon-
scious conception of the practitioner, fragmented into nosological classifi-
cations, caught up in synchronic taxonomies, normative genetic
systematizations. Metaphoric doublings unquestioned as to their proce-
dure, economy or effects.
Without doubt, the analytic scene is complex. Metaphor is never
produced there - or anywhere for that matter - as one, simple and unique.
SEX AS SIGN 143
Analytic practice is fortunate in that way. Metaphorizing is to be under-

stood there as the play of sex in language, as well as, though not in simple
reciprocity, the play of language in sex, but its evolutions are multiply
overdetermined, intertwined, entangled. Sex is always inter-sexuality whose
synchronic functioning marks its sedimentations, just as language is always
inter-textuality with diversified plots, formations and stories.
The intervention of sex in language, and the displacement of sex within
and through language, has always already taken place. Metaphoric oper-
ation thus composes, thus reassembles, a plurality of relations and a
plurality of types of between from across time, in addition to the play of
their articulation within a transfer, or a transference, toward another place,
or term, presumed able to take them in.
METAPHOR INTERPRETED
It is into this scene, or this score, of metaphor, that interpretation worms

its way. It loosens, without breaking into, without cutting into, the tight-
ness of its knots, the way they come together or close up into one single
point, supposedly final, of multiple relations. Operating through connec-
tions linked back to other, same and other, chains, through transfers to
different circuits branching off, joined, to various networks, and their
respective syntaxes, interpretation emphasizes, through allusion, the artifice
of their confusion, convergence and assimilation. The latter are made
possible by an affinity, by some economy of kinship, not excluding differ-
ences, gaps, intervals, differences in gaps and intervals, differences between
so-called terms, as well as between always already plural combinations,
groupings and operations in always already metaphorical chains, related to
each other through metaphor. Resemblance, or analogy - if it is taken as
such (and such a term) - tends to cover over, to recover (?), in its loops,
rings and envelopings, all types of play between, and their ordering, since
resemblance's aim is the limit of the series: the biggest, the strongest, the
highest, the truest, the most natural, etc., but also their variations and
determinations, through the anticipation, or foresight, of their recurrence,
and also through mastery of the gap between the plan and its possible
repercussions, between the aim and its deferred action, its retroactive
effects, between the imperfect and the future perfect. Etc. Sex represents its
operations, as well as their suspension, summary, resorption, into a
'correct' (just, true, natural, strong, elevated . . . ) term, a term as right as
anything, the best, the most sublime, with no possible response. The last
word! Without approximate repetitions, reproductions. Play of the same
and other. Positing the other out of inability to repeat the same, which,
here, is the simple reiteration or the return of the end reabsorbing the
origin, encompassing it, enveloping it, as well as their gaps, and their
tropisms, and the history of their relations, under the pretext of the same.
Which could be translated, out of facility for and indulgence in final
metaphors, as life is death — and not life and death are linked through
comparison. We can thus extrapolate the function of as/like, of between-
two, of the waiting, the uncertainty, the doubt and the unforeseen of the
relation between necessity and chance, between tropism and aphanisis,
between illusion and unveiling, unveiling as illusion, the hymen as illusion
of unveiling, as unveiling of illusion, etc. It is relegated to an eternity
neither fortunate nor unfortunate, removed from contingencies, from the
interminable games of sex and their polarity. The latter are transferred, in
an (acceptable) metaphor, an (acceptable) metaphoric practice, deviated
and merged, into sublime terms. Into sublimation? Who knows? Read for
yourselves, right here, the risks of letting oneself get carried away by
metaphor, even, or especially, for an analyst.
Because the analyst has no other business but that. All enunciating
practice, all enunciation, is already metaphorical for her or for him; all
utterances are referred to a network of asllike, as if, which wind up and
unwind its threads, which detach it from 'the' 'present' 'good' 'sense,' or
good sense. It is not about substituting an other for it - we have to
remember - but about articulating that fragment to the text, to texts, and
inter-texts. Which calls into question, by the very same act, the simple
character of the present, or of simple presence. Metaphoric process has
already divided them, even when, verbal, it affects the present. Equivocal
time, in any case, that marks division, distinction and the instant, or devel-
opment and duration. It plays on continuous and discontinuous. Ambig-
uous time of enunciation, privileged time of fiction, it takes up and
displaces fission? It eludes interference from precise temporal landmarks,
supposedly exact reporting, supposedly true narrative, the simple future or
the past definite, while resorting to the imperfect, the future perfect, and,
of course, to the infinitive, to participles: tenses where we note the inter-
vention - to have taken, or will have taken, place - of as/like or as if in
order to re-suscitate. Which at one and the same time interprets the figura-
tive, Active - by process - character of the relation; suspends assertion and
simple opposition between affirmation and negation, and all of their
dichotomous re-presentations; defers judgment and the unequivocal attri-
bution of qualities. Which calls into question the very existence of a deter-
mined, determinable relation between terms, the simple and innocent
functioning (except in fiction, the covering over fission) of the copula, of
copulation, and of their displacements, and therefore of metaphor. Never
simply good or bad, true or false, correct or incorrect, right or wrong, high
or low, natural or artificial, light or dark, it remains as neither one nor the
other, unavoidable obstacle of any relation, whatever the illusion of a
SEX AS SIGN 145
consciousness that claims to be good and true and just and noble and clear
and coherent . . . the guardian of good sense, proper meaning. As if sense
or meaning could be looked after, or looked at! Tropism carries on
dissimulated, under wraps, in veiled terms, through turns, turning back
and turning round, perhaps - tropes, as they say. But it fades away as soon
as anyone tries to zero in on it, give it a face, assign it a term (either final
or original), implicate it in a statement, make a judgment about it. It
exceeds or escapes from any predicate. All formulas or formulations are
inadequate to it, because adequacy results from a logic, a logos, to which it
cannot be reduced, and in which it moves about only with difficulty, and
wanders without end but not without loss, if one tries to seduce it there,
wait for or hear it there, grab onto it there, envelop or shut it in there.
That would violate it or steal its play of as/like, as if, play between, over-
determining the space between two signifiers, and concealing the sham of
all terms or endings. Which can happen due to an alleged knowledge and
practice of unveiling, notably of the ending, by whomever reserved to
himself or herself what is undoubtedly the most interesting attribute of
what is designated 'as' God, whose veils, we must acknowledge, have not
yet all been lifted. True, the trap is laid, seizing on fiction, its process, and
its final metaphors, in order to analyze them.
Curious word - analysis - for qualifying a practice whose elemental
nature is questionable, always already Active reprise of fission. It can only
reckon with this unnameable sham: through (re-)exhibiting its economy,
its turns, turnings back, turnings round, its retroactive effects, its games
irreducible to the logic of non-contradiction. Such is the syntax of tropes,
the economy of tropism, of its operations, never to be taken simply as is,
as terms to accept or to judge as good terms, true, right, etc. That would
risk cutting them off short, by eliminating their after-effects, whose traces
must be recorded, reread and re-marked by interpretation.
METAPHORIC PRACTICE, W O R D PLAY
Sometimes it resorts to plays on words, reminders of relations, relations

between included in the metaphoric term, revealing its own workings, 'as
if in reverse. Metaphoric practice re-suscitates comparison, and emphasizes
the particularity and singularity of distinctive witticisms within transference
- always complex and working toward some putting together, some
bringing together, in a package that can take in, harbor, and enclose it. It
dissimulates under cover of this vestment, investment, its differences and
articulations, and all of those maintained with other witticisms. The play
on words makes us burst into laughter as it bursts open the simplicity, the
exhaustiveness, the coherence of the form, formula or formulation, taking
off its mask of good term(s), elevated, true, correct, clear, noble . . .
sublime term(s). Sublimation(?) disguising and concealing the compromise.
This burst of laughter is not without economic effects, without repercus-
sions on value and sense, suddenly devalued. Not without resistance,
sometimes! The placement and displacement of investments are revealed,
at least apparently, as precarious and without decidable plan or realization;
half returns can often be preferred to full returns. But what difference does
it make if in the meantime we enjoyed it? Flash of wit, or discharge, it
comes as an additional bonus, authorizing new placements and displace-
ments.
That economics is disorienting. It is difficult to conceive. That type of
expenditure outwits thought, or at least a certain form of thought. Its
present form? Word play confounds the confusion of plans, programs,
projects, times, aspects, and voices, or rather re-marks them with its
syntax. It emphasizes the equivocal, but reveals it as inevitable, constitutive
of the very process of thought: always already a rearticulation of intersexu-
ality and intertextuality, of their fictive composition, even in its most
elemental forms and formations - words, syllables, and phonemes, for
example. Word play reveals their complexity and ambiguity, the artificiality
of their intervention in a linear chain. It exposes, insofar as it is presented
as utterance, or text, actually taking place, right then, as place-holder in
the process of enunciation, the traits or the hidden faces of all figures,
figuration, the mandate of all representation, the as/like or as if of all utter-
ance, of all the articulations or the junctions of its development. It unveils
the enactment of metaphor, of transfer, of transference and of displace-
ment through and by the copula, the copulation, in a sign that represents,
recalls, certain of its traits, so that it can work like a sign. Word play
emphasizes that semaphoric function, replays it, as if in reverse, preventing
it from freezing up into in-signia, final term, ending, last word.
THE ECONOMY OF THE STAKES . . .
Maybe that is the source of the interest in metaphor in the history of style,
and in psychoanalysis, and also perhaps the ambiguity of the subordination
of the one to the other, that repeats like an edict the subordination within
metaphor. It is not the most eminent, the noblest, the bravest, etc., under
which all the other tropes would have to be classified, or filed; nor is it the
most natural one on which all the others would have to be based. Its
demonstrated, codified importance runs the risk of compromising what is
important in it. The distances between the lowest and the highest, the
deepest and the most elevated, the first and the last, the weakest and the
strongest, the most natural and the most artificial . . . function as that
SEX AS SIGN 147
which is in play or at stake - if they are read as already being metaphors,

as being that which activates the transfer, the transference and the passage.
As being that for which, through which, and between which, the id, or the
metaphor, passes, or comes to pass. Metaphor must remain a passageway,
without resolution or resorption of the difference between the terms of its
recurrence.
Even their direction cannot be foreseen; the series does not move toward
a simple reduction of or a simple increase in the gap. The variables impli-
cated are complex in number and quantity, and linked according to a
function whose form is complex. Complex operation of metaphorizing
that, while attempting to represent certain vector(s), and to give form to
their size, direction, and sense, principally reveals their degree of liberty. It
posits new relations, notably between dependence and independence, and
re-suscitates those that are bound or rebound to that function or
functioning. It calls up or recalls further operations, comparisons, transfers,
and transferences, both the same and different.
The elaboration of the stakes is never-ending. Except for whomever
would imagine he or she could resolve it with indices, assign it terms,
circumscribe or circumvent its economy, assimilate it in some way to a
constant: complex x, symptom j / , structure a . . . forgetting the wager, the
historical wager, for example, that permits its utterance, its formation(s),
and the effects of its placements and displacements, always in progress. No
one stops or regulates its economy. The most effective metaphors take or
make their own time, even if one tries to fix them in time, use them to
subjugate time, getting caught up in the process of metaphor that gets over
on time.
But the fact that we take it, take it on, or get taken, does not prevent the
game from going on somewhere else, where there is still play. Where, not
taking any metaphor seriously, which means not taking ourselves seriously,
we can still play with it, play between, play with, or dupe, each other. All
types of between, that no element and no relation between elements can
determine, except by way of fiction sustained. That capture would check
the play of the copula; the grip, the connection between, would interrupt
its work of articulation, always to be restarted.
Which is to say, referring only to a certain functioning of the copula
and certain turns of metaphor, that no utterance can reabsorb all that is at
stake in enunciation, no text all that is at stake for the scribe, no figure all
that is at stake in figuration, and no representation can entirely account for
its mandate, etc.
No substantive can fulfill the function of a verb. It is always already a
sign — made into a sign — an attribute, dependent. However many transfor-
mations come together to give it its form, its definition, or perhaps because
of this series, this multiplicity of operations, it evokes more than a verb,
several relations and their articulation, whose repetition it will prescribe in

the unfolding of discourse. This reverses the roles for whomever does
nothing more than read the distribution present in the utterance, the
actual statement. What must be questioned is the complex and sedimented
elaboration of the subject, its relation to the predicate, their retroactive
effects. Furthermore, the present (tense) of the utterance itself, its intent,
its direct meaning or direct address, must be questioned, for what it really
does is transpose, transfer, and displace, and this transposition, transfer/
transference, and displacement have always already taken place through the
intermediary, furtive no doubt, of as/like or as if, of metaphorizing. This
present is only like a present. And its metaphor has no import except
insofar as it conceals the process. It consists, precisely, of feigning, of
behaving as if sex, the sign, or the sign of sex, could become or simply be
a sign. And it never appears except as sign, made into sign, making like a
sign, through various materials, techniques, and machineries. Metaphor
claims to transgress the intervention of the sign, to cut through its materi-
ality, as well as to transmute the materiality of sex into a sign whose
comparison recalls the irreducible difference of materials supposedly in
presence, of their properties, resistances, treatments . . .
. . . HAVING T O RECKON WITH THE INCALCULABLE

OPERATIONS OF THE MIRROR
As/like maintains the gap, emphasizes it even as it tries to reduce or

reabsorb it. It is a reminder of the play of mirrors permitting analogy,
relation, congruence, interference, and even assimilation, through relays,
reflections, derivations, deviations, refractions, diffractions, etc., that have
already transformed, treated, and replaced them, notably as forms, both
the same and different, and appearances, or appearing.
Metaphorizing has to reckon with this quasi-morphology, these quasi-
morphemes (not necessarily linguistic), has to compromise with them,
even as it contravenes them. Its operation is not so simple. It transgresses,
as in transfixing and outlining the form, or rather its formation, while it
represents another form as present. It simulates crossing through mirrors -
or rather recrossing - and their total transparency, their transitivity, the
possibility of transpiercing. In fact, it displaces the mirrors' intervention,
re-marks it, plays with their properties, particularly their reflective proper-
ties, with their brilliance, with the opacity of their backing, with the dispo-
sition of their multiple, multiplied surfaces, placed now at an angle to
allow the ricochet, now face to face to measure the angles of divergence,
inscribed or circumscribed at a distance in order to fix the facets, and
especially to concentrate their energy, and now introduced, in volume,
SEX AS SIGN 149
into the other term - supposedly big, strong, voluminous and powerful
enough . . . to take everything in. This concrete, natural, sensible term . . .
will from now on include the mirror, its powers of abstraction, but also, in
a more complex way, of idealization.
And the game is over. Here, they say, is matter that is animated,
elevated above its origin, that becomes transparent, coherent, sublime
reflection . . . sublimated? While remaining natural, of course. Or else, the
harmonious transformation or assumption of matter by the spirit, the idea,
thanks to the specifically human tool that is language, etc. Or rather,
tropism that tries to locate, relocate, its sense, sometimes its good sense, in
re-presenting (itself), in doubling (itself), (as) its own cause, origin, agent,
marks and insignia, in a figure where it makes (itself) a sign. Trying to
outplay, or at least to play, the intervention of the mirror, of mirrors,
whose economy is too complex for it to reckon with, or foresee its effects,
repercussions, ricochets, or pick up on those that have already taken place.
Thus, one cannot decide the term(s), no matter how appropriate it
appears or feels, or they appear or feel, of his or her own transference, nor
decide that it will not take place or has not already taken place - had not
or will not have taken place - within that term precisely, or in some other,
perhaps judged inappropriate. These terms themselves are caught up in a
play of repeated reflections, refractions, etc. It is not possible to anticipate
the turn its displacement, always in progress, will have taken. Transporting
even a shard of mirror - metaphorizing plays with the fragments of the
mirror, but also with the relation of the fragments to the whole of the
mirror - into a figure makes it begin to shimmer. It shines and dazzles.
One sees nothing else; one sees nothing. One feels (oneself) no more.
Tropism, seduced, will depend on that ideal, if one does not remind it of
as/like, as if like present, like presence, like in presence, like being, or to
be, in the presence of, etc., developing, deploying, unveiling (interminable
operation), the complexity of the go-between of as/like or as if that gets over
on the sign.
Other multiple, contradictory effects, never simple or unique, will have
also been produced. Even a little piece of mirror inserted into a so-called
natural environment recalls its fissionable character, and fission, and there-
fore the risk of explosion, of shattering, but also its precariousness, the
provisional nature of its volume and its suture, the possibility of throwing
it out or throwing it back — or up. Especially since mirrors are rather
indigestible.
Furthermore, the nature of this contribution, or relation, is postponed,
along with all the comparisons and substitutions it undertakes to resusci-
tate. Not to mention that the introduction of a reflector denatures in
unforeseeable ways. You have at least to reckon with reflexivity and reflec-
tion that absorb and deflect the rays, and since this is an already much
used reflector, with the relation of its reflections to new incidences. So

there are all kinds of relations of angles, of intensities, of meanings . . . that
are not easy to guess. The transference in the mirror implies many calcula-
tions. And we have not finished, perhaps never will have finished, either
enumerating and elaborating the multiplicity of the operations in play, or
defining the singularity of their science. Analytic practice has not fixed its
mathematics. No more than those of writing, of enunciation or of
metaphorizing.
T O FUNCTION/TO FEIGN
We already know that it must have something to do with fiction — and

therefore fission - with duplicity, duplication, repetition, representation,
and recurrence, but also with displacement, ^rformation, detour, develop-
ment, and with transference, transposition, ^ranrfbrmation, etc. We get
only a glimpse of the complexity, number, power and indices . . . of these
operations, but we cannot ignore that they are all about numbers, a
relation of numbers; in representation at least two. Which is not to say a
return to simple dichotomy. Division — scission — is only one type of
relation among others, and division into two a type of division requiring
only one difference. Furthermore, dividing up a relation, or more precisely
a function, results only in another function, in the modification of
relations between variables, and not in their disjunction. As for the
variables, in any case for our purposes, they represent and refer to a
plurality of irreducible functions. Beside the fact that a variable never has
definite, definitive or unique . . . value, form, gender, number, aspect. Just
go ahead and try to resolve this issue.
For example: 'say it (is or is not) now'. All you can do is simulate.
Which is the same thing as starting to count, to take into account, the
difference between what you can say, or rather feign to say, and what you
will not say. In fact, it is impossible to say everything at once, because
everything cannot be said; the calculation of what is at stake and in play is
too complex to solve at present; it is impossible to determine its form or
formulation in definitive terms, especially not here and now; the formula
is (undoubtedly) not representable, particularly not in these signs, nor in
linear fashion, etc. All you can do is play, represent, figure, interpret, a
difference whose sum, nature, gender/genre, species and meaning (more?
or less?) you do not exactly know, any more than you know the divisions,
separations, or transformations, your moves, or the interventions of others,
or their interpretations, will bring about in it . . .
High stakes of enunciation, of the analytic match, from which no
category can escape,8 that plays out between them all, without its being
SEX AS SIGN 151
possible to analyze or break it down into components, or place a cash value

on it. Metaphoric operation applies to all forms of speech and to all
elements of language, unlike other tropes. It includes and confounds their
division, their differences, but cannot itself be reduced to different terms.
It always operates between them. It elaborates the copula, working as a
verb, and all the verbs of the utterance can do is re-mark its modes or
aspects, like a verb that would mean, count, enumerate, measure, link,
move from one number to another (a number from which one can deduct
the previous one), or connect; or they can estimate and (re-)establish
relations between numbers; or make connections and correlations through
identities, differences, divisions; or attribute values, quantities, properties
. . . to numbers, or rather to relations between numbers. (These numbers
being already functions, relations between functions.) Metaphorizing acts
like a verb that means to function. This function, this functioning, of the
copula is unrepresentable given the number of variables. What can be
done is to specify, through fiction, a possible or probable relation, in order
to estimate the values in play, the direction of their progression, their
separation from the excessiveness of the infinite. Because these different
unrepresentable variables run the risk of merging together.
F (METAPHOR): F (METONYMY). F (SYNECDOCHE) -+ oo
Barely conceivable scene of metaphor - of enunciation, of analysis, of

writing — where one would appreciate some landmarks: designation of the
author, the agent, the object; sharing out of roles, acts; naming of actors,
knowing how many of them there are; indications of place and time;
(re)discovery of the setting and the decor; study of the materials, the way
they will be treated; an account of the instrument, means, execution, and
effects; in sum, a staging and a representation. That will require resorting
to other figures and figurations, other functions, relations, and connections
that will indicate, index, the ones in play in the metaphoric process, in the
copula. They will take the place of indices, signs, traces, marks, and
ciphers, and decompose the function of the copula, reduce the number of
variables (functions, actually) it requires, for an — impossible - representa-
tion. They respond to the '(it is) like that' like a sign, of metaphor, with a
series of questions asking for an accounting. First of all: what (is />)?; a
question whose insistence continues to constrain the programming of
utterance; and also: who? what? why? for whom? in what? by what? how?
how many? when? where? etc. These questions are correlated with the
position of the terms of the utterance, with their determinations, defini-
tions, materializations, and modes, with the particularity of their interde-
pendencies and associations.
Through the same process, they are associated with all representations of
transference, of its protagonists, of their assessment of their respective attri-
butes, of the itemization of their interventions, and their causes, effects,
and stories; and with all representations and representatives of its
economy. The latter are produced as efforts to escape from what is played
out on the psychoanalytic scene, or as attempts to attend (to) its
functioning, if need be through imitations of displacements of time, place,
and actors, supposedly other, since carried over from contexts where it
would have all already taken place. Analytic <subjects> leave the scene in
order to be present at their own spectacle, or in order to comment on it
from the wings; which eclipses them. They try to make the process
explicit, through explanations and analyses, through (re)division of their
acts into Actively elementary, separable operations, and through the figura-
tion of their terms and stakes.
Which implies — to use a certain terminology, which is not to say a
certain interpretation - resorting to the functions of metonymy and synec-
doche, to the products of their processes. Designating the supposed causes,
effects, origins, instruments, places, signs . . . of the operation of the
copula; which would determine, situate, activate, execute its tropism, pro-
jection, play between, but also what they are applied to, what they aim at,
point at and eventually transform: matter(s), genre(s)/gender(s), species,
individual(s), number(s), and relation(s) of the part with the whole.
These figures distinguish the so-called terms, disjoin the relations
between them to re-articulate them in a representable, sayable, enactable
way. That does not happen without effects, without loss. There is no
doubt that loss can become a function of production. The fact remains
that its economy can be calculated only with difficulty. Because it tends,
for all operations, toward infinity.
XII
Idiolect or Other Logic
THE CORPUS
Fifty respondents were recorded at the Hopital Sainte-Anne, and the

recordings were transcribed. The corpus consists of 600 typewritten pages,
and includes spontaneous and semi-induced (questions about reasons for
hospitalization, professional and family life, etc.) language, and responses
to various exercises that can be analyzed to show how schizophrenics use
language and linguistic forms: exercises calling for morphological or lexical
negative transformations, for synonyms, for word definitions, for sentence
production, etc. Certain of the exercises were also given to senile dementia
patients and to different types of aphasics (cf. the work of H. Hecaen, J.
Dubois, P. Marcie, etc.), permitting comparative studies among the
different populations.
The corpora of schizophrenic language were classified in three ways.
(1) By respondent: for each respondent, I grouped together the

transcriptions of the spontaneous and semi-induced language, the results of
the linguistic exercises, and any recordings that had taken place. This
allowed a certain number of comparative analyses among different types of
language production, different types of interlocutory situations, and
different stages of the illness, and its chemotherapeutic and psychothera-
peutic treatment, etc.
(2) By type of exercise: the results of the linguistic exercises were

grouped together, as were the spontaneous and semi-induced utterances, in
order to carry out comparative statistical studies, either within the schizo-
phrenic group, or between the schizophrenics and the other groups of
respondents (normal or pathological).
(3) In tables: the corpora were organized into tables for clearer reading
of the results. The tables constitute an initial interpretation.
ANALYSIS OF RESULTS
CHAPTERS ON THE LINGUISTIC EXERCISES
In the study of schizophrenic language, each chapter, of which I will give only
a resume, includes the corpus and the analysis of results for each exercise.
The chapters are organized as follows:
• rationale for the exercise

• ways of presenting the instructions
• corpora collected
• tables
• analysis of results
• interpretation of types of errors.
The chapter headings:

1 negative transformation exercise: morphological and lexical (polite/
impolite; true/false)
2 lexical micro-system exercise: kinship terms
3 paraphrasing of proverbs exercise
4 synonyms exercise
5 word definition exercise (substantives, verbs, adjectives)
6 shifters exercise
7 sentence production exercise.
Analysis of results from these different exercises confirms certain hypoth-

eses, and allows formulation of several others, concerning spontaneous
language. The goal is principally to show that schizophrenics, who have the
linguistic code at their disposal, do not convert it into discourse. In other
words, in the case of schizophrenia, there is no appropriation of the
linguistic code in a speech act by an who wants to send a message to a
<you>, a message concerning the world - <he/she/it> — constituted as
referent.
Negative transformation exercise

The negative transformation exercise - the results of which are analyzed at
length in Chapter III, 'Negation and Negative Transformations in the
Language of Schizophrenics' — was administered in two ways.
• The respondent is given a predicative sentence - he closes the door - and

is asked, after being shown the morphological procedure he or she will
have to use - . . . does not... - to apply a negative transformation to it.
IDIOLECT OR OTHER LOGIC 155
• The respondent is asked to supply the opposite of a given word. The

opposites requested belong to two different grammatical classes: adjec-
tives {grand, chaud, doux, profond [big, hot, sweet/soft, deep], etc.), and
verbs (naitre, aimer, mourir [to be born, to love, to die], etc.). These
words present various types of ambiguities: between several possible
grammatical classes, between a word and a phrase, between homonyms,
etc. The ambiguities must be resolved by the respondent before making
a negative transformation.
The exercise was given to:
• a schizophenic group (45 respondents);

• a control group (15 respondents) from the same socio-cultural
background as the schizophrenics;
• a group of students in the humanities (49 respondents);
• pathological groups: senile dementia patients and aphasics.
The principal characteristics of the responses of the schizophrenics can

be grouped under the following rubrics:
(a) much greater diversity of responses than among 'normal' respondents

or among the other pathological groups
(b) systematic quantification through negative hypertransformation: neutral

terms are set aside in favor of terms marked '+': grand —> nain, minus,
minuscule [big —• dwarf, minus, minuscule]; doux —> brutal, violent,
cruel, colereux [sweet/soft —> brutal, violent, cruel, irascible], etc.
(c) tendency to prefer animates: when one term can have two distributions
— one animate, the other inanimate — the term selected is usually the
metaphorical or figurative term, the one that applies to animates. For
example, the opposites of doux [sweet/soft] among the 'normal' group
are dur, rugueux, reche, amer, aigre [hard, coarse, rough, bitter, sour].
Schizophrenics prefer: rigide, colereux, cruel, austere, intransigeant [rigid,
irascible, cruel, austere, intransigent], etc.
(d) predominance of stylistically marked terms over 'neutral' terms: the

stylistic mark, modalization of the response, sets a tone, either collo-
quial - moche [tacky] for 'ugly,' crever [to croak] for 'to die' - or
elevated, literary, administrative — deceder, disparaitre [to be deceased,
to disappear] for 'to die.'
(e) tendency to privilege the signifier: chosen terms show a certain phonic
homology with the cue word: naitre [to be born] —> renaitre, dispar-
aitre, nepas etre [to be reborn, to disappear, not to be], etc.1
(f) tendency to operate across different lexical classes, preferring adjectives

and substantives: for example: naitre —> le deces, le neant, absent, mort,
sterile [to be born -» decease, nothingness, absent, death, sterile]; aimer
—• insociable, froid, style, indifference [to love —> unsociable, cold,
trained, indifference], etc.
(g) schizophasic responses: there are few neoforms, but numerous examples
of deviant usage, and neologisms in the distribution of terms.
These types of error can be interpreted as showing that what fundamen-

tally differentiates schizophrenic responses from those of so-called normal
respondents, and even from those of other pathological group is the
relationship between the subject of enunciation and the utterance
produced. Exercises performed on the code, particularly the negative trans-
formation exercise, require that the schizophrenic experience the research-
er's utterance as well as her or his own as proposed objects of
communication or of dialogue, or as objects to be transformed. One
consistent feature of schizophrenic responses seems to be difficulty in
assuming the produced utterance, in dissociating the subject of enunciation
from the subject of the utterance. This can also be detected in the way that
disambiguation of the messages of both reseacher and respondent is left to
the researcher, in the way that responses, and indeed any message at all,
are transformed into a play of signifiers, as well as in the way that utterances
are modalized.
The analyses call into question the very aptitude of the schizophrenic to
carry out a negative transformation, whatever his or her skill in manipu-
lating the appropriate morphological procedures. The transformation
exercise on a predicative sentence readily demonstrates that what is
obtained from the schizophrenic is not really a negative transformation.
The respondent most often answers this exercise with a new sentence that
simply excludes the example given by the researcher. For example: 'He ate
oranges' provokes the response: 'He ate bananas' rather than 'He did not
eat oranges.' This procedure can be said to constitute negation only in that
it consists of the exclusion of the utterance of the researcher (perhaps the
researcher as well); it is not the negative transformation of a referential
utterance.
Use of negation can also be found in the spontaneous and semi-induced
discourse. The morphological procedures are both operative and deviant,
insofar as they do not actually carry out negative transformations.
These results indicate the need to examine the relationship between the
manipulation of linguistic forms and their conversion into discourse. They
also raise the issues of the linguistic formalization of negation, and of the
moment of its intervention in the utterance, etc.
Kinship structures exercise
This exercise (cf. Chapter VI, entitled 'Linguistic Structures of Kinship and
Their Perturbations in Schizophrenia') was also given to respondents in
two ways, the second exercise having been developed to verify hypotheses
formulated as a result of the first.
The goals were to analyze the ways schizophrenics manipulate the
micro-structure of the lexical code constituted by kinship relations, in
order to determine if the sub-code is intact for schizophrenics, and if they
can make use of it on demand, as well as to determine how they deal
with the fact that ego is the privileged referent of this lexical micro-system,
and that the subject, as ego, must express, in the immediate linguistic
context, how she or he is situated in the kinship structure. In other
words, in addition to the integrity of the lexical micro-system, the exercise
examines the relation of the subject actually producing the utterance (the
subject of enunciation) to the subject of the utterance (who here is always
ego).
The identity between the subject producing the message and ego, privi-
leged referent of the lexical micro-system of kinship, leads to reactions of
reticence, and to interference from delusional themes, rare on the part of
the schizophrenics in response to the other linguistic exercises.
The responses indicate that schizophrenics have mastery of the lexical
micro-system of kinship, and that, if they do not give the 'correct' answer
right away, it is not because they do not know the term requested.
Types of errors found in the responses:
(a) confusion of generations: one or two generations can be confused,

merged with each other: petits-enfants —> enfants [grandchildren —>
children]; oncle -> cousin [uncle —> cousin]; neveu —> cousin [nephew
—• cousin], etc. These errors do not arise from the complexity of the
questions; on the contrary, when the question implies a simple relation
of filiation (father-son, for example), the answer is even more difficult
for the schizophrenic.
(b) confusion of other distinctive traits: collaterality and consanguinity,

collaterality and generations, for example; generational errors are
almost always combined with these other types of error.
(c) responses with generic terms: this type of error, frequent among senile
dementia patients who exhibit a loss of lexical specificity, is very rare
among schizophrenics and shows up only among hebephrenics, or
among respondents who resist the exercise.
(d) schizophasic responses: one could label as schizophasic such responses

as 'elm striplings' (instead of 'twins');2 responses indicating an attempt
to restructure the kinship code, and to constitute a kind of neo-code
through symbolic overdetermination of the kinship terms. For
example: Abraham [Abraham] (for: Le pere de votre pere? [Your father's
father?]); un petit poussin [a little chick] (for: Qui etes-vous pour votre
pere? [Who are you to your father?]); un 'Dieu' [a 'God'] (for: Le frere
de votre mere, qu 'est-il pour vous? [What is your mother's brother to
you?]). There is evidence that the respondent knows the requested
term, but that he or she is questioning the lexical micro-structure, in
the same way that he or she questions and reworks the language.
Errors in response to this exercise cannot be interpreted as the result of

linguistic deficiency, or of the loss of lexical specificity (on the contrary,
schizophrenics, who give 'first cousin' instead of 'cousin,' or 'nephews and
nieces' instead of 'nephews,'3 emphasize lexical specificity more than
'normal' respondents). The issue here is the relation of filiation. Utterances
such as 'Papa et moi sont des freres' ['Papa and I are brothers'], Le pere
ressemble au fils* ['The father resembles the son'], 'Le fils et le pere sont
pareils' ['The son and the father are similar'], show a flattening out, or
even a reversal, of the <?g#-father relation. The generational axis, whose
paradigm is filiation, constitutes the principal dimension of the kinship
structure and the genealogical tree. When filiation is questioned, or impos-
sible to establish, or perturbed, the result is the dysfunction of the kinship
structure in schizophrenic discourse, which can also be detected in the
spontaneous utterances of these respondents.
Paraphrasing of proverbs exercise
Respondents were asked to paraphrase three proverbs: 'Tel pere, tel fils'
['Like father, like son']; 'Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut' [ 'What woman
wants, God wants']; 'Chacun pour soi et Dieu pour tous' ['Every man for
himself and God for all'].4
The choice of proverbs was determined by the responses obtained from

other exercises (for example, the word definition exercise where the word
'God' appears, or the kinship structure exercise), and by certain themes
found in the spontaneous discourse.
Comparison of comments about the proverbs made by male respondents

on the one hand, and female respondents on the other, is interesting. In
response to the first proverb {'Telpere, telfils' ['Like father, like son']), 100
percent of the men respond with an utterance indicating either a reversal of

filiation {'le pere ressemble au fits' ['the father resembles the son']); or
reciprocity in filiation {'lepere ressemble au fils et le fils au pere' ['the father
resembles the son, the son the father']); or by elimination of the genealo-
gical relation {'Papa et Guy sont des fireres' ['Papa and Guy are brothers'],
'Le pere et le fils, c'est la meme chose' ['the father and the son are the same
thing'], etc.). The women give more diversified responses. Some go along
with the expected response {'Le fils a le meme caractere que le pere' ['The
son has the same character as his father'], for example). Others run counter
to the message of the proverb, and make claims for resemblance between
mother and son {'Les garcons sont plutot proches de leur mere' ['Boys are
more often close to their mothers'], etc.). Only three responses show
similarity to the men's.
The divergences in the responses can be interpreted as the result of the

difference of the relation of the speaking subject - male or female - to the
message of the proverb. The answer changes according to whether the
speaker can, or cannot, be represented as subject of the utterance in the
proverb. The question is whether or not it is possible for schizophrenics to
assume an utterance where they, or where their image, is represented as
subject, particularly when the utterance is imposed by someone else - the
researcher, in this case. In other words, what is the relation of the schizo-
phrenic speaking subject to the referential, and, more precisely, the co-
referential, function of discourse? The pertinence of the question thus
framed is confirmed by:
• the comments given in reaction to the second proverb; the men's
responses are more correct than the women's, the relation of the
speaking subject to the subject of the utterance being the reverse of the
one established for 'Like father, like son.'
• the problem the paraphrasing operation causes the schizophrenic.
Relevant in this context are the types of comments given in response to
all the proverbs; most of them do not consist of interpretations or expla-
nations of the proverb, but of quotations from other proverbs, or aphor-
isms, etc.
Synonyms exercise
Respondents are given a certain number of substantives, for example:

peury joie, maitre [fear, joy, master]; and a certain number of verbs:
parler, penser, vivre, exclure [to speak, to think, to live, to exclude], etc.,
and are asked to supply a term with the same meaning or a very similar
one.

• the schizophrenic group (45);
• a group whose socio-cultural background is similar to the schizophrenics
(15);
• a group of students in the humanities (36).
The specific characteristics of the schizophrenic responses are as follows:
(a) refusal to disambiguate the cue word or the response given: respon-
dents ask the researcher to specify the precise linguistic term if the
term exhibits any homophony or polysemy; they produce several
responses instead of just choosing one, or preferring one as the most
appropriate; they modalize their responses: 'on pourrait dire ga, mais
encore autre chose' ['one might say this, or something else'], 'par
exemple' ['for example'], 'je dirais effroi, mais je pourrais dire tout aussi
bien autre chose' ['I would say fright, but I could say anything else just
as well'], etc.
(b) refusal to give synonyms: this refusal is particularly interesting due to

the fact that schizophrenic language is almost entirely based on equiva-
lences. However, the important thing for the schizophrenic seems to be
the refusal of the meaning assigned by the language - more specifically
by the language of the mother - and the attempt at elaboration of a
neo-code whose rules he or she may or may not give. Hence the
'insane' character of this language for whomever does not know, or
rejects, the specific code.
(c) diversity of responses: this characteristic could also be interpreted as a

refusal of the most frequently used term according to the established
linguistic code, and a questioning of the synonymic operation. Diver-
sity has also been noted in the results of the opposites exercise.
(d) connotations of given terms: schizophrenics most often give a stylisti-

cally marked, rather than a neutral, term. Connotations can place the
term in the colloquial, or even idiolectical, code: peur —> frousse [fear
—• scared stiff ]; parler —> parlotter [to talk —• to chat it up], etc. They
can also signify the pursuit of lexical specificity, the intention to use
only elevated language: parler —> articuler, disserter, discourir [to speak
—• to articulate, to hold forth, to discourse], etc.
(e) systematic quantification: neutral terms are set aside in favor of terms
marked '+': peur —> effroi, hantise, terreur [ fear —> dread, haunting,
terror], etc.; joie —> euphorie, hilarite [joy —• euphoria, hilarity], etc.
(f) tendency to privilege the signifier: the power of the signifier provokes
aberrant responses: maitre —• omettre [master -> to omit 3 ]; vivre —»
revivre, vivifier [to live —• to relive, to vivify], etc.
(g) responses with opposites: in the opposites exercise no responses with

synonyms were noted, whatever the order in which the two exercises
were given. Responses with opposites could be an indication of the
schizophrenic's desire to distance herself or himself from the imposed
utterance, from the researcher's discourse, and from the proposed code.
(h) tendency to operate across lexical classes, with preference given to

substantives and adjectives, or to words having already undergone a
transformation.
(i) schizophasic responses: there are few neologisms: vivre —> viviver,
croisser [to live —> to vivivy, to grow]; parler -> defervence [to speak —•
deffervescence]; etc. On the other hand, a certain number of deviant or
unexpected usages are found that, outside the specifically framed
context of the linguistic exercise, could be interpreted as schizophasic:
penser —• voter, tricher, psychanalyser [to think —• to steal/fly, to cheat,
to psychoanalyze]; parler —> transmission de pensee [to speak —• trans-
mission of thought]; vivre —• profiter [to live —> to take advantage of];
etc.
(j) switch to another language: some respondents confuse synonymy with

translation.
Singularities and errors can be interpreted in the same way as the results
of the negative transformation exercise: refusal to assume an utterance as
such, distancing with respect to the researcher, and to already coded
language. These characteristics can be detected in the modalizations of the
responses, the resistances to disambiguation, the multiplicity of terms
given, the refusal to choose one as more appropriate, and the commen-
taries, etc.
Schizophrenics are more reticent in relation to synonymy than in
relation to the negative transformations they can more easily convert into a
formalistic play with linguistic forms, without having to take into account
the content of the message. In this exercise, terms must be given with the
same signification, the same meaning, as the one presented by the
researcher. This seems to be more difficult and less acceptable to the
schizophrenic whose language is elaborated out of specific, idiolectical
equivalences, the goal being to restructure the meaning of the mother
tongue.
Word definition exercise
Respondents are given a certain number of words and asked to supply the
corresponding definition. The words were selected for their ambiguities:
homonymy, synonymy, distributional polysemy (literal meaning/figurative
meaning, for example): mur, tuile, glace, corps, mere [wall, tile, looking-
glass, body, mother]; 6 or for the thematic or semantic interest shown in
them in the spontaneous or semi-induced utterances: miroir, mere, dieu,
corps, loi [mirror, mother, god, body, law], etc.

• a group whose socio-cultural background is similar to that of the schizo-
phrenics (15).
Characteristics of the responses:
(a) refusal of unequivocal definition, of one single definition, one single

meaning: it is not only the terms chosen for their homophonic or
polysemic ambiguities that provoke several responses, but almost all
the terms. Comments emphasize the random nature of the respon-
dent's utterance as well as that of the researcher.
(b) emphasis on the materiality of the object, along with, or contrasting

with, predominance of the figurative over the literal meaning: this
contrast, or opposition, emerges both in single answers given by indivi-
dual respondents, and in the whole series of utterances produced by
the schizophrenics. For example, we find, in response to mur [wall]:
'construction en terre, en argile preparee' ['construction made of earth, or
of prepared clay'], 'mur de pierres' ['wall of stones'], 7/ y en a en
briques, en grillage, en tole, en bois ...' ['there are brick ones, wire ones,
metal ones, wood ones . . . ' ] , etc., and on the other hand, 'c'est un
obstacle' ['it's an obstacle'], 'ca peut etre une prison, un etouffement' ['it
can be a prison, a strangulation'], 'c'est un part age, une separation' ['it's
a division, a separation'], (quelque chose qui divise' ['something that
divides'], etc. All these responses imply what could be called symbolic
overdetermination. The same for corps [body]: Vest des cellules, c'est du
sang ['it's cells, it's blood'], Vest un ensemble d'organes quipermettent a
un corps humain de vivre' ['it's a set of organs permitting a human
body to live . . . ' ] , 'c'est un ensemble biologique' ['it's a biological unit'],
etc., in contrast to 'c'est un embetement' ['it's an annoyance'], 'c'est une
chose nuisible contre la verite' ['it's something harmful to the truth'],
etc. For mere [mother], a response such as 'les eaux thyro'idiennes
(amniotiques?)' ['thyroidal waters (amniotic?)'), is opposed to a defini-

tion such as 'c'est la plus grande partie de Dieu' ['she's the greater part
of God'], or 'c'est ce qu'il a de plus beau au monde' ['what is most
beautiful in the world'], etc.
(c) definition by connotation rather than denotation: respondents do not

supply the denotation of the term, but rather express a certain number
of connotations they think are appropriate to it. For example: la loi
[the law]: 'c'est ce qu'il y a de plus magnifique lorsque c'est fait d'une
maniere absolue' ['it's the most magnificent thing when it's done
absolutely']; la verite [the truth]: 'c'est la chose la plus belle au monde'
['it's the most beautiful thing in the world']; mere [mother]: 'c'est ce
qu'il y a de plus beau au monde' ['what is most beautiful in the world'],
Vest quelque chose d'infiniment beau, de mysterieux' ['something
infinitely beautiful and mysterious'], etc. These types of response allow
schizophrenics to avoid complying with the instructions, or to reject
the coded referent.
(d) stylistically marked language: certain responses show the affectation of

elevated style (schizophrenic mannerism?). For example: 'la verite c'est
ce qui peut etre augure avec la presomption, I'indice, et ... qui finit par
formuler une preuve' ['the truth is what can be augured with presump-
tion, the clue, and . . . ends up formulating a proof], 'La verite c'est un
acte de prouvance' ['the truth is an act of provance'], etc. The stylistic
mark seems to take precedence over the pertinence of the definition, as
if the exercise required a certain type of language, rather than the refer-
ential function.
(e) responses with opposites: these responses are related to those given for
the synonym exercise, and they share the same interpretation: distan-
cing from the linguistic code, and from the researcher's utterance. For
example: la verite [the truth]: 'c'est le mensonge' ['it's a lie'], 'c'est le
contraire du mensonge' ['it's the opposite of a lie']; la loi [the law]: 'c'est
I'injustice ['it's injustice']'; le chatiment [ punishment]: 'c'est le contraire
du bonheur' ['it's the opposite of happiness'], etc.
(f) responses with translations: also related to the synonym exercise; For
example: la loi [the law]: 'lei;' dieu [god]: 'deo> etc.
(g) homophonic responses: corps — coeur [body — heart7]; parentheses —

parentes; c'est des parents) [parentheses - [female] relatives; it's the
parents]; tuile — tole [tile — sheet metal8]; etc. The choice of term seems
to be determined by its phonic relation to the signifier given in the cue.
(h) schizophasic responses that can be grouped into three types of utter-
ances:
• 'paraphonic' responses: parentheses: parents [parentheses: parents], etc.
where the definition, determined by homophony, is neological;
• responses with syntactical or syntactico-semantic neologisms: dieu [god]:
'c'est comme moi, c'est le respecter dans sa personne' ['it's like me, it's
respecting him in his person']; le corps [the body]: 'une chose nuisible
contre la verite' ['something harmful to the truth'], une glace [a looking
glass]: * c'est un miroir ... Un mirage d'eau qui peut etre mire, qui efface'
['it's a mirror... a water mirage that can be reflected, that erases]'; etc.
• responses with lexical neologisms: dieu [god]: 'ca vient peut-etre par la
savanterie cosmique de Vair . . . (7^ peut etre qu 'il est interesse par I bstru-
ment du vide' ['that comes perhaps through the cosmic savanterie of the
a i r . . . . It could be that it is interested in the ostrument of the void']; une
tuile [a tile]: 'c'est une plaque rendue mecanique, c'est-a-dire agrippante
qu 'on a mise sur la toiture de la maison' ['it's a mechanical plaque, that is
a gripping they put on the roof of a house']; la verite [the truth]: 'c'est un
acte de prouvance' ['it's an act ofprovance']; le corps [the body]: 'c'est une
matiere flanche' ['it's flanch matter']; parentheses [parentheses]: 'je ne me
rappelle plus... C'est un legyptl et un IdrowW ['I don't remember... it's
an /aigypt/ and a /drool/']; etc.
It is significant that the schizophrenic rarely defines words, and instead

gives examples, expresses connotations, prefers symbolic or figurative inter-
pretations. In addition, the schizophrenic never pleads ignorance of the
meaning of the proposed term. For example, it is obvious that a certain
number of respondents do not know the meaning of 'parentheses,' but
they do not say so, and prefer to invent a definition. This exercise, not
rejected by schizophrenics, but giving them more problems than the
opposites or the synonyms exercises (they respond just with syllables,
constantly interrupting their utterances, etc.) is undoubtedly the most
effective one for examining the problem of reference in schizophrenic
language, and for analyzing the articulation of the coded linguistic
meanings of words with whatever meaning these same words have in
schizophrenic language. One is able to grasp and perhaps interpret more
accurately what has been called 'reification,' 'mannerism,' or 'symbolic
language.' It is also interesting to note that it is among the responses for
this exercise that one most frequently finds neologisms and schizophasia.
Whenever the meaning of a word, an utterance, or a message, escapes the
respondent, she or he is likely to respond schizophasically, or with a neolo-
gism elaborated according to the morphological procedures of her or his
own language.
One also finds the same specific characteristics of schizophrenic
responses as in the other exercises: refusal to disambiguate a message (sent

or received), predominance of the signifier, homophony, stylistic singulari-
ties, etc.
Personal pronoun exercise
This exercise is used to verify the formal and pragmatic framework of

enunciation, constituted by interrelations among persons, and specifically
the I-you relation.
Respondents - the schizophrenic group and the control group of similar
socio-cultural background - were asked to integrate personal pronouns, in
various combinations of twos, into a minimal sentence pattern. For
example: I-me, I-him/her, you-me, you-him/her, he-me, he-you, etc.
The goal is to cross-check the economy of personal relations detected in
the spontaneous and semi-induced discourses.
Characteristics of the responses were that responses exhibit the same avoid-
ance of establishment of relations between the persons specific to the
enunciation (I-you) that was observed in spontaneous language. This
avoidance can go so far as to substitute for the pronoun a homophonic
term belonging to another grammatical category. One does obtain utter-
ances integrating they-me, one-me, they-them, one-them, etc. This can
be interpreted as showing that schizophrenic language is a language of
citations, of utterances of utterances, but that it cannot be understood as a
practice, a pragmatics, of conversion of language into discourse. The
pronoun / is found in the utterances, showing specific functional character-
istics: either it designates the formal paradigm of all speaking subjects (it is
then a kind of citation of the linguistic form of the speaking subject), or it
represents the subject of a narrative of narrative, a type of reported utter-
ance. It does not signify the first person, the speaker, in an actual process
of appropriation of language. You and you (plural) are not found in the
subject noun phrases of the utterances produced.
For further discussion of this exercise, see Chapter XIII, 'Does Schizo-
phrenic Discourse Exist?'
Sentence production exercise
Orally, respondents are given, in a definite order, two, three, or four

morphemes, and the instructions to integrate them into a minimal
sentence pattern: 'Make one sentence, the shortest, simplest possible, with
the words I indicate.' The cue words correspond to several different
syntactic functions, belong to different lexical classes, and exhibit limited

compatibilities for combination. The exercise requires the use of three
types of linguistic rules: syntactic (intuition of the minimal sentence
pattern, with its possible expansions), lexical (respect for syntactico-lexical
correlations, disambiguation of proposed morphemes, and eventual selec-
tion of a verb), and semantic (establishment of the compatibility or incom-
patibility among the suggested morphemes and certain messages, as well as
among the terms themselves). The instructions are given with an example
demonstrating the definition of the minimal sentence, and implying that
the respondent should rectify any agrammaticality or anomaly in the
message constituted by the cue words.

• a group with a socio-cultural background similar to the schizophrenics'
(15);
• a group of students in the humanities (49);
• other 'pathological' groups: senile dementia patients, aphasics, etc.
Strategies adopted by the speaking subjects with respect to the linguistic

rules show up both explicitly, in their verbal and non-verbal behavioral
reactions to the cue, and implicitly, in their linguistic performances.
The behavioral reactions of the schizophrenics can be grouped as follows:
• comments emphasizing the ambiguity of the received message;

• comments emphasizing the ambiguity of the message carried out. These
comments would seem to indicate that the utterance produced by the
schizophrenic is some kind of game played with linguistic rules, carrying
no message assumed by the speaking subject. All modalizations of the
utterance also indicate this: 'on pourrait dire ca . . . ; ' 'par exemple;' 'je
dirais ca, mais aussi bien autre chose' ['one might say that ...;' 'for
example;' 'I would say this, but anything else too'], etc.
The characteristics of the sentences produced can be analyzed:

1 from the syntactic standpoint, in:
• the specificity of the verbs used (for example, attribution verbs, verbs
referring to the Greek 'mean') and their modal and temporal aspects;
• relational elements used to establish equivalents that are 'paradig-
matic' as opposed to 'syntagmatic;'
• aphorisms, single word discourses, holophrastic expressions;
• the availability of pronominal and negative transformations (unlike
the senile dementia patients, for example).
2 from the lexical standpoint, in:

• the specificity of the terms used;
• the perception of ambiguity in the morphemes of the cue words,
often followed by refusal to disambiguate;
• the scarcity of neologisms and schizophasic expressions, and the
presence of singularities and improbabilities in the semantic compat-
ibilities, and in the established syntactico-semantic correlations.
3 from the syntactico-semantic standpoint, in:

• the subject noun phrases, most often animates or specific inanimates;
• the preferred personal pronoun /, functioning as formal paradigm of
the speaking subject, often interchangeable with the impersonal one\
• the intransitive verbs; intransitive construction is in any case
preferred.
4 from the semantic standpoint, in:

• utterances that most frequently make no sense, except as play with
the linguistic code, but that avoid major linguistic anomalies (cf.
responses to the cue: red—see—horse in Chapter VII, 'Sentence Produc-
tion among Schizophrenics and Senile Dementia Patients').
• These characteristics can be interpreted as indicating that schizophre-
nics never really articulate the subject of enunciation with the subject
of the utterance. They refuse to, or cannot, emit or transmit, a
message. They refuse to, or cannot, communicate. What they say is
a manipulation of the code itself, and their utterances lack 'content.'
STUDY OF SPONTANEOUS OR SEMI-INDUCED LANGUAGE
The difficulties of approaching schizophrenic language, and the still

fragmentary character of enunciation theory, led me to treat this data
according to different methods.
Discourse analysis (Z. S. Harris's method)
Twenty fragments each of about one and a half typewritten pages were
isolated. Selected from the beginning of the recordings, the fragments
included only minimal interventions on the part of the researcher. Ten
fragments were produced by male respondents and ten by females. They
were analyzed in tables broken down under the rubrics NP1, VP, NP2,
NP3, 9 adverbs and adjectives. The tables also show the clauses (C). Each
line of the table reproduces C I , or C2, or C3, etc.
Interpretation of the tables shows the specificity of syntactic and syntac-

tico-semantic construction among schizophrenics. This analysis permits
extrapolation of a model for the kernel sentence, which varies according to
the evolution of the illness. It should also be noted that male and female
respondents do not make the same types of sentences.
Grammatical case (Fillmore's method)
The 20 fragments defined in Part 1, above, were analyzed according to

grammatical case. This type of analysis delineates specific grammatical
competence. In Fillmore's terms, it can be expressed as follows: T (A) is
constituted as objective (O) by an counter-agent (CA). The operation of
the counter-agent shows up particularly in the locative (L): A is placed by
CA in an L connoted harmful because A lacks an instrument (I) to carry
out the action (therefore the discursive process) he or she wants to carry
out.
Interpreted in terms of the functioning of enunciation and of its relation
to the utterances produced, there is no possible 'I, here, now' for the
schizophrenic. The frequent use of the locative is a substitution for the
'here' of the process of enunciation, and it demonstrates that 'here' is
impossible. The number of temporal transformations signifies the impossi-
bility of 'now' in the production of discourse.
From this analytic perspective, I attempted to interpret what appears to
be a 'discord' in schizophrenic language: the presumed lines of selection
for syntactic structuring are not respected. There is therefore a clash
between grammatical competence and lexical competence; hence, the
anomalous character of the denotation, the impossibility of identifying the
referent.
Flow-chart analysis
I attempted to account for the specificity in the embedding of clauses for

the 20 fragments defined in 1 and 2, above.
This type of analysis demonstrates:
• that schizophrenic language is often constituted by a proliferation of

parentheses, opened up one inside the other, but not closed;
• that these parentheses are most frequently appositions serving to connote
differently a noun phrase or a predicate, and have no denotative or refer-
ential function;
• that the parentheses also correspond to the complex intermingling of
enunciative processes attributable to x speakers in x places and at x

moments of production of discourse;
• that the order of transformations is not respected; hence the incomplete
character of the clause;
• that clauses develop a series of transformations of the types preferred by
schizophrenics, but do not, however, constitute an utterance.
Analysis of two corpora of spontaneous language
This analysis is carried out on the entirety of the spontaneous language

recorded for two respondents. Since sexual difference was a pertinent
criterion in the results obtained, I selected a male's corpus and a
female's.
This type of analysis raises questions about linguistic and psychiatric
methodologies, in addition to the question of sex markings. For example:
how does one define the signifying unit in schizophrenic language? Is
delirium within the province of thematic analysis, of syntactic analysis, or
both? How might one analyze their articulation? In addition: can one
speak of 'schizophrenia' as a nosological entity? If schizophrenia is defined
according to chemotherapeutic criteria, what does the functioning of
language indicate about the effects of those criteria? Does the analysis of
schizophrenic language open up the path for a verbal therapeutics elabo-
rated on a scientific basis? Would it be preferable to chemotherapeutic, or
to more immediately biological, methods of treatment?
Research on the indexical aspects of language
Analysis of the indices of person, time, place, and mode (cf. 'Does Schizo-
phrenic Discourse exist?') shows a specific functioning that calls into
question the constitution of discourse in the language of schizophrenics.
They do not actually convert language into discourse; hence the singu-
larity, the strangeness, of a language that mobilizes the linguistic signs of
passage from code to message, but diverts them from their path. This
problem concerns the functioning of the process of enunciation, and its
relation to performed utterances in schizophrenia.
Analysis of schizophasic mechanisms
All the neologisms in the corpora of spontaneous and semi-induced

language were isolated, and the procedures for their formation examined.
I noted:
(a) that they were almost all elaborated according to processes of deriva-
tion appropriate to the French language; non-coded forms, or
morphemes, were created, but that is not to say that they could not
have been coded. For example: psycher, luminer, programmique,
prouvance, senserie (to psyche, to lumine, programmic, provance,
sensery], etc.
(b) that they sometimes constituted paraphonic errors. For example: lesion
conjugate, amnosphere vitale, instralle en France, des gens qui m'electru-
quenty j'avais des formes de cheques [conjugal lesion, vital amnosphere,
instralled in France, the people who electruck me, I had forms of
checks], etc. It is not always possible to determine what, in these
'errors,' might signify overdetermination in the meaning of a word
(conjugal lesion), or what might be just a simple substitution for a
forgotten term.
(c) that they were sometimes formed as hybrid words, a kind of stylistic
procedure producing effects on meaning. For example: horriable (horri-
able [horrible + abominable]); gourderie (dumceitfulness [dumb +
deceitful]); faribandelles (nonsensinesses [faribolles + bagatelles
(nonsense + trifles)]), etc.
(d) that they sometimes signified the idiolectical symbolic overdetermina-

tion of a word or an expression.
(e) that they were often formulated using anomalous syntactic construc-
tions or anomalous syntactico-semantic compatibilities. It is not the
words here that are to be understood as neologisms, but rather the
oddity of their functioning in the utterance. For example: 'frottez pas
vos yeux, on va vous les coulisser' ['don't rub your eyesy they will slide
them open for you']; 'nous faisons le mouvement des Sieves' ['we are
doing the movement of the pupils (=watching over the rows')]; si nous
avons des economies garantes* ['if we have guarantor economies']; 'nous
sommes rentres en normal ['we came home in normal']; 'on a dit notre
victime' ['they said our victim']; etc.
This work should be carried on with research into the referential function:
the function of the proper name; interpretation of the large numbers of
deictics; and interpretation of the substitution of connotative for descrip-
tive or denotative traits allowing identification of the referent.
*
In conclusion, the following questions could be formulated:
• For the schizophrenic, is there a possibility of what is called discourse?

This question takes up the results of analyses done in the different
chapters and puts them into perspective, based principally on theories of
the practice of discourse, or on the pragmatics of enunciation (cf.
theories of Jakobson, Benveniste, Austin, Searle, etc.).
• How might we determine the specificity of schizophrenic language in
relation to other groups of respondents defined as pathological?
• How might we analyze the characteristics of schizophrenic language in
relation to so-called normal language? What normal language would be
closest to schizophrenic language?
• Does schizophrenic language represent an idiolect of so-called normal
language? How is that idiolect formed and how does it function? Or: is
it really a stratum of language functioning habitually hidden under a
certain kind of logic? Which logic?
• Do linguistic methods allow us to interpret schizophrenic language? Or
are they powerless to account for the way it functions? Can psycholin-
guistics make a contribution to linguistic theory, which currently pays
insufficient attention to the mechanisms of enunciation, and is founded
too extensively on criteria of language production considered as
universal norms?
• At the other extreme of the socio-cultural model, are psychiatrists ready
to base their therapeutic methods on analyses of language? Are they
prepared to listen to what can be creative in expressions considered
atypical in relation to an often stereotyped and impoverished norm?
XIII
Does Schizophrenic Discourse Exist?
When I switched from analysis of the verbal productions of patients with

senile dementia to analysis of the language of schizophrenics, my work
began to require different methods, and instruments capable of accounting
for singularities in discursive practice, or pragmatics, and in modes of
enunciation. Problems in schizophrenic language are related more to the
dynamics of enunciation, of 'putting language into operation through
individual acts of utilization' (according to Benveniste's definition of
enunciation), than to any eventual symptoms or deficiencies, the problem
that always underlies the study of the language of senile dementia patients
or aphasics.
The linguistic characteristics of enunciation, or the types of relation of
the speaker to the language she or he uses, can be studied in different
ways, some of which I analyzed with respect to the language of schizophre-
nics.
THE INDEXICAL ASPECT OF LANGUAGE
Language includes a class of elements that permit passage from, or conver-

sion of, language into discourse. These elements have a double function:
on the one hand, they are part of language defined as a system of signs,
and as the syntax of their combinations; on the other hand, they belong to
language as activity manifested in instances of discourse. These elements
are called indexical, or pragmatic, as opposed to the denominative, or refer-
ential, elements of language. Analysis of the indexical aspect of language
constitutes a chapter of enunciation theory to which E. Benveniste and R.
Jakobson made significant contributions.
The indexical elements can be subdivided into four types.
PERSONAL INDICES
(a) The I-you relation constitutes the formal framework of interlocution.

It is produced only in and through enunciation, and its variants can be
analyzed to characterize specific forms of enunciation. In order to
study the process of interlocution in the language of schizophrenics:
(i) I analyzed the spontaneous or semi-induced discourse of 50 respon-

dents. I noted the near absence of I-you interrelations in the utterances
produced. Relations among the partners of enunciation are represented
only in reported discourse. In direct utterances, only I-him/her, they-me,
one-me, they-them, one-them relations are found, and can be interpreted
as a depersonalization of discourse through the use of utterance of utter-
ance. You (singular or plural) is not found in the noun subject or object
phrases of direct utterances. / appears, but functions in specific ways: either
it designates the formal paradigm of all speaking subjects (it is in some
ways the citation of the linguistic form designating the speaking subject),
or it represents the subject of a narrative of narrative, a form of reported
utterance. It does not signify the first person, or speaker, in an actual
process of appropriation of language. It is a common noun, an it (a non-
person), taken up from a prior act of speech production to designate the
subject who speaks in the discourse. These few conclusions already indicate
the singularity of schizophrenic discursive practice.
(ii) In the recorded corpora, I also considered the preferred forms of

utterance, and analyzed their relation to the conditions of interlocution.
For example, interrogation and direct address (imperative, vocative) can be
interpreted as transformations implying an actual relation between speaker
and addressee. They are very rare in the dialogue between schizophrenic
and researcher, and appear only in reported utterances. Assertion must also
be viewed within the context of interlocution. It is the commonest form of
intervention of the speaker in enunciation, and, its aim being to impose a
certitude on the interlocutor, it has at its disposal specific instruments
manifesting that intervention: the words 'yes' and 'no.' In schizophrenic
utterances, assertion is modalized in such a way that affirmation or
negation are suspended, maintained in ambiguity. A questioning of the
very process of assertion is verbalized. For example: 'Whether one eats or
not, it's the same thing,' 'Whether he bets or not, it's the same,' 'Whether
they know it or not, it's the same thing,' 'He wants to stop me from
speaking or from not speaking,' etc. Schizophrenics' use of the logical
operation of negation (do . . . not) can be interpreted as an aptitude for
manipulating the linguistic form, without direct reference to the pragmatic
context of interlocution (cf. 'Negation and Negative Transformations in
the Language of Schizophrenics').
(iii) I administered an exercise dealing with the structuring of relations

between persons in discourse to groups of respondents of differing
diagnoses. Personal pronouns were presented two by two in various combi-
DOES SCHIZOPHRENIC DISCOURSE EXIST? 175
nations, and respondents were asked to integrate them into a minimal

sentence pattern. The goal of this exercise is to cross-check the economy of
personal relations observed in spontaneous or semi-induced discourse. The
responses obtained show the same avoidance of relations between the
persons specific to the enunciation (I—you), which can go so far as to
substitute a homophonic term belonging to another grammatical category
for 'you.'1 O n e does find, however, utterances integrating the pronouns
one—we, she/he—them, he/she—me, etc. This exercise is not so well received by
schizophrenics as those dealing with denotative elements of language.
(iv) The relation of schizophrenics to interlocution can also be analyzed

in their reactions and responses to verbal exercises requiring negative trans-
formations, the disambiguation of utterances, or the production of
sentences, of synonyms, and of word definitions. Schizophrenics consis-
tently call into question the types of assertion, direct address, and interro-
gation that are required by the instructions. Respondents either emphasize
the ambiguity of the cue words, or try to reduce the implied message to its
linguistic forms and rules (the answer then becomes a formal exercise with
the linguistic rules and elements), or answer with a series of transforma-
tions and comments on the instructions or the expected answer. All of
these types of reaction can be interpreted as ways of rejecting the interlocu-
tion initiated by the researcher. The same remarks apply to the way schizo-
phrenics answer questions during the recording of semi-induced language.
(b) In interlocution between / and you, language is used to express a

certain relation to the world (he/she/it). This implies, in the locutor (/),
the need and the capability of making a reference through discourse, and in
the addressee {you), the aptitude for co-reference, according to the terms of
a pragmatic agreement making each locutor a co-locutor. The referential
mechanism can thus be studied as the integral part of the process of
enunciation. The perturbation of interlocution in schizophrenia affects
aptitude for reference and co-reference in the practice of discourse. From
this perspective, I began to examine, in the recorded corpora, the function
of denotation, in particular with respect to proper names. To approach the
problem of reference, I used the works of the logicians Russell and
Strawson, in particular their texts On Denoting and On Referring.
DEMONSTRATIVE AND PLACE INDICES
Indices like 'this' or 'here' refer to the place where enunciation occurs.
They have meaning only within the context of the actual practice of
discourse, and their signification is correlated with each new process of
enunciation, unlike nominal terms that refer to concepts defined in and by

the language. The indices of place are closely associated with the partners
of discourse (I, here/you, there). Interpretation of their occurrences and of
the roles they play in the recorded fragments reconfirms the analysis of the
personal indices.
INDICES OF TIME, OR TEMPORAL FORMS
The paradigm of temporal forms is determined, in many languages, in

relation to the present, the time of enunciation, renewable for each
production of discourse. This present coincides with the moment of
enunciation — whose center is ego — and it forms the axis for the definition
of verb tenses. Discourse and its relation to the present have been analyzed
by Benveniste, Austin, Searle, Strawson, and Vendler, in particular. I
referred to their work (cf. Problemes de linguistique generale, How to Do
Things with Words, Speech Acts, Intention and Convention in Speech Acts,
Les Performatifs en perspective) in order to analyze temporality in the
language of schizophrenics.
Benveniste divides French verb tenses into two distinct and complemen-
tary systems, revealing two different levels of enunciation he defines as
historical enunciation, on the one hand, and discourse, on the other. A third
type of enunciation, a means of articulating the two others, would be
indirect discourse, where discourse is reported in terms of events and trans-
posed onto the historical plane. The characteristics of historical enunciation
and of discourse, as described by Benveniste, are pertinent for interpreting
temporal forms in the language of schizophrenics, who prefer certain tenses
typical of historical enunciation - the imperfect (including the conditional
form), the perfect and the pluperfect. The present does play a role, but as
atemporal present. Furthermore, the historical plane of enunciation estab-
lishes a particular economy in the reciprocal relationship between the two
verbal categories of tense and person. Historical enunciation never adopts
the formal apparatus of discourse whose essential framework is the I-you
relation. Historical expression never uses /, nor you, nor here, nor now.
Only 'third-person,' in other words non-person, forms are found in histor-
ical narrative, and discourse is produced without direct intervention of the
locutor into the narrative. One might even say that no one speaks.
Interpretation of fragments of discourse has shown that the interpersonal
relation (I-you) is all but missing from schizophrenic language, that she/he/
it is the preferred subject of the utterance, and that here (or this/that) are
extremely rare.
Now - either explicit, or conveyed through the present tense, the time of
the process of enunciation — is not found in the fragments. However,
DOES SCHIZOPHRENIC DISCOURSE EXIST? 177
attenuating these observations is the fact that the aorist - the preterite or
the past definite - preferred tense of historical enunciation, plays almost
no role, except in reported discourse. The preferred temporal forms are the
imperfect, the conditional, the pluperfect and the atemporal present. It is
also true that / is found as subject of the utterance; however, it is not
associated with the first person, and should rather be interpreted as a cited
paradigm for the speaking subject, an it, the non-person of interlocution.
The characteristics of temporal indices in the language of schizophrenics
are more closely related to historical enunciation than to discourse. They
cannot, however, be entirely identified with them, any more than with
those of indirect discourse, with which they show some analogies, without,
however, conforming to the temporality required for transposition of
discourse onto the historical plane.
In the recorded corpora, temporal forms were also analyzed according to

theories on performatives (cf. works of Austin, Searle, Strawson, Vendler).
The conditions required for classification of the temporal form of a verb as
a performative are almost never met. Verbs that could be classified as
performatives are rare in schizophrenic language.
If such verbs are used, the syntactic conditions, temporal forms, and
personal indices do not correspond to the characteristics of performatives.
Performatives are the markers of discourse; they emphasize, or make
explicit, the illocutionary force of an utterance. They are another way of
examining the pragmatics of language. Their absence from the language of
schizophrenics emphasizes, from yet another angle, the singularity of their
discursive practice.
MODALIZATION
I also took up the problem of modal forms in schizophrenic language,

both the modes of verbs (optative, subjunctive), and locutions modalizing
the relation between the utterance and the locutor: maybe, no doubt,
probably, etc.
Neither the optative nor the subjunctive, modes marking the attitude of
the speaker with respect to what he or she says, and requiring a distancing
from the moment of speech, are found in the recorded corpora. As for
locutions found in the utterances, they differ from maybe or no doubt,
which express, in the discourse, the way the subject of enunciation assumes
her or his utterance. In schizophrenic language they would be better inter-
preted as the sign of a refusal, or of an incapacity for assertion on the part
of the speaking subject: 'for example,' 'one could say that, but other things
as well,' 'possibly,' 'probably,' 'I could say it completely differently,' etc.
Phrases of the same types can be found in the responses to the verbal
exercises. They confirm the schizophrenic's insistence on emphasizing the
ambiguity of the cue words and of the answers he or she gives, emphasis
which at times consists mainly of an enumeration of the ambiguities and
the variants possible in response to the cue words.
This manipulation of the ambiguities of the terms used in certain

exercises (opposites, synonyms, sentence production) prompted me to
administer an exercise with ambiguous phrases, where the respondent was
asked to resolve the lexical or syntactic ambiguity of a given utterance. The
responses obtained are, for the most part, paraphrases or comments.
Schizophrenics manipulate ambiguities in the elements of language, but do
not easily perceive the ambiguity of an utterance, and do not really under-
stand what would need to be done to disambiguate it.
THE SEMANTIC ASPECT OF LANGUAGE
The question of how language is converted into discourse, in particular

with respect to the formation of meaning in words and in syntactic struc-
tures, is a difficult one. I approached it as follows:
• by examining the functioning of the lexicon and of transformations. The

symptomatic aspect of meaning, lexical meaning in schizophrenia to be
exact, can be apprehended from several different intersecting angles:
refusal of the mother tongue as it has been transmitted; a linguistic or a
metalinguistic attitude with respect to that language, whose lexical and
syntactic forms are taken as objects for manipulations resulting in
idiolects and neo-codes; lexical or grammatical schizophasia; procedures
of derivation imposed on the lexical elements of the mother tongue;
constant transformational activity. Spontaneous or semi-induced
discourse, as well as responses to certain verbal exercises (sentence
production, opposites, etc.) served as source material for these analyses.
• by analyzing the procedures used by schizophrenics to maintain
ambiguity in their utterances: modals, paraphrasis, temporal forms, and
metalinguistic activity.
• By examining presuppositions in schizophrenic 'discourse.'
XIV
Schizophrenics, or the Refusal of
Schiz
When applied to the language of an individual designated, in psychiatric

nosology, as schizophrenic - a term whose most common rendering would
be 'mind split in two,' or 'divided in two' - a certain number of instituted
dichotomies are revealed to be ineffective, and even outdated. One might
object that these dichotomies are metalinguistic, that they belong to
discourse about language, to the science of language, and not to language
itself. That presupposes, however, that linguistic methods can be heteroge-
neous to language, or that linguistic discourse is in no way marked by the
language it uses: hypotheses that are hardly defensible, and that immedi-
ately raise the question of the very possibility of a linguistic metalanguage,
and of its pretentions to establishing rules with respect to natural
languages. However, that issue will not be addressed here, at least not
explicitly. We will examine the economy of schiz in the verbal productions
of schizophrenics, and consider the functioning of their 'discourse' with
respect to certain dichotomies used in the analysis and interpretation of
language. These dichotomies are disparate, but intersect with each other.
They were chosen intentionally, in order to examine in several ways -
insofar as that is possible in a few pages - the singularity of schizophrenic
language.
LANGUAGE/SPEECH
In structural linguistics, language is conceived as a system of signs, an

inventory of elements, each defined by its position relative to the others, or
as a system of values determined solely by their mutual relations. It should
be added that language exists 'in the collectivity, in the form of a set of
imprints in each brain, almost like a dictionary, of which every individual
would have a copy. It is something that is within each of them, while at
the same time common to them all' (F. de Saussure, Cours de linguistique
generale, Paris: Payot, 1962, p.38). 1 Speech consists of'individual combina-
tions,' through which the speaking subject utilizes the language system in
order to 'express his or her personal thought,' combinations 'dependent
upon the will of the one who speaks,' as well as on the 'acts of phonation
necessary for the execution of these combinations.'
This restatement of the definition of the language/speech distinction,
which could be termed axiomatic for the structural linguistic method, may
cause some amusement. Nevertheless, the authority of this distinction at
least partially explains our resistances to schizophrenic language, and the
fact that we characterize it as strange, or foreign, or mad. Perhaps the same
could be said of any questioning of a binary systematization? In any case,
schizophrenics can be said to have neither language nor speech, in
Saussure's sense of the terms, and there is no dictionary identical to that of
all other members of society printed in their heads. Even if it were a
schizophrenic society! The schizophrenic's glossary is neither within her or
him, nor common to all, but is defined by a specific set of relations to the
language of the mother. The socially determined characteristics of the
mother tongue that are particular to a given society are re-marked by the
singularity of the language of the mother. Language is no longer a neutral
code, a set of conventional signs and rules, set down in dictionaries, avail-
able for everyone to use. It is a sub-code, an idiolect with no laws
common to a group of speaking subjects, an avatar of the speech of the
mother, or of her substitute. It is private, and, in addition, its inventory,
the taxonomy of elements that constitute it, is also more limited, more
restricted, than the mother tongue. Furthermore, the ways in which these
elements are related to each other, and are determined by their mutual
relations, are not neutralized by usage, or by the wear and tear of a
linguistic practice experienced and systematized by a group of individuals,
but are rather prescribed by the syntax regulating the discourse of the
mother. Language here is not a network or a net, without central control,
that functions as a system of in-finite references among distinct particles; it
has become an interlacing of threads whose weave follows a certain pattern
emanating from a center, which in this case happens to have a hole in it.
Meaning, rather than becoming manifest through specific relations of
difference established in a message, is from the very start assigned by
language. It can only repeat, contradict, refute, or dislocate itself, etc. It is
not created, as Saussure maintains, in the act of speech. Speech loses its
function and, furthermore, the possibility of its realization. The schizo-
phrenic's code is not a social code, any more than his or her speech is
individual or personal speech, 'consisting in freedom of individual combi-
nations depending on the will of the speaking subject,' 'with the goal of
expressing his or her thought.' Schizophrenic language cannot really be
described as the actualization of a system of conventional and abstract
signs within concrete, always differing, acts of speech. What the schizo-
phrenic does is to repeat, with a certain number of transformations and
adjustments (almost foreseeable if the rules of operation are discovered),
SCHIZOPHRENICS, OR THE REFUSAL OF SCHIZ 181
sequences of already programmed signs, 'concretized' in a discourse. Due

to their reiterations, reproductions, and transformations, bearing no
relation to an intra- or extra-linguistic context or situation, they appear to
be abstract, but their abstraction is not comparable to that of the elements
distinguished and defined by linguistic analysis.
In any case, for the schizophrenic, the sentence does not belong to the
register of speech, as if it resulted from an act of individual creativity on
the part of the speaking subject. The grammar of what takes the place of
language for the schizophrenic cannot be described, as in a structuralist
conception of language, as a taxonomy of minimal elements, paradigmatic
classes, and certain types of syntagma (as in Nicolas Ruwet, Introduction a
la grammaire generative, Paris: Plon, 1967, p. 51). It is from the start
syntactical, and even always already in phrases. Would generative grammar
be a more appropriate means for theorizing the language productions of
schizophrenics? Would other types of binary oppositions - competence/
performance, deep structures/surface structures, etc. - be isomorphic with
the principles in operation in schizophrenic language?
COMPETENCE/PERFORMANCE
This new linguistic dichotomy takes up the classical opposition of

language/speech, but differs from it where grammar is concerned.
Language is no longer defined inductively as an inventory or taxonomy of
elements that are related to each other, associated into sentences, or syntac-
tically combined, through speech. It is conceived as 'a system of general
rules permitting the enumeration of all grammatical phrases' (Ruwet, pp.
45-6); 2 in other words, as a 'finite mechanism capable of generating an
infinite set of phrases' (Paul M. Postal, Limitations of Phrase Structure
Grammars, cited in Ruwet, p. 46). Competence designates the implicit
'linguistic knowledge' of speaking subjects regarding these rules, knowledge
that would allow 'any adult subject speaking a given language . . . to
transmit spontaneously, or to perceive and understand, an indefinite
number of sentences that, for the most part, she or he would never have
pronounced or heard before' (Ruwet, p. 16). Performance puts the abstract,
finite rules of competence into operation; it is the manifestation, realiza-
tion, or actualization of the rules, in an indefinite number of grammatically
correct sentences. It should be noted that this definition of language
modifies the role Saussure attributed to creativity in linguistic activity. For
Saussure, there is creativity only at the level of speech, in the singularities
and individual deviations of the speaking subject combining the elements
of the linguistic system in order to form messages. This conception of
creativity remains valid with respect to performance in generative
grammar, which also posits a second type of creativity related to compe-

tence, and based on the recursive power of the rules that constitute the
language system.
This emphasis on syntax and on its generative powers would seem to be
an effective instrument for the analysis of the verbal activity of schizophre-
nics, despite the fact that the latter is in large part deconstructive of syntax.
However, the categories defined by generative grammar do not really apply
to schizophrenic language. The grammar manifest in schizophrenic utter-
ances cannot be formalized as a finite set of rules, general rules that can be
represented as logical relations among abstract symbols. The rules of
schizophrenic 'discourse' are pre-determined by the mother tongue as it is
brought forth in the language of the mother. They have always already
been actualized. One might object, with reason, that it is in truth the same
for anyone else as well. However, the power of the mother's language over
that of the schizophrenic is such that overdetermination becomes assigna-
tion. Due to the specificity of their usage by the mother or her substitute,
the grammatical rules have become, rather than mechanisms for the
production of an infinite number of sentences, machines programmed
once and for all, generating only a finite 'discourse,' closed off, at once
limited and enveloping. Actual concretizations in syntax are not in-finite in
number; there are no transmissions or receptions of new, never before
pronounced or heard sentences. In a certain way, everything has already
been set down ahead of time. This does not mean, however, that it is not
radically impossible for speaking subjects with knowledge of the same
mother tongue — supposedly — to anticipate or automatically to understand
schizophrenic utterances. Why? Notably because they have never
questioned the functioning of the code or the sub-code that they use.
Schizophrenic language, constrained linguistic activity where naive usage of
the language is suspended, keeps the question open. Enigma, word puzzle
. . . Should it be designated insane, and classified in reassuring nosological
categories? Or questioned as reservoir of meaning, or for meaning?
In any case, schizophrenics do not escape the problems of the

functioning of language. As soon as they try to speak — instead of just
being spoken - they become linguists; they produce only language about
language, or about what constitutes language for them. They continuously
rework the rules of 'their' language, trying to re-establish their potentiality
beyond linguistic performance of the language of the mother, trying to
extricate them from maternal phraseology, from her psychological or
socio-cultural determinants (to mention only those admissible in linguistic
theory). A linguist in quest of the lost object - language - the schizo-
phrenic tries to re-suscitate it at every turn by freeing grammar from its
rigid and rigorous machinery. Hence, the apparent syntactic games, or the
fact that the schizophrenic is perhaps the most rigorously 'syntaxifying' (to
use Mallarme's term) of all linguists, and all 'speaking subjects,' with
plenty of intuition of the language, and to spare. Syntactic operations are
the surest way for schizophrenics to carry out verbal, or more precisely
morphological, or scriptural, activity. They control language only in
finding and playing with the articulations and joints of syntax, in decon-
structing its concatenations and fixed sequences, in attacking sentences,
and even words, and unlinking their elementary particles. They disjoint
them, break them down into their minimal components, their polyvalen-
cies, their possible variants. They challenge their codified, unequivocal
functioning, and produce all kinds of associations and unforeseen combi-
nations with partially fabricated elements or morphemes, caught up in the
play of unexpected substitutions and groupings. The morphemes are
sometimes borrowed from foreign languages and reintegrated into the
grammar of the mother tongue through addition or modification of its
rules (cf. Louis Wolfson, Le schizo et les Ungues, Paris: Gallimard, 1970).
Thus schizophrenics elaborate sentences, syntagmatic sequences, and word-
phrases that are not necessarily understandable or acceptable for a subject
supposedly speaking the same language.
Having already questioned schizophrenics' use of the same code, we
must now keep in mind that it is only erroneously that we say that they
speak. We might rather say that they unspeak, reversing the process of forma-
tion of utterances. They try to break through the closure of constraining
discourse, in an attempt to find the laws of its engendering. They move

away from phonetic realizations that harass with their insistent, repetitive
noises - sonorous actualizations of significations that bind the listener
without his or her consent — and move toward what would be the key to
their power, the secret of their formulation; that is, their 'fundamental
structures.' They destroy imposed speech, which is violating in its claims
to proper, exclusive, totalitarian meaning . . . They explode that meaning -
which for them had always been meaningless - in order to get back down
to, and play around with, its categorical and lexical components, its under-
lying articulations. Everything happens in reverse between 'surface struc-
tures' and 'deep structures,' but this between two is per-verted by the fact
that the domination of the language of the mother denies free access to the
'deep structures.' Schizophrenics are able to perceive them to some extent,
because the mother tongue is, after all, spoken by the mother. The fact
remains that what is missing is the articulation of the code with its
sonorous signifying realizations.
This could be one possible explanation for schizophrenics' syntactic
behavior, their transformational activities, their incessant manipulations of
the sub-code in search of a subtilized code that would allow them access to
speech. However, it is not the only possible hypothesis, and is, moreover,
as questionable as the linguistic categories on which it is founded, in parti-
cular the authority of the theory of the sign, a theory that has never been
seriously called into question.
SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED
Schizophrenic language also raises the question of the sign. The empire of
the sign goes back much farther than Ferdinand de Saussure. His linguistic
interpretation conforms to the definition already at work in Stoic philo-
sophy, as Roman Jakobson reminds us in 'A la Recherche de l'essence du
langage' (Diogene, 51: 22). We will consider the ways in which Saussure's
theory might, or might not, be applicable to schizophrenic language.
The sign, or 'linguistic unit, is double, made up of the connection

between two terms' (Saussure, p. 99). 'The linguistic sign does not unite a
thing with a name, but a concept with an acoustic image.' 'The linguistic
sign is therefore a psychic entity with two faces.' 'In current usage, the
term sign generally designates the acoustic image alone... . The ambiguity
would disappear if one designated the three notions involved by names
that, while in opposition to each other, resembled each other. We suggest
conserving the word sign to designate the whole, and replacing concept and
acoustic image by signified and signifier respectively; the latter two terms
having the advantage of emphasizing the opposition separating them from

each other, and from the whole of which they are parts' (Saussure, p. 99).
The language of schizophrenics, or their relation to what are 'signs' for
them, calls into question almost every one of the terms of these statements.
I will examine only some of them, playing the game of this definition of
the sign.
Meaning, for schizophrenics, is constituted through the signifiers, which

are meaningless for them, of the mother's discourse. That is to say that
they are marked by 'sounds' whose 'concepts' remain hidden, veiled.
Stolen? The result is their simultaneously fascinated and painful relation-
ship with signifiers, that they repeat, transform, disjoint, fracture, break
down, and rework, as if they wanted to destroy them and seize some of
their power. The signifiers they enumerate, associate, pulverize, and recon-
struct, come flooding to the surface to be passively transmitted, or utilized
as material for refashioning or re-elaborating; they evoke no specific
concept or signified, nor are they simple acoustic images. They produce
themselves, reproduce themselves, unlink and relink themselves together,
like re-markings of traces. The signified is an effect of the power of the
signifiers of the mother's discourse. There is no double-faced sign in
schizophrenic language, but rather cryptogrammatic writing or rewriting of
sonorous inscriptions.
The signifier, if we may keep the name, is emancipated from the power
of the sign. The dichotomous constitution of the linguistic unit, wherein a
signifier represents a signified, is broken up, dislocated, dissolved, called
into question. The signifier no longer represents a meaning that the
speaking subject assigns, or re-assigns, to it. It repeats imperfectly, in an
'imperfect' tense, a signification whose 'concept' neither the mother, nor
the schizophrenic, has ever mastered. As opposed to the sign, which suppo-
sedly exists in an eternal present without a past, the schizophrenic signifier
evokes a kind of imperfective past that never was and never will be
present. Meaning is always in the process of trying to produce or to repro-
duce itself in that signifier. It cannot be detected in any one single term,
any more than in the totality of one discourse, but in the repetitions, trans-
formations, derivations, deviations from one discourse to the other, in one
discourse by the other.
Processes of derivation/deviation are prevalent in the linguistic activity
of the schizophrenic, in the formation of new words through addition,
suppression, or replacement of 'morphemes' (either already existing in the
language or elaborated according to codified derivation processes), and in
the transposition of words from one grammatical category to another
without changing their forms. These derivations eventually stand on their
own, and are used to subvert all references to radical, base, root, or fixed
category. Schizophrenic language thus consists of an unending process of

derivation without represented or representable axis - ex-centric, unhinged,
cut adrift.
Could this constitute a laborious response, or a parry, to the fact that
the schizophrenic functions as signifier, in derivation/deviation, in the
economy of the discourse of the mother? Ex-orbitant signifier: circuit
derived from the play between signifiers in the language of the mother,
ensuring that their circulation does not open up onto some gaping hole,
some void. Signifier that occults, bars, blocks, occupies the space of a gap
or a hole, or of the unspeakable, like a linchpin that assembles, fixes, and
connects the signifiers of maternal discourse around a void, of which it
takes charge. The schizophrenic is implicated in and by the discourse of
the mother as signifier of an unnameable signified: rather than as lack of
signs.
Playing, yet awhile, the sign theory game, one might interpret the sign's
linguistic function as the signifier-symptom of the inadequacy of (codified)
signifier to (codified) signified, as signifier of the excess of signifier or of
signified with respect to instituted signs. This excess is experienced through
the mother and through the mother tongue, not as a question about
meaning, as reservations on or about meaning, but as the threat of
meaning's collapse, disintegration, or decomposition. The excess becomes
closure: signifier that blocks, seals off, and closes up investigation into the
constitution of the sign, notably in its bipartite, dichotomous combination.
The schizophrenic takes the place of the signifier of a discourse skidding
out of control toward its elsewhere, its other, its outside, a discourse that
projects itself, assures itself, re-assures itself through the in-fans. This is the
source of the hesitations, the oscillations between extremes. Could the
schizophrenic be God? Representative of a transcendental signified he or
she furtively guarantees, through mutism: silent cornerstone of language?
Or could the schizophrenic be nothing? Signifier of a vacancy, a gap, a
blank, a fracture in discourse, or risk of blackout, of drift, of slippage in
signification. Let us rather say that the schizophrenic supports the faltering
relation between two abysses, and has for that reason been reduced to the
role of a magic word, a key word, a signifier both unique and ambivalent.
The schizophrenic will forever be in the process of disengaging from this
reified status. She or he enters discourse as a sign, if we can still use the
term, of the inadequacy of signs, of their failure, and in order to guarantee
their perpetual functioning as signs. Alien in, or of, a discourse that refuses
to consider the strangeness and dementia of its own process, to pay the
price of madness for its own reason, to underwrite the anomalies of its
fixed and rigid norms. Signifier of this deficiency, of this swindle, the
schizophrenic, as in-fans of his or her mother and of society, remains as
security, in trust, on notice - incarcerated, legally neutralized, codified
symptom of the deadly (and yet always threatened with derision, or derelic-
tion), law of power of the signs in power. Signifier of the omnipotence and
the impotence of discourse, the schizophrenic in-fans is at one and the same
time necessary to and banished from the process. Out of the I-position, out
of the game, of language which claims to take place now, to communicate
something here, to signify in the present, in all codified normality, intellig-
ibility, communicability, and security. Like a sign exiled from discourse,
but nonetheless necessary for the functioning of language, rejected and
required, heterogeneous to the system, but guaranteeing its homogeneity.
We can thus understand that for schizophrenics words are the much
sought after and much feared ciphers of their enigmatic aphasia, of their
irreducible alienation and lack of common sense. Their linguistic activity
consists of fracturing, along every possible angle, the envelope that enacts
and harbors the meaning of the language of the mother, the nicely
reassuring value of its signifiers, and the proper and paralyzed syntax that
produces limited and repetitive sequences. Caught between the vertiginous
fault in discourse, of which they are effigy and emblem, and its closure
which they guarantee, schizophrenics cannot be read as signifiers repre-
senting a signified, or even several signifieds, but rather, since we are using
this terminology, as what Saussure rejects as definition of the sign: a name
designating a non-codified, non-codifiable, unnameable thing.
Nor do schizophrenics have at their disposal the conventionally struc-

tured system of the signs of the language. Words are not discrete and
distinct elements, able to be mobilized and combined for the transmission
of messages, because they are always already captured, prisoners of
programmed sequences. The association of signified and signifier in the
sign no longer obeys the law of the arbitrary. The play, the free will, of the
law of the arbitrary, is missing from schizophrenic language. Paradoxically,
this results in the interpretation of what the schizophrenic says as unmoti-
vated, gratuitous and unfounded. In fact, schizophrenics' signifiers are
rigorously prescribed by a meaning that is never subject to the arbitrary
law of the sign, whatever their attempts at reintroducing conventions and
rules that might resemble its function. These schizophrenic conventions do
not, or no longer, govern a link between a sound and a concept. They seek
to eliminate, or tame, or even seduce the violent force of sounds. They
attempt to develop an economy of signifiers, a signifying economy, where
signification can be produced and partially controlled through a system of
rules seeking to organize the power of (the) signifier(s), either linked in
sentences, or detached from one another. By reassembling them in a
grammar they can manage?
The 'signified' can no longer be detected at the level of the sign, but in
the elaboration and functioning of an idiolectical syntax, or perhaps only
in the reiteration or the deconstruction of maternal syntax. In schizo-
phrenic language, 'difference' is not to be found between the signs, but
rather in the processes of dissolution, distortion, derivation/deviation, and
recoding the maternal language undergoes as the schizophrenic tries to
distinguish herself or himself from it. It is the undoubtedly rather singular
syntactic work that maintains, in his or her language-producing activity,
the play and the articulation of differences. The arbitrary and the differen-
tial, essential attributes of the constitution of Saussure's linguistic sign, are
inappropriate to describe schizophrenic signifiers.
In addition, the representation of the double-faced sign as a signifier
separated from a signified written underneath a bar or a horizontal line is
inappropriate, as is the layering of the linguistic unit, dichotomized by a
plane, split, cut. 'Language is also comparable to a sheet of paper: the
thought is the front and the sound is the back' (Saussure, p. 157). The
virtuality of the sheet of paper, its plane surface, cuttable and cut up into
double-faced units, is missing in schizophrenics. In their language there is
neither plane nor bar separating 'signifier' from 'signified,' which is
perhaps precisely why there is none between present (participle) and past
(participle). The 'signifier' repeats and reinscribes the 'signifier,' while
transforming it. It re-manifests its power, attempts to elaborate and re-
elaborate its strata and sedimentations in multiple redistributions, without
detectable or institutable distinctions in or between signifier/signified,
present (participle)/past (participle). This operation more closely resembles

an effort to modulate, articulate, or sometimes simply neutralize the power
of sounds.
Thus, in schizophrenic language, none of the linearity or the arbitrari-

ness of the sign, its primordial characteristics according to Saussure
(Saussure, p. 103). Schizophrenic signifiers are not produced 'along one
single dimension . . . a line' - far from it (Saussure, p. 103). What
Saussure has to say on this subject, practically contested by himself in
Anagrammes (cf., for example, Mercure de France, February 1964: 242-62;
To Honor Roman Jakobson, Mouton, 1967, pp. 1906-17; Tettres de Ferdi-
nand de Saussure a Antoine Meillet,' in Cahiers de Ferdinand de Saussure,
21: 89-135), should be re-examined with respect to the conception of
time prescribed by classical philosophy, where time is determined as a
succession of points, as a line, or as a circle. Saussure's theories should also
be questioned regarding their lack of development of the economy of
space, of space-time, and of spacing in the articulation of signifiers. From
the beginning, Saussure's reductive, repressive, 'flat' interpretation of
writing prevents him from thinking about the economy of the blanks in
discourse (cf. the analyses of J. Derrida, in particular De la Grammatologie,
Paris: Minuit, 1967).
Schizophrenics ceaselessly and irrepressibly contravene this classical

concept of temporality. The linearity of the signifier is broken up into
fragments no longer recognizable as elements, as 'points' of the language
or of speech. Schizophrenics multiply the blanks by fracturing the
discourse. They refuse to produce or to inscribe it onto one single page, or
one single medium, or into one single blank. There is no one appointed,
fixed sheet on which they write, or rewrite, a text. The pages are strung
together, but come unstrung, slip away, fly away. The planes flatten or
collapse into each other. Neither discourse, nor the message, is pronounced
or articulated at the point of intersection of two axes of co-ordinates, two
lines defining a plane - even a blank plane - those two dimensions desig-
nated as language/speech, paradigm/syntagm, signifier/signified, etc.
Discourse and messages accumulate like innumerable, uncountable
fragments - that do not add up - of heterogeneous blanks, and sounds,
and voices: the ones programmed in the language of the mother and in the
mother tongue that they break up and remanipulate; the one that sustains
and organizes that tongue and that speech as such, as systems, or as
systematic; the one that guarantees the circulation, or indeed the circularity
of (the) signifier(s). Which might correspond to an exiled signified, or to
the functional law of the system (which for structural linguistics is fear of
the blank space), its denomination, its proper name, and even its flaw, its
lack of signs. These blanks, these functions of the blank supported by the
schizophrenic in-fans, are the very ones she or he seeks to deconstruct as
entities, to fragment into disparate chunks of debris, defying any possibility
of their reconstitution into a unity. The unity of the blank in all of its
privileged roles? Especially its role as support for the system of language,
ensuring the circle of maternal, familial, and social discourse underlying
the plane (possibly even the blank plane), the line, the point, the present,
the sign, the time, and the space-time of the sign.
There are other dichotomies called into question, or destabilized, by

schizophrenic linguistic process that must be examined, even if they inter-
sect, at some angle, the dichotomy of the sign. To mention only a few:
locutor/addressee, speech/writing, enunciation/utterance, literal/figurative,
original/derivative, subject/object, active/passive, etc. And we must ask
ourselves how to understand this process. It can, on the one hand, be inter-
preted through a language that never questions its constitution or its
functioning; the verbal activity of the schizophrenic then appears insane,
incoherent, dissociated, unmotivated, gratuitous, etc.; it is defined by a
lawmaking discourse as foreign to its laws, outlawed, to be subjugated to
instituted norms. Or, on the other hand, schizophrenic logic can call into
question the normative conventions of language, along with their implica-
tions and correlates. We might then hypothesize that schizo-phrenia, as
seen in certain individuals, is the name of a projection of the dichotomous
mechanisms at work in the discourse of those who name, those who speak
literal meaning, onto those who reveal the remainder, that which is left over
from the binary divisions of discourse. Schizo-phrenia could be the
symptom of a certain type of language-functioning, unrecognized by its
locutors, and for that reason attributed to the in-fans of the language of
the mother, of the mother tongue. A schizophrenic would then be
someone who could not, or who would not, play the game, who recalls
what lies underneath, the reverse side, the prerequisites, or the balance,
lack of recognition and the price to be paid for it. The schizophrenic
would signal (the way toward) the above or the beyond of signs.
XV
The Setting in Psychoanalysis
The setting of the analytic scene may not be just another empiric, or just
another psychical application, an experience like any other. Who knows? It
may be a setting that disorients, disconcerts, and destabilizes the scene of
representation.1
I am not returning, or regressing, to this scene insofar as it is medical
act, or praxis, whose distance from what is going on here would guarantee
the safety of some kind of secret I am keeping, that any analyst keeps -
just another hermeneutic obstacle. The psychoanalytic setting has no
secrets other than the one that psychoanalysis and its readers, including
those on the outside, have neglected to interpret - that is, the theoretical
impact it might have. To investigate psychoanalysis as text only, to apply
only the text to other cultural domains, is to treat as negligible this setting
that is at work in representations of psychoanalysis, as well as in its theore-
tical texts, determining their incoherence, or their other kind of coherence
- that is, the fact that Freud's text does not answer to the same systematic
criteria as a philosophical, or a scientific, or even a literary text. This does
not mean that it does not convey certain postulates, fragments and
sequences... . however, they are not anchored to a domain, a method or a
system. One argument that could be made against psychoanalysis, and
against its eventual diaspora, is its lack of recognition of its setting. As if it
nostalgically wanted to lock up in the text, in theoretical and scientific
interpretations - even those made while 'in session' - a scene that calls the
very condition of representation into question. As if psychoanalysts, or
their readers, could not stop themselves from reframing within classical
representation everything about psychoanalysis that does not fit in, trying
to re-master in the utterance the drama of enunciation that is played out
there. Everything that is said and written about psychoanalysis bears
witness to this. Writing on psychoanalysis always runs the risk of
downplaying the efficacy of the scene.
How can we speak of analysis from within its setting? From inside the
scene?
*
Do you think you can put the beginning in front, and the end, the culmi-
nation, in back? Is the former not always intuited, rationalized, as the past
- already left behind, even when you try to get back to it (and not by
walking backwards) - and the latter as the future, up ahead even when
implying a detour through the past?
Try to imagine the beginning ahead of you, and the end behind you,
and the habitual scene of representation starts to vacillate. Try to imagine
it with no way out, and no hidden agenda, in the following scenario: in an
eternal present, in the future perfect, in a futurable conditional - not some
eternal return of the same - and with absolutely no reappropriation of the
beginning in the origin. What vertigo without our reassuring representa-
tion of space! What direction do you move in? How do you begin
speaking?
What do you say anyway? What meaning can language still have?
The subject is often imagined as source, with nothing behind him or

her. As if he or she had their back to the wall. If there was anyone back
there, it would be God: the creator of everything. Back turned to every-
thing that went before, does the subject imagine she or he is protected in
front and up above?
In back of the subject who speaks in analysis, there is the analyst. Of
course, it is not quite so simple. Underneath the backside2 of the analy-
sand, there is the couch. The reality of having actually to lie on the couch
makes it more difficult to believe he or she has no backside, or to imagine
some God back there. Under the couch maybe? Too humble a position for
a God. Obviously, there is also the analyst, in back. But there's not
supposed to be anything back there. Is the analyst going to function as
God? At times, perhaps when she or he is silent and seems all-powerful. It
becomes more difficult when the analyst admits something about her or
his own desire — in interpretation, for example — or when seen face to face
before or after the session, or when touched. Is the analyst going to
function as 'wall'? Here again, not always. In any case, yes, in the
phantasms of the subject. But maybe that is where the analyst discovers the
wall he or she was leaning up against.
And what if this wall speaks? Where is the source now? In the analyst,
the only subject? If she or he claims absolute knowledge - then, yesy
possibly. If the analyst plays the hermeneut - yes, maybe, at least for a
time. But when the analyst's own transference and desire dictate what he
or she says, things are a lot less simple. The source is no longer simple. In
the scene, it is at least double. Which is strangely disturbing for the
proper . . .
The position of the analyst has several other effects. Discourse is actua-
lized at the intersection of two axes. The subject of representation has a
front and a back, an up and a down, and is supposedly upright, forming a
THE SETTING IN PSYCHOANALYSIS 195
right angle with the plane supporting her or him. What happens when the
subject lies down and speaks with someone in back?
Imagine the scene. The cardinal points flip over. Where is the subject
with respect to front, back, up, down? What becomes of the horizon, for
example? The subject's intersection with it is infinite: analysis is intermin-
able.
In the scene, right and left are precious co-ordinates for orientation.
When right and left are missing, Plato's demiurge cannot make the world
turn; Kant can no longer be found in his room, etc. At the analyst's, the
analysand is not in his or her own environment, among familiar objects,
and the analyst, from one visit to the next, could very well move all the
objects in the office around. The reference point formed by the analyst's
body when the subject enters the scene disappears all at once, due to their
respective positions. The analysand misses the analyst's body. All reference
points are reversed; face to face, right corresponds to left and left to right.
Here, they are one behind the other; left corresponds to left and right to
right. As if they were looking at themselves, at each other, in the same
mirror. Besides, if you walk up to a bed and lie down on it, you will
yourself have modified left-right orientation. However (and this decon-
structs representation), it is the analyst who directly maintains certain co-
ordinates for the subject: is the analyst then imagined to be holding up the
vertical axis, while the subject is lying down? The junction point of the
two axes is no longer within the one who speaks. That which guarantees
the present splits in two? Opens up an abyss between the two? The right
angle is, at least for the time being, lost to the subject?
In this between two, the accordance of reflection with representation is

also lost. Even if subjects can reflect 'within themselves' on the conformity
of the representation to the thing itself, and even if they have in some
ways introjected the specular, the specular matrix of everything they were
representing, it is the analyst who fulfills the function of the mirror. Of
course, the thing in the mirror is not the same thing any more, never was
the same thing, and never was actually there. The identity between a thing
and its representation holds no assurances. The distinction itself is highly
problematic. The representation is not necessarily different from what it
represents, not because the thing is nothing more than a memory, but
because the memory itself might not have a reference, or a model for
memory. There is no rating scale for the appropriateness of memory, no
right or wrong memories, nor even any 'thing' to remember; there is never
any painting of the real thing hung up on the wall in front of the subject.
Memories as such are not the object of analysis. And remembering is
not about bringing memories back in order to show or to demonstrate
their conformity, or lack thereof, to some abstraction of memory.
Memories emerge as the privileged - not always - mode of expression, no

doubt because of the supine position, and because of the absence of
immediate perceptions, notably visual ones. But they also signal a mode of
defense: inertia, the filling-in of an invisible frame of representation with a
content the subject thinks appropriate to it. The 'object' would really be
the framework of all representation, the imperceptible, unrepresentable
construction of the phantasm that dramatically reappears because no
objects are perceived, because 'say everything' results in meaningless
discourse, and because there is no guarantee that what is said is truthful,
etc.
The object of desire does not simply conform to the same teleology as
the object of representation, nor to the same methodology. And it often
outwits all intuition. Here as well, the subject must be at least double,
because if something can be signified about the 'object,' it is as the result
of its projection in analysis onto the analyst. The form-content (if we can
use these terms) of what is to be represented - impossible aim in the
classical sense of the term — is produced between the analysand who speaks
and the analyst who sustains the setting of his or her word. And, of course,
there will almost never be discovery of the setting, or unveiling of what
seduces and maintains the word within this framing. The frame, or the
window, determines the form of the apparition; they themselves do not
appear, any more than they exist outside the session.
Let us also note that the object is usually in front of the subject, but in
this case it is in back. When the subject - accustomed to a certain practice
of representation - seeks the object 'before' her or him, who is the source,
the object has already moved to the back. And what comes to the
'forefront' masks the object: profusion or excess of meaning, or of literal
meaning, meaning's elusive above or beyond. The subject is overwhelmed
by language, and, consequently, all signs or signifiers appear, at least for a
time, as equally contingent, inappropriate, lacking in specificity, etc. The
scene of representation dissolves into confusion. It empties out, even as it
loses mastery, both at the same time, within an ever more profuse enuncia-
tion. The subject no longer knows where to begin, what goal to aim at,
what type of utterance or enunciation to articulate here and now. It is the
transference, the projection onto the analyst of what causes the word, or
the desire, to reclaim its framework, that maintains what is spoken, the id
that is spoken .. .2 But in what time? In what confusion of times?
How? By assigning to the analyst the simple function of reflecting
screen? Of mirror? Thus allowing the subject to read the secret cipher of
his or her desire? By watching for signs of her or his image to appear on
the analyst in order to introject it? But since it is not really about the
image, but rather about its framing, how to distinguish 'me' from 'him' or
'her'? Me as the same as him or her? Especially since about the analyst
himself or herself (as same) few clues are given. The subject would have to
introject the whole analyst? The same questions subsist. Who is P. Who is
youl And furthermore, the subject leaves whatever he or she does not want
to be, to have, or to know, to the analyst, and wants nothing more to do
with it. How to distinguish between a good and a bad projection? A
'good' or a 'bad' copy of oneself?
This quest for the appearance in the mirror of the cause of language, of
desire, is yet another illusion caused by their reappropriation in representa-
tion. The analyst signifies this by functioning as mirror as well as by
eluding this function. Undoubtedly, the subtlest articulation of the analytic
scenario, and the most insidious question it raises about representation, are
the distinctions among projection, identification, identity to self, and desire
for the same. These functions become confused due to the inexplicit,
uninterpreted postulate that representation has only a front, and no back,
and that it does not undergo the inversion produced in the mirror. The
setting of psychoanalysis, its unfolding, contradicts this pretension
concerning representation's 'front.' Let us remember the respective
positions of the protagonists, their evolution, the preoccupation with the
backside of the subject (no acting out - that would confuse phantasm and
reality, and avoid questioning the status of representation itself; with no
exceptions, the backside of the subject is situated over on the couch), the
non-face-to-face with respect to the object, the non-face-to-face with
respect to the mirror, etc. Representation submits to a certain number of
swivels and turns, or leaps, that elude common sense, leaving, behind the
face that is exposed, the secret, hidden reserve of its back side, hermeneutic
resource, and this is not one of the least disconcerting aspects of the
practice. In the front-to-back about-faces of representation, subjects find
their 'volume,' not only the volume of soul, or of mind (circle never
constituted except in the face-to-face?), but also of their body, flesh, and
story.
This is not to say that there will not be, in the language of the analy-
sand, preferred signs, words, and sequences. When they are interpreted as
such, the fascination they momentarily exercised in the face-to-face is
reinforced with meaning, so-called secret meaning that the analyst unveils.
These are the key semantemes of the analysand's language-desire, the main
points of her or his meaning system deciphered by the analyst, new high
priest of hermeneutics.
No sign is worth being singled out and interpreted as such in analysis.
Such a gesture would resubordinate the setting to the scene of representa-
tion that brought on the neurosis. Which means that no projection, no
identification, no mimeticism, should be pinned down to the truth of one
single meaning. One has to wait until, breaking off from their support,
these diverse modes of identity - that is, projection, identification, and

mimeticism - teach the analyst and the analysand that they have a back
side. What maintained their fascination and their privilege was the security
of the only face possible, the face-to-face, along with the hidden support
assuring their presentation: that surface whose back never appears, and that
must be penetrated until infinitely pierced by a final inaccessible meaning.
Since all representation can be turned around, its value becomes part of
an economy, and furthermore an echo-nomy, which needs no ultimate
anchorage in order to have value. The signs play off each other without
some Master, Father, or Analyst, who would answer for their ultimate
meaning: no all-powerful mirror, no guarantor for the functioning of the
totality of the set of signs or signifiers, no legislator of suitable meaning.
Dancing while writing, no doubt, evokes the pursuit of a similar practice,
at least for whomever does not dance always in the same direction, or
pirouette around the same axis, but turns round without depending on a
fixed plan. The problem remains: can one get there alone?
We have known for a long time that the language spoken in analysis
leaves considerable room for the past, and that the present is immersed in
the past: a past that was never present — in the sense of a representable
thing - and that never will be. Representation is thus disengaged from its
pretension to a univocal here and now, even an eternal here and now,
because, once again - despite the hopes of the analysand - there will be no
model for memory, nor discovery of a memory that would equivocally give
weight to representation, overdetermining it with temporal stratifications
whose different impacts could be interpreted, giving meaning to every
moment of the past, up to the present. The facilitation of the trace has no
term that can be appropriated, in either direction. It writes, rewrites,
inscribes, reinscribes, but does not offer itself up to be seen, intuited,
reintuited, remembered. So what happens to it in the analytic setting?
Where will its tracing be marked, re-marked? Against what will it exercise
its strength? What will the medium for its writing be? What or who will
keep its memory? For a time, the analyst fulfills these different functions.
More precisely, the analyst's body? For either the memory is repressed in
the present, or it is assisted by already written 'things,' texts, as well as
laws, or else it needs a corresponding material in order to be inscribed and
kept, at the time of each displacement, and each reworking of the
economy. What the analysand asks of the analyst, at least implicitly, is to
ensure that her or his memory traces are maintained. And the analyst has
no other choice but to refer to an already written text and submit them,
compare them and evaluate them according to it — text-book, or text of his
or her own personal economy — or to make himself or herself, insofar as
that is possible, into the available medium for the inscription of the traces
of the analysand, for the time of the drama of analysis, and thus to become
what is unfit for all effective presence, unfit for all the edicts of common
sense, and unfit for attestations to truth of any kind, etc.
Who ensures this keeping of the traces in theory or in writing? And

what price is to be paid by someone who renounces the appropriation of
her or his own meaning, or of the other's. The appropriation of her or his
own desire, or of the other's? The analyst is paid for this function, for this
forfeit, or this infamy, which is in any case unrepresentable in the estimate
of the debt. In any case, the analyst is paid, sometimes too little,
sometimes too much.
However, some other criteria do come into play here. How, how much,
whom to pay for keeping the traces outside of this scenario? What is the
relation between guilt, the debt owed to the father, or to the truth of the
word, and the one who is unpaid and who functions as memory? It is to
the father, no doubt, that we owe the transmission of the text of the law,
but is he not the very one who forces into a representation the traces that
do not remember him? The father is not the keeper of the traces: he erases
them in the common sense of the present. But they want to be about their
work, and can do so only if reinscribed onto a readable medium. What or
who will fulfill this function without appropriating the traces? What will
he, or she, be paid for this service? And does the secret of meaning — in
the text as well - not come from, does it not in large part come from, this
unavowed medium that does not even know itself, and to which the
meaning owes the investment of its present meaning, or even its force, and
the tracing and design of its writing? For re-marking the facilitated
pathways, the scribe is not sufficient unto himself or herself. Even were the
scribe, in some privileged way, medium, the strength would have come
from some other, whom she or he would rewrite.
In the scene of presence, the voice is the most subtle means of auto-
affection, or of auto-reaffection for the subject in his or her interiority.
The voice, in the analytic setting, runs through an additional circuit. Auto-
affection imposes itself from the very beginning as relayed through hetero-
affection. The illusion of simplicity in the return to self, in identity to self,
is blurred by this doubling of circulation. / returns to itself thanks only to
the detour through the other. / thinks itself only after having passed
through the other. The / think that accompanies all representation is
already the other's thought. The voice returns to the subject only through
the voice of the other, including the voice of her or his internal speech and
thought.
Since the determinant is not so much what is said here and now, as it is
the phantasmatic framing that dictates that nothing else can be said, a
framing that the analyst has already heard, analysands can carry on a silent
monologue with themselves, and they will be listened to. They know it
too, without knowing it: from their discomfort at keeping quiet, from
their anger at being heard in spite of everything, from their irritation if the
analyst begins to speak, reactuaHzing the fact that there have always already
been two voices, and that if there had not always been two, they would not
hear or understand themselves, and that, if priority must absolutely be
assigned, it would go to the other who spoke before them, in them. It is
when they believe they are auto-affecting exclusively, that they are trying
most purely to re-hetero-affect - but that, they do not want to know.
It can result in all kinds of murders - real, imaginary, symbolic. Nonethe-
less, within the autarkical pretension to current common sense, it seems the
murder succeeded in part, that it formed one body with a so-called proper
word, with a realized identity to the self. Which does not prevent fights to
the death from persisting among theoreticians, or even writers, in order to
appropriate the proper signification. The various interpretations do not
change anything; the war goes on, with other weapons, perhaps.
The war is also waged in analysis. When it comes to meaning, analysand
and analyst do not surrender unity of voice easily. But the voice that comes
from behind the one who thought herself or himself the origin of meaning
confuses the geography of auto-affection. It is not a confrontation of
voices, or a crossing of voices, like a crossing of steel, nor is it violence,
even though there can be violence in the contest to see who speaks louder,
or more appropriately. One of the voices comes back to the subject from
behind. If he or she silences it, then he or she risks losing his or her own.
How are these two irreconcilable voices represented in theory, in the
text? In theory, in philosophy at least, we know a little about it: the son
forces silence on the father, steals his voice by force.
But are we still really talking about voice? Or is voice not dead as well -
except in some delirium of internal speech, some hallucination, some so-
called divine revelation or inspiration - in this takeover of the voice of the
one by the other? Sense, meaning, have no more voice. A connotation that
risks making them unfit for truth.
And what about in writing? How to retrace simultaneously the two
voices, together and apart? Without privileging either one? Without some
forced analogy that, in some ways, reduces them to the same? Is it possible
to write in two voices? If not, what unity of the subject re-forms in
writing? Or: does writing renounce the voice? Why? Where can the traces
of its effacement be read in the text?
*
And the gaze? It has always been the gaze that commands object-
representation; the gaze that intuits, exposes, reassembles the represented in
front of itself, giving it or recognizing its form; the gaze that maintains the
privilege of the face-to-face. It is difficult to look at one's backside, unless
it is projected to the front by a play of mirrors. The backside is the
impotence of the gaze.
Analysands have nothing before their eyes. In the view of their habitual
view, they are plunged into blindness. They see nothing but nothing-to-
see, apart from a minute inspection of the analyst's furniture, perception
that's soon exhausted. As for the face-to-face of representation, the supine
position disrupts it. In analysis, what happens to the gaze, privileged organ
of representation? Perhaps it is abandoned to the analyst for a while.
Perhaps analysands temporarily experience themselves as object of the
other's perception. But the scene cannot be reduced to that. So? Subjects
re-vision their memories? How to be sure that perception, or the relation
to perception, is right? They tell what they have seen, here or there. They
re-see and replay what they saw for the other? They have no idea what or
whom to look at, or look upon. The perspicacity or the acuity of the gaze
overflow. They tell what they do not see, have not seen, saw without
seeing - beyond the horizon - think maybe they saw. Should have seen?
How can they know? Where do we make the distinction between seen and
not seen, visible and not visible? Hallucination and reality of perception?
Perhaps, what the subject sees there most clearly and most surely, is
precisely hallucination. And if we had to declare what is most distinctly
recognizable in analysis, would it not be a language of hallucination? But
what happens to it in the scene of representation? Where is this underside
of the perceived, the perceptible, or the recognizable hiding? Could it be
in the fact that the chain of meaning is somehow closed off? Or in the fact
that all there is to see is already given in representation, and that there is
no room for another seen? Or in the fascination with literal meaning? Or
in its authoritarian power of conviction that captures the conviction of
hallucination? Or in the postulated imperceptibility of ideality? But from
what then would ideality have taken its framing? What relations are
sustained between ideality and hallucination? Is each the underside of the
other? Unless ideality is an hallucination that repeats itself in representa-
tion, if the treatment does not bring out their intervals, their alternations,
and even their reconciliations?
The psychoanalytic setting makes it obvious that the hierarchy of values
of representation corresponds to a perspective, even to an optical illusion.
Mastering all representations in the face-to-face, organizing them into the
same time-frame, onto the same plane, while maintaining the pretense of
respect for their spatio-temporal differences, requires that they be ordered
within a perspective with differing degrees of presence, propriety, and
proximity, in accordance with the rigidity of the proper, a perspective that
damages, infinitely, through loss of volume.
The privileging of the gaze and its face-to-face is allied with an economy
of the sexual: privilege of the visible sex, but also of all tropism of the
front. Freudian sexuality is perhaps, at the same time, a negation of the
sexed body. It leaves woman as guardian of a body without a sexuality of
its own? Castration is reduced to nothing to see? In the other? Hence, the
Other?
Concerning the privileging of the visible of and in representation, the

following questions can be raised:
• Is what makes us laugh in a play on words not the revelation of the back
side of the words, the things? The incongruous discovery of a part of
that back side that is supposed to be hidden by common sense?
• Would repetition compulsion not be that which remains of an insistent

left-behind? And the death at work there, does it not really mean that
it/the id4 is still, and always, repeated, or that it/the id is still, and
always, trapped in the mirror-surface of a present, leaving life drives left-
over, or behind?
• Couldn't deferred action be interpreted as what is imposed by the under-

side of things, after the subject has charged ahead, projected himself or
herself forward, seduced by the fascination of the face-to-face?
*
Why and how did Freud get the ingenious idea of this scenario? Because
he found himself facing a sign undecipherable except in its paralysis? A
sign whose only representation was paralysis? Of course, all representations
are paralytic, but they do not know it. Whereas hysteria, deprived of its
own sense, of common sense - of all sense? - presents in its miming only
this remainder of the meaningful sign: its paralytic setting. Is that what
empirically pushed Freud to deconstruct the frame of the proper, of so-
called objective reality, in search of conditions that would permit every-
thing to be said without hierarchical judgment, without a priori appropri-
ateness or truth, plunging sign and sense back into their sedimentations,
their waste products: the little stories of his patients (male and female), the
beginning plus the origin, phantasms, dreams, hallucinations, perceptible
transference, etc.? Why then does he also resubjugate it to the traditional
logic of representation? Not only just that, but also that? And why the lag
in theory that could very well re-establish the authority of the a priori of
meaning over a setting that calls them into question; a lag that could
reduce psychoanalysis to a science pretty much like any other, a theory
pretty much like any other, an empiric like any other. Whereas psychoana-
lysis, since its setting is not an empiric like any other, has the power to
question the dichotomy. In other words, could this empiric undercut
certain a priori governing the scene of theoretical representation, including
the divorce between its oppositions?
If we invoke the fact that Freud knew only the analyst's position, and
not the analysand's: armchair/couch, seated/supine, face-to-face/no face-to-
face, etc. it might be objected that the argument is much too empirical.
The only decisive response might be that is how he missed the relation
between the two positions and its possible interpretation. However, the
hypothesis cannot be verified; nor should it be. That would be reprivi-
leging one position over the other.
What can be known, on the other hand, is that the setting was imposed
by a practice of sexuality, and that it inspired a theory of sexuality. But has
that theory of sexuality not come to be an obstacle for inquiry into repre-
sentation? Is the theory of sexuality not Freud's most regressive contribu-
tion? Can we negate or deny the phallomorphic, phallocentric character of
this theory? - even though, as far as the logic of truth is concerned,
Freud's practice does raise certain unavoidable questions: dreams,
phantasms, deferred action, overdetermination, etc. How is it that he
missed the articulation between his theory and his practice? Was it an
ideologically marked social sexual practice that created an obstacle to
theoretical progress?
Why all these questions? They interrogate the sign and the text. They
ask how we might move beyond their 'true' meanings, their 'right'
meanings, their common-sense meanings, without ending up in some
other mode of fascination, or of paralysis, or excessive repetition of what
has been neglected about the backside, and without crossing over into
disorder, simple anarchy? How can we turn the sign over, even in the text?
Turn it over so that one side no longer has the monopoly on its value?
Turn it around in several different ways: looking into the inversion of all
specular operations that projection - confusing that which is projected
with identity - has never wanted, or been able, to see, the other being no
more than the medium, surface, mirror ensuring the projection of the
same. Turning it over also so that its back side need not stay hidden,
secret, sacred. This means that the linearity of the utterance, whatever the
force of its demonstrations, is no longer sufficient, and that all of its
pornographic attestations and transgressions are not sufficient. They lead
the sexed body back to the privileging of the projection out in front, even
if what is really out front is the backside itself. Fragmenting the text is not
enough either . . . We need to regestualize the sign, but not within an
already prescribed — by the a priori of the sign - semiotics of gesture. We
have to turn signs over and over in every direction, shake them up well,
and not repeat or confirm them from memory, adhering to a medium for
identity that cannot recognize the other side of a backside.
And I might express regret that today, even here, the face-to-face was
privileged; not that I believe that pirouetting around a classroom or a
conference hall can ever eliminate the obstacle of such an old, old story.
XVI
The Poverty of Psychoanalysis1
On Some Only Too Pertinent Considerations
In memory of Juliette L.
Gentlemen, psychoanalysts . . .
Why 'gentlemen' only ? Adding 'ladies' changes not a thing: in language,
the masculine rules. The subject is expressed in one gender only (unless he
discovers the flaw in his truth?). The phallus - and what is more, the Phallus
- is the emblem, signifier and production of one single sex.
Therefore, gentlemen psychoanalysts, most of you - if I go by what you
say, and write - will not be able to understand my title, what it evokes,
what it refers to, in whose memory it is formed, in whose history it is
inscribed, in which discourse it has already taken place, what desires it
speaks of, or imitates, etc. Most of you will not know how to interpret it.
And your attention will be blocked by at least two systems of screens,
censorship and repression:
• a psychic reaction of rejection, at first individual, and then collective.

Psychoanalysis poor? Psychoanalysis petty or mean? Psychoanalysis
pathetic? What is that all about? The phallo-narcissistic investment you
have made in your function as analysts will not allow you to tolerate
expressions like that, even in questions. You will protest, more or less
consciously, like those who wish to keep some desire repressed: psycho-
analysis is certainly not in the poorhouse, or petty, or pathetic. That will
even strengthen your resistance. Let us hope that it will last only so long
as it takes you to understand, and that your institutions themselves are
not founded on ignorance of your poverty, of your pettiness, and of
how pathetic you are... .
• a desire to know, at least for those who still have it. Go ask some professor
of philosophy or mathematics, or some political militant or ex-militant
(male or female), what I am talking about here. As 'subjects presumed to
know,' they will perhaps get the benefits of your transference . . .
To know what exactly? Something about philosophy? About politics? Or

something about the way the unconscious functions? You intend to
separate philosophy and politics from the unconscious, but you have been
mercilessly misled, since in reality they are mutually determining in the

history of knowledge. You do not want to know that the unconscious,
your own concept of the unconscious, did not shoot up fully armored
from the head of Freud, that it was not created ex nihilo at the end of the
nineteenth century, springing forth in order to impose its truth on the
whole of history - including world history . . . - past, present and to come.
The unconscious was discovered, and should be understood, spoken about,
and interpreted, within a tradition. It exists within, through, and for a
culture. Failing to put it in its proper place, you reduce it to . . . ? A goal
or object of your desire whose truth still escapes you, some object c O' or
'o' that maintains your drives in effervescence, keeps you on the run,
impassions and terrorizes you, turns you on, and makes you all band
together, all stick together, all resemble each other . . . Economic solution
- in every sense of the term - to the general crisis of indifference hanging
over the Occident. Perhaps you did not know about that?
In your contempt for culture - which is very profitable for you - you
resent some men's and women's questioning of the consecrated values of
psychoanalysis. A psychoanalyst, male or female, who examines the history,
culture, and politics into which psychoanalysis is inscribed, is supposedly
not one of you any more. Psychoanalysis must remain closed in, without
limits or determinants other than itself, with no authorizations - of
existence or essence - other than its own. In a word: whole, absolute, and
without historical foundations. Its theory and practice are founded on just
a little dab of history. It is enough to have read Freud and Lacan - even
better to stick to the latter only - to be a real analyst.
But how is it that you are authorized to decide if someone is an analyst

if, according to you, 'the analyst is authorized only by himself? Are your
criticisms founded on that 'by himself? Those criticisms are, in any case,
nothing but rejections: 'she or he is not an analyst,' 'that is not analysis.'
What determines this proscription, and this 'foreclosure'? Your own? In
accordance with what law? In the name of what name? The name of a
father of psychoanalysis to whose unconscious every unconscious must
conform? The imperialism of an Unconscious whose subjects everybody,
males and females, would have to become? Well then, what you should say
is: he or she is not, or is no longer, subject to that Unconscious. And then
listen to what the unconscious still has to say. Because, either the uncon-
scious is nothing more than what you have already heard - and so
whatever unheard things your female and male patients still might try to
say, that is never it, never the id2 — or the unconscious is desire that tries
to speak itself, and as analysts, you have to listen without excluding,
however your own desire may be implicated in listening to everything, and
whatever the risk that your own death might ensue . . .
THE POVERTY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 207
Do you not think that everything that functions in the name of history
and in the name of psychoanalysis speaks of the economy of your death?
Or of your economy of death? How can you be an analyst and not deal
unendingly with that question? And not wonder, always and everywhere, if
analysts might not be protecting themselves from death by imposing it on
the other? And if they might not be defending themselves against their
own violence or hatred by imputing it or leaving it to the other? And if
analysts might become analysts only so that the other can live the relation
to death in their stead; while, neutral and benevolent, silent as the tomb,
realistic, objective, impartial, and scientific spectators, they are witness to
. . . tragedies that are not, or are no longer, their own? Should what we call
the 'analyst subject' be interpreted as a casting out of death? Or as its
effect? As a passage to some beyond? Which would bring forth what? A
ghost? Some kind of mechanism? In any case: something in-corporeal?
What can the appearance or the persistence of such a status of the subject
mean in our history? How can we know without questioning history or
retraversing it?
In other words, how do you interpret the effects of a culture on the

unconscious: your own and your analysands', both male and female?
What if the unconscious were at one and the same time the result of
censorship and repression imposed in and by a certain history, and a not
yet come to pass, a reservoir of the still to come? Then, your rejections,
reprimands, and lack of comprehension would just be turning the future
into the past. What you would be doing is reducing the still unsubju-
gated to the level of the already subjugated, the still uspoken or unsaid
of language to what one language has already paralyzed into mutism, or
kept down in silence. Might you be - without your knowledge — the
products and defenders of an existing order, its officials of reprimand
and repression, making sure that this order is the only one possible, that
there is no other imaginable word, desire or language, aside from the
ones already in place, that there is no other culture authorized but the
monocratism of patriarchal discourse? Are you culturalists without your
knowledge? Some of your statements seem to testify to that . . . sympto-
matically.
Now you happen to benefit from prestige, power, love, and transference
as a function of the projection onto you of a desire still to come. So, if
you are not there to hear it (the id),3 if that is not your job, if all you care
about is invariably reducing every word you hear to what has already been
expressed or written, to forcing it into your economy of repetition, your
economy of death, then you should say as much, and write it, clearly. Let
us know. So that certain men, or women, do not expect from you (and at
what price!) what you neither can nor want to give them, so that they do
not go on asking questions you neither can nor want to answer.
You could go out and boast about having perfected and put on the
market an extraordinarily profitable 'lifetrap' (R. M. Rilke's word), a
lifetrap no other economy ever had the notion, or the audacity, to offer its
buyer-consumers. Something they have to spend their life-savings on, only
to end up with nothing. Something in the name of which they would have
the right to ask everything of you, and pay accordingly, only to find, after
the demand has exhausted all their resources, that your only answer is
'nothingness,'' or (dis-being" Go ahead and proclaim it openly. The market
is such that you will still have clients. But not all men, and certainly not
all women. Some men and some women no longer want anything to do
with your nothingness. No matter what seductions, simulations, jewels,
veils, semblances, or beliefs you employ to dress it up.
So do not keep saying, in some kind of naive pretense, that analysis

'sticks to what is most individual in the desire of the subject - individual
as defined by his history and told in his symptoms,' and 'that it is thus out
of what is most individual in the symptom that the universal of a science
becomes possible'4 (Eugenie Lemoine-Luccioni, Partage des femmes, Paris:
Seuil, 1976, p. 11, [pp. 4-5]). 5 Because, aside from the fact that one
might ask you what this relationship is between one science, yours, and the
universal, it very quickly becomes obvious, in reading you, that you estab-
lish this relation in a univocally deductive and, above all, normative way.
Which is to say that whoever knows your universal, the Lacanian code,
knows a priori how you are going to interpret 'what is most individual in
the desire of the subject.' We might even say that a filter is already in place
in front of your ears; it closes them off or opens them up as required; or
that they have been injured, and fitted with an orthodoxical prosthesis
before your analysands begin to speak. Her or his individual only serves as
proof oi the rightness of your universal.
Freud and the first psychoanalysts did not act in quite that manner, at
least not right away. For them, each analysis was an opportunity to
discover a new facet of practice and theory. Each analysand was heard as
if he or she were contributing something new to both. But from the
moment psychoanalytic 'science' claimed to have found the universal law
of the functioning of the unconscious - each analysis being nothing more
than an application or a demonstration of it — this 'science' became
nothing more than a dead-end, knowledge from a bygone era, the stuff
of university diplomas and theoretical qualifications, enforceable with
sanctions.
What if the price to pay for the very existence of psychoanalysis was
never submitting to one theory and to one science? What if the source of
its singularity was that it cannot be complete, reduced to an already
defined corpus, a knowledge already in place, an already determined law?
That it remain 'interminable'? What if each new analysis were as much an
elaboration of practice and theory as all those that went before, and if a
pre-existing model of analysis indicated only that analysis no longer exists.
Would you object that that would be chaos? Well, you would be admitting
that you have forgotten that every living body, every unconscious, every
psychic economy brings its own order to analysis. You have only to listen.
But a pre-existing law prevents that.
And, since you claim that there is only 'individual' desire, how is that
you can force analytic material into a lexicon or a syntax, into schemata,
and graphs, and mathematical formulas foreign to that individual analysis?
What kind of gesture is it that subjugates the language of the analysand to
a system of signifiers that is not his or her own? In other words, even if
there is a dictionary or a bible of Freudian or Lacanian discourse, there
cannot be a dictionary or a grammar of psychoanalysis, under threat of
forcing the analysand into adaptation to a language different from the one
she or he speaks. Interpretation and listening on the part of the analyst
then become nothing more than acts of mastery over the analysand. They
are instruments in the service of a master and of his truth. The psychoana-
lyst is already enslaved, and reproduces his or her own enslavement.
In practice, when the language of the analysand is listened to, antici-

pated, with reference to an already established system - an already articu-
lated, fixed, frozen code - are her or his needs/desires not captured or
suspended by that system in a formal and empty ecstasy? Do analysands
not end up in some kind of permanent hypnosis or suggestion, whose
medium would be a certain type of language-functioning, whose effects
would be sustained long-term? Anyone who tried to analyze those effects
would automatically be declared outside the ethics of pyschoanalysis . . .
So 'patients' - especially if they want to become or to remain analysts

themselves — will have to pump life and strength into the system, their
own lives and their own strength. The strictly silent benevolent neutrality
of the practicing analyst fascinates and inspires the analysand to fill in his
or her signifiers—containers—receptacles with the discourse of the other. I
mean . . . the Other. Not the analysand's other - or the analyst's - her or
his unconscious, if you will, but an Other's (with capital O, since you
insist), an a priori authority, and a posteriori as well for that matter, always
already and still there, law-trap of an omniscient, omnipotent God the
father-mother (the two being merged in the capital letter . . . ), keeper of
the duly veiled Truth of every unconscious. The analysis 'terminates' with
the submission of every man and every woman - having thus tautologically
become subjects - with no real difference between the sexes - to an order
that makes their needs/desires conform to the desire, always invisible, of a
Master. Perhaps one might venture to suggest that this Master is of their
own making, that it is the Unconscious made School, a sort of micro-
culture both primitive in its magical components and decadent in the cult
of Truth it imposes, terrorizing precisely in proportion to the amount of
ignorance it hides.
Is it not rather surprising that you criticize certain women and men for
their philosophical questioning, given that your schoolmaster literally
brought you up on philosophy? Not using questions, it is true. But are
you not projecting back onto others all that you never digested in his
discourse? All that you resent, all that you loathe about him? How does
the object of this rejection preferentially end up being a woman's word? In
general, is that not a common mechanism in (your) society?
Of course, Lacan delights in not citing his sources or his resources,

which does not help in properly assimilating him. He intentionally plays
the seduction game of the philosophy professor who 'knows more,' and
assures himself of the love of his young pupils. Even so, he did repeat,
until you were tired of hearing about it: read 77?^ Symposium or De Anima,
for example. He was Hegelian enough to have been credited, during some
of his seminars on psychoanalysis at Vincennes, with the discovery of the
master-slave dialectic! He admitted, in certain relatively famous instances
of acting out, his passion for Heidegger. Etc.
So how is it that you can read the Ecrits without having read what the
Ecrits discuss? How can you understand what 'the Thing' or the 'thing in
itself (that you borrow from him, and label as Freudian) are all about,
when you are quite ignorant of how much of the 'Thing' he himself
borrowed from Kant? How do you understand the difference he estab-
lished between 'to speak' and 'to tell,' without understanding what he
understood about it from Heidegger? Two little reminders, among many
others . . . Since all these 'symbolic' or 'imaginary' components, all this
weaving of knowledges and identifications, that constitute your Master's
word are little known, or unknown, to you, his word can appear before
you only as Truth.
All this must have serious consequences for your listening as analysts
'presumed to know,' since you leave uninterpreted the difference between
the knowledge, or knowledges, of your Father-Master, and your own.
What kinds of suggestions, trances, ecstasies, convulsions, and death do

you transmit in consequence? Of course, Lacan desires knowledge. That,
no doubt, is what commands your admiration, and even a certain kind of
beatitude? He loves knowledge more than the unconscious. Or, he loves
the unconscious for the knowledge it brings him. Is that what has left you
all a bit stupid, like children of a father who knows too much, or a father
'presumed to know everything,' whose limits you cannot even imagine,
under pain of confronting your 'lack,' under pain of being forced to
question the function of lack within your own desire? You would rather be
the sons of God than deprived of your lack? So then, you have Lacan as
God of your unconscious, of your School, of your world, of the world?
Final avatar of a — psychoanalytic - incarnation of salvation. Do you not
know that when science comes to power, God is dead? And your god is a
specter that haunts you because you cannot discover his nature. Or inter-
pret, according to your science, his provenance or his cause in relation to
desire. Therefore perhaps... ? His relation to sex? Real sex too.
Your often mixed-up and contradictory statements concerning the status

of the phallus in relation to the organ or to real sex - are they not caused
by the desire to keep the veil in front of your eyes, and everyone else's, so
that you will not see, and we will not see, the sex of your Father in psycho-
analysis? To bury in an unsolvable mystery, in a well of invisibility, in a
capital letter whose crest rises up to infinity - the relationship your father
has with sex: your psychoanalytic primal scene. Does the imaginary and
symbolic value of the phallus need a capital letter because, in the real, the
sexual relation is not supposed to exist, and some sort of phallo-narcissistic
supplement is needed to take its place? Unless we interpret its effects.
It is not a question of underestimating the real. But ask yourselves if the

real might not be some very repressed-censored-forgotten 'thing' to do
with the body.
Alas! The body, for you, is always already engineered by language, a
language. The domination of that language means that 'the sexual relation
does not exist,' any more than woman exists, statements whose theoretical
impact certainly does not exclude impact on the most banal everyday
reality. On the contrary . . . Confining oneself to Truth at the expense of
corporeal sex has the most unfortunate consequences . . .
For example: 'Woman is the figure of the scene of the veil that covers
over the primal scene: she dances the eternal and often ridiculous dance of
the veils. She alone knows what nothingness the veil covers, while, fasci-
nated, man watches. Thanks to which the sexual act can take place'
(Lemoine-Luccioni, p. 180 [p. 152]). (My emphasis on ridiculous: the
dance of the veils, dance of a cosmic mystery and reality above and beyond
any already constituted subjectivity, is the sexual and religious rite par
excellence in many traditions. This scene is played out among the mother-
or the lover-goddess, the gods, and the universe. Its purpose is not to
conceal nothingness, but to break through illusion, and to approach the
act of creation or of generation of the world.)
It scares you, doesn't it... ? But why, exactly? If the relation between
the sexes can be reduced to man's fascination with the nothingness behind
its veils, then there is no recourse against the most profoundly negative
effects of nihilism. As for nihilism's constructive goal - the fall of idols -
well, about that, you want to hear nothing. Is psychoanalysis today not
the practice of a nihilism that unfortunately does not even know it is one?
In that case, 'benevolent neutrality,' with respect to 'saying everything,'
could also be understood as the ultimate form of a certain kind of indif-
ference, where everything would be the equivalent of everything else, with
perhaps a few little variously named differences noticeable against a
unitary background: it is all the same anyway. How could it really be
otherwise if there are not two sexes, each with its own imaginary and its
own order?
And if 'allegiance to castration'(!) is not the condition for opening up

the imaginary and tautological circle of the subject to the perception and
desire of some other, but rather 'everyone's experience that their desire is
the desire of the Other' (Lemoine-Luccioni, p. 180 [p. 152]), and if it
subjects the two sexes to the cult of the lack of, or in, the Other, then
psychoanalysis is a prorogation of a religion of privation and frustration, in
which no incarnation of the divine is possible. Its law is the imposition of
nothingness for the sake of Nothingness. It inscribes nothingness onto the
deepest unconscious of sexed bodies.
Bodies with no reason even to look at each other any more, since 'there
is nothing real to see in either the one or the other' (Lemoine-Luccioni, p.
180 [p. 152]), Hence 'unbearable nudity'? And 'beauty as ornament, that
is, as weapon and as cover-up' (Lemoine-Luccioni, p. 181 [p. 153])? But
then why, if there is nothing real to see in either one, do we have a 'delib-
erate rejection, on the woman's part, of her own body, in favor of beauty'
(Lemoine-Luccioni, pp. 181-2 [p. 153])? If for you the scopic drive is
constitutive of the subject, and yet there is 'nothing to see,' aside from
what has already been ornamented, armed, and covered up, what concep-
tion of the subject are we talking about? Woman still has to give up her
body in order to perpetuate it. A body so ugly it can be looked at only
when covered up . . .
Don't you worry about philosophy. Philosophy couldn't care less. All of
you, men and women, are stuck in nihilism without knowing it. For
example, when you say 'all discourses are equal.' Which is not true, even
'for a subject in analysis or for an analyst' (Lemoine-Luccioni, p. 11 [p.
4]). The subject is determined by certain discourses (by the discourse of
mastery - by philosophy) more than by others. After the end of philo-
sophy, philosophy inspires discount discourses among those who are not
aware of its end, and the truth, duly exploited by professionals in
publishing, comes cheap. The original designer label only has to be
removed. Actually, there is no reason to put one on in the first place any
more. You bring everything down to the same level where it is all equal,
and all worth nothing. Your language is nothing more than a knock-off,
and you do not even know it. The only thing that still seems to regulate it
is a relationship to contradiction, emancipated from all principles, and
from all vital imperative. This polemics for the world's end plays with
language forms, leaving aside respect for their meanings, order, beauty,
and generations.
And so all that is retained from the truth of men is what splits women
up, and assigns them their lot, puts them in their place? The effects on
women of ambivalence, without the safety catch of a negation that
founds truth? The effects on women of the underside of 'male' discourse?
In order for them to be one(s), women must take care of the split. Torn
between 'yes' and 'no,' women are the site of the irreparable wound
(imputed to their sex [organ]); the wound of all the 'I want/I don't want,
I love/I hate, I'll take it/I'll leave it' underlying and covered over by the
True, the Good and the Beautiful of men. When you affirm that 'man is
and he remains, as man - and assuming he exists as a man who would
not be a woman at the same time - one' (Lemoine-Luccioni, p. 9 [p.
3]), and that 'knowledge does not divide him' (Lemoine-Luccioni, p. 9
[p. 3]), are you not making woman the bearer of what you call the 'split-
ting of the subject,' are you not reducing her to the effects of man's
relation with the unconscious? Because, if man is not divided in his
knowledge, he has no unconscious. Or, at least, he wants to know
nothing about it. And his own schiz can be understood only as that
which splits women up and puts them in their place. You go on: 'It is
understood that woman is not; and yet if she should disappear, man's
symptom would also disappear, as Lacan says. Where there is no
symptom, there is no language, and therefore, no man either' (Lemoine-
Luccioni, p. 10 [p. 4]). So it falls to woman to hold onto her (?)
symptoms, to remain within 'her lot and her suffering,' 'the paradise of
jouissance' (Lemoine-Luccioni, p. 8 [p. 2]), or else she 'disappears as
woman'(Lemoine-Luccioni, p. 10, [p. 4]) . . . !
And 'no sexual revolution will ever move those dividing lines, neither
the one between man and woman, nor the one that divides woman'
(Lemoine-Luccioni, p. 9, [p. 3]). Let us take note of this statement in a
book that claims to be 'an analytic, and not a philosophical or a political,
work,' a book that 'is not concerned with the issue of whether women
should make a revolution in order to overcome a lack of recognition that
has up till now kept them from speaking' (Lemoine-Luccioni, p. 11 [p.
4]).
How is it that such contradictory statements can be made two pages
apart? Is the 'neutrality' of the analyst not sticking its neck out a little bit
here, handing down dogma about history from the depths of an armchair?
And when you write: 'My thinking always coincides with what my
analysands (men or women) are telling me, as well as, through what they
are saying, with the analysand that I am; since one hears only what one is
capable of saying, but would not say without the other' (Lemoine-
Luccioni, p. 11 [p. 5]), 'one' feels like asking you where this 'coinciding'
might lead. Might it be leading up to making the other say, or preventing
the other from saying, what you aren't capable of hearing? In whose name
do you write 'he' or 'she' said such and such a thing, had such and such a
phantasm, etc., if you don't reveal where you stand with respect to 'him'or
'her,' to your sex, to your things and your phantasms? How do you decide
who is speaking?
It is easy for you to object that being an analyst means listening to what
the other says without taking sides or making judgments, but how do you
determine which is you and which is the other7. And is this other she or
other he not the other of you? How do you know if you do not interpret
your transference onto that other? Technically speaking, it is true that this
is not a simple issue. But hiding behind what analysands tell you in order
to affirm: the unconscious is, and is only, what I write in their name, and
it is not I who says so, but those men and women, and I take no position
whatsoever - ideological, political, philosophical . . . phallocratic? or sexed?
- regarding what I hear, seems at best naive. Nevertheless that naivety
leads up to certain judgments and condemnations. Unconscious oblige, you
protest? Well, whose?
And if you 'impute' to woman an unconscious that is not hers, or if you
claim that 'it is only when she is all, that is, as she is seen by man, that the
dear woman can have an unconscious' (Jacques Lacan, Encore, Paris: Seuil,
1975, p. 90 [pp. 98-9]), 6 or, worse still, if you maintain that woman does
not exist except as symptom of man's language (Lemoine-Luccioni, 10 [p.
4]), then certain 'complaints' are less 'untenable' than you would like to
think (Lemoine-Luccioni, p. 7 [p. 1]). Women do complain - and
sometimes even before the law, in cases of rape, for example - that they
have no access to their own desires under your law. But all 'the alleged
reasons women give are unconvincing' (Lemoine-Luccioni, p. 7 [p. 1]),
and 'although it is true that no one can or should accept slavery, the only
question that remains to be asked when it is accepted, and even begged
for, is: what is it accepted for, in exchange for what benefit?' (Lemoine-
Luccioni, p. 7 [p. 1]). I will let you answer that one . . .
How could you, though, given that your male masters have taught you
that 'desire is the same regardless of sex' (Moustapha Safouan, La sexualite
feminine dans la doctine freudienne, Paris: Seuil, 1976, p. 157),7 and that it
is difficult to sexualize it in the imaginary, and, in a word, that one
language - traditionally their language - is the only possible language.
Assuming all of that, all you can do with the 'benefits' of slavery reaped by
men in their mastery - is attribute them to women. Whether you have
begun to say anything in all of this about women's own desire is another
question altogether. Because it is not the either devalued or over-valued
discovery of their relation to objects that 'leads women astray;' it is rather
their exile from whatever might be their space. Ecstasied from their space-
time, always moving from place to place in the male phallic imaginary,
they seek to incarnate themselves in some 'thing' man can play with, or
through which he might be able to rediscover value in his own world of
objects (Lemoine-Luccioni, pp. 154-5 [pp. 130-1]). Why not some
element in his House? Why not some member of his School? Why not
some book-'o' produced in the field of his language-'O'?
For each other, for themselves, women are still not there, anywhere:
touching everything, they do not retouch themselves and each other. Lost in
space, like ghosts. Dissolved, absent, empty, abandoned, a part of themselves,
apart from themselves, apart from each other (Lemoine-Luccioni, p. 154 [pp.
129-30]). Whereas, if they were ever to come into the imaginary of their own
desires, they would always be moving and yet always at home, finding their
security in mobility, and their jouissance in motion. Nomads with no bound-
aries other than their own living bodies. But, for that to happen, they cannot
stay put where they've been put. They have to be able to leave the property
where they have been legally confined, in order to try to find their place(s).
And passing a law, in order to protect them from madness by 'allowing them
to keep their furniture in case of divorce' could only be the idea of 'an
eminent male Italian criminal lawyer' (my emphasis; Lemoine-Luccioni, pp.
154-5 [p. 130]). No doubt it is to protect them from going mad that psycho-
analysts today keep them on their couches. In any case, once confined there,
mad or not, nobody will hear anything more about it/the id .. .8
Then you will be able to stay within the circle of your own imaginary.
Which is, in your own words, totalitarian. That explains how you are able
to force the becoming of the desire of the little girl into the same explana-
tory schema as the little boy's, without even making the disclaimer that
you are really just talking about a child (in the neuter), or about man (in
the generic). This power play can be shown for what it is in an example -
that is often where parapraxes appear; it is about a 'piece of furniture'
(again . . . ), a piece of furniture 'at odds with the space of language and
Truth' (Safouan, p. 23 [p. 133]).9 Absolutely - if a piece of furniture has
some role to play in the schema you apply to the girl's demand - made
with 'sealed lips' - you can go right ahead . . . It can never contradict your
schema. Your appeal to Marx confirms it. The goods speak only the
language of their producers-exchangers-consumers. So a 'piece of furni-
ture' will never say anything more than what your desire intends it to say.
And if 'none of us gets a dispensation from thinking about ourselves as a
piece of furniture' (?) (Safouan, p. 23 [p. 133]), it is a bit different to have
to be one without even being able to think about it for lack of a language.
Which is what the cult of your hollow divinities requires . . . How else are
we to take 'seriously' (Safouan, p. 21, [p. 131]) your fetish for capital
letters - Other, Thing, Demand, Truth, Phallus - if not, once again, as a
nihilistic religion with respect to which all living, corporeal, social reality
seems as nothing to you.
Yes, gentlemen psychoanalysts, desire is linked to an epoch (Safouan, p.

19, [p. 130]). That is precisely what allows you today to invest yours in
psychoanalysis, but that is also why you find yourselves called into
question, whether you like it or not, by women's. And when you reduce
what they are trying to tell you to the same old discourse you have always
spoken, or when you stick the label of militant feminism — now there is a
word that does seem to force you out of your neutrality as soon as it
comes up - on it, on the unconscious,10 it signifies your resistance to
acknowledging certain limits. Is it because they mark the limits of your
imaginary?
And you want to keep it absolute. To protect it, you have to deny
certain facts by univocally reducing them to phantasms. Some examples,
perhaps?
The fact that you attempt, even today, to demonstrate that your analy-
sands' rape anxieties bear no relation to reality will make just about any
woman laugh (?). Her/these 'phantasms' (?) must rather come to be under-
stood as memories of traumatic experiences, as images of events submitted
to, seen, or heard, or as the effects of a set of restrictions, interdicts, impos-
sibilities, or oppressions, that are everywhere present in the everyday life of
all women. But man, who fails to recognize there his own desire to rape —
for not having analyzed it? - can only deny, in the name of woman, the
reality of the object of his own phantasms.
When you affirm that, from a very early age, we distinguish between the
sexes using all kinds of insignia, especially clothing, that have nothing to
do with perceived differences in the body of the other (Safouan, p. 14 [p.
126]), are you not saying that what matters to you is what is hidden, what
masks, or ornaments, or makes a relation between two bodies impossible
or forbidden, except - occasionally - through breaking and entering? That
the cause of your desire is the veil that needs to be lifted - occasionally?
The occasional 'semblance' that needs to be deflowered - without knowing
it? That it is the seduction of rape that both motivates and disappoints
your desire? Because the body already has holes in it? Does it only just
have holes? Does your language not have holes? Are your capital letters not
just filling in the holes? Does this parade of letters and master-words not
trap speech in great holes where the words
ring - and reason - in the void? Hence your fear and anxiety about a
certain 'thing'?
When you say that 'the phallic conditioning of the narcissism of the
subject, regardless of sex, is established in, and only in, analytic observation,
a thesis no direct observation could either prove or disprove,' the latter
type of observation being 'as useless here as it is with respect to the
Oedipus complex' (Safouan, p. 15 [p. 127]; my emphasis), it is really
worth it to hold in the laughter long enough to ask you: why do you make
statements that so patently contradict reality? What purpose do they serve?
Do you really believe in this? If you do . . . do you ever leave your
consulting rooms? If you do not, then what is your reality?
Reading you, one discovers that, in fact, 'it is not enough simply not to
be a feminist to know one's place in the business of sex!' (Safouan, p. 12
[p. 125]). Well, if you were feminists - unlikely hypothesis given the real
difference between the sexes, and your existence outside of historical time
- perhaps you would know your own place a little better? In that case, you
would understand — perhaps — why Freud insists that his patients have
vaginal orgasms. It is proof of his own potency. 'That is hardly an injunc-
tion to which it would be easy to respond' (Safouan, p. 17 [p. 129]) . . . ?
On the contrary, actually . . . Women do give themselves, give each other,
'vaginal' orgasms with no trouble. All they need do is allow themselves not
to satisfy your imaginary. You refuse to recognize one fact: women have
orgasms very well without you. That does not stop them from wanting to
have them with you, even though, generally, it is not quite so 'easy to
respond.' However, most of them tell you nothing, 'show' you nothing,
about their jouissance, even their jouissance with you. Maybe so that they
will not be made frigid, frozen by your gaze, your desire, your discourse,
and your theory? That allows you to believe they have no sexual life, or no
longer have one. And is it not astonishing that you decree in your erudite
way that ' "vaginal" frigidity constitutes a definite symptomatic problem in
the sexual life of women' (Safouan, p. 18 [p. 128]), without ever
wondering whether it might not really be the effects, on her, of a problem
in male sexuality? In your 'verbal parade' (Safouan, p. 16 [p. 128]), you
never even question the quality of your male sex life.
You are just as erudite when you state that, 'for us, female homosexuality
represents an obstacle on the path toward the assumption of symbolic
castration' (Safouan, p. 127), but you are forgetting one fact: your own
phantasms are making the law. That symbolic you impose as universal,
purified of any empirical or historical contingencies, is your imaginary
transformed into order, social order too. When you write, on the last page,
that 'if we finally come to think of marriage as an exchange between men
whose object is woman, we find that she takes on the unconscious significa-
tion of all objects of exchange,' and that 'despite the ever increasing liberty
that prevails in the choice of a wife, the fact remains that one always
marries his father-in-law or his brother-in-law,' but that 'these remarks can
easily be transposed into a perspective from which marriage could be
considered as an exchange between women whose object is man'(?)
(Safouan, p. 127), 'one' might ask you if your own non-assumption of
symbolic castration - to put it in your own words - has not led you to
'transpose' just any social organization onto just any other, imagined
according to your fantasies and your denial of homosexuality. Has your
symbolic ever been anything else but the legal guarantee of strict cultural
endogamy among males? Male psychoanalysts, among others.
You remind us that the mother is the first object of desire for the little
girl just as she is for the little boy, and then you conclude one more time
that 'everything happens for the little girl exactly as for the boy' (Safouan,
p. 11), neglecting the fact that desire for a body the same as one's own, is
not necessarily identical to desire for a body different from one's own.
Smelling, tasting, touching, seeing, listening to a body the same as, or
different from, one's own has an effect on desire. Is sex not always
inscribed, and not in some secondary way, in the qualities of a body? Is
sex itself an organ separated/abstracted from its body? Is the imaginary you
are listening from, where you situate your male and female analysands,
incorporeal? It negates, or denies, from the very beginning, that sex is also
constitutive of the body. This might correspond to male phantasms of
possible separation between the two, but does not make a lot of sense to a
woman, unless she is imprisoned in your imaginary. An imaginary that is
exclusively dependent on organs? Erogenous zones and their 'objects',

sex(es) and language(s).
Is psychoanalysis then a theory and a practice dealing with organs? Like
medicine? Generally speaking, psychoanalysis and medicine are both
unknowingly caught up in a technocratic process with little concern for
sexed matter, or about the site where organs come together in living
bodies.
In any case, the system of representations and signifiers accounting for
the psychoanalytic experience is unusually poor in representatives of the
body: of the blood and circulation, of the air and respiration, of the
consumption and metabolism of food, etc. What kinds of vision, of
concepts, and of listening, does the psychoanalyst have in relation to the
body? Is that body dead? Purely mechanical? A libido-producing machine?
What is forgotten or foreclosed about the body, and about sensitive, sexed
corporeal matter, when this mechanism is put in place?
You talk a lot about the debt owed to the father, but very little, or
never, about the debt owed to the mother. Does that not show that, for
you, blood, life, and body are not worth much? Only organs have value, it
would seem. One might well ask you if what prevents the relation between
the sexes - phantasms, object o - could be the symptoms of an unpaid
debt to the mother - false bodies, or semblances, pure objects taking the
place of a repressed-censured relation to the body that gives life. This
unpaid, and at least partly unpayable, debt to the mother, that we would
do well to acknowledge, becomes evident in the impossibility of sexual
relations, in the obligation to reproduce: children, phantasms, theory,
science, etc. But women are the ones who continue to supply the material
substrata - the nourishing body, blood and life - while you exercise the
power of your organs.
Of course, returning to historically dated anatomical-physiological

arguments is out of the question, but we do have to examine the empire of
a morpho-logic, the imposition as norms of discourse — and more generally
of language — of formations corresponding to the necessities or desires of
one sex alone.
The empire of the phallus — of the Phallus — is necessitated by the estab-
lishment of a society based on patriarchal power, where the generative
power of the natural-maternal is taken over as a - phallic - attribute by
god-men, instituting a new order that is supposed to appear natural. From
then on, "nature" is represented as either good or bad, depending on
whether it has been created by men, or engendered by women. The
resulting upheavals affecting the organization of the imaginary and the
symbolic can still be read in the Greek tragedies and myths from the dawn
of our logical era. The values underlying its articulation and deployment
have since then been isomorphic with the male imaginary.
And the way that you dismiss as 'anatomical-physiological reasoning' the
questioning of phallic domination, bears witness, at the very least, to inten-
tional ignorance, and perhaps even to a refusal to interpret this domination
as regulating, through the order of language it commands and which
sustains it, all of your systems of representation, as well as to a refusal to
examine your way of looking at the male-female difference as taking place
solely within one discourse that fails to recognize its sexual determinations.
This means that what you claim as universal is sexed according to your
own necessities. Since they are yours, you cannot see that they are parti-
cular. You reject any outside or inside that resists them, and prefer to
accuse others of all kinds of stupidity rather than to have to submit to
what you call . . . symbolic castration: that is, the possibility of an order
different from your own.
The repression you exercise against women's speech that does not
conform to your conception of the symbolic, and to your symbolic world,
is therefore absolutely predictable, as are the arguments (?) you invoke, and
the tone in which you make your decrees. Since you are implacably
programmed by a history you refuse to question, you have not, up to this
point, developed or written anything on the subject that is especially aston-
ishing.
Thus when you 'simply tender the remark' that 'the question of what
she wants (the girl) is just as much the question of the girl herself as of the
Other, whether it is about Freud, or ourselves, or first and foremost about
the mother' (Safouan, p. 20 [p. 131]), you do not even bother to wonder
about the nature of this 'Other' to whom you relegate the daughter and
the mother (graced with a capital letter so she can fit into your system?).
You go on: 'There is no 'you' unless coming from the great Other'
(Safouan, p. 20 [p. 131]), that is, coming from an ecstatic projection
constituted as all-powerful imaginary reality (the 'cornerstone' of your
symbolic concatenation?) from where T comes back to me in inverted
form.
And what if this schema did not fit the girl's desire? What if this relation
to projection, to inversion, to the transcendental, to the imaginary, were
dependent on a male sexual economy? On being beside oneself, or outside
oneself, as in erection and ejaculation? Man appears to have tried to
reappropriate, not without disappropriation, her desire for him, using a
phallic morpho-logic constituted through his transcendental imaginary.
You want to impose the answer to your own needs as universal law,
thereby reducing, in an endlessly repeated gesture, sexual difference to
nothing.
Trying to find a possible imaginary, or to find one once more, through

the movements of two lips touching each other (cf. Speculum, de Vautre
femme, particularly 'L'Incontournable volume,' and Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas
un, particularly the title essay, cLa 'Mecanique' des fluides,' and 'Quand
nos levres se parlent') is not a regression to anatomy, nor to a concept of
'nature,' any more than it is a call to return to genital norms - women
have several pairs of two lips! It is an attempt to open up the autological
and tautological circle of systems of representation and their discourses, so
that women can speak their sex. The 'at least two' lips no longer corre-
spond to your morpho-logic; they do not conform to Lacan's 'not all,' a
model to which the One is necessary. 'There is One,' but something
escapes it, resists it, is always lacking; there is One, but with holes, fault-
lines, silences that forbid silence, that speak to each other, whisper to each
other, etc.: a real in revolt against the law, but already produced under the
empire of the law? Woman - unwoman, awoman - is privileged to dwell
under the sign of this lack or this fault.
Aristotelian model? Or already Parmenidian? The circle of the same is
posited or presupposed. Within the 'at least two' lips, the becoming form
- and the becoming form of the circle as well - is not only never
complete, or completable, but actually takes place (without ex-sistence)
thanks to this incompleteness; the lips and the borders of the body
respond to each other, back and forth, and in this movement is born,
perpetuated, and developed, a formation of desire, an imaginary of the
sexed body whose form(s) are never detached from the matter that engen-
dered them. Form and matter - the very division between the two terms is
overcome - engender each other ceaselessly, and no form can be extrapo-
lated from the body-support that gave birth to it.
The constitution of woman's sex does not therefore signify the 'lack of,'
or the 'atrophy of,' or 'envy' for, the male sex (except when socio-culturally
induced); nor does it signify a univocal call for completion by the male sex
in the penile or phallic mode. Sexual difference - when there is any -
carries a risk, never foreseeable, of increase or of decrease in jouissance,
and even in desire. For woman as for man.
The risk of diminished desire on the woman's part is, on the other
hand, completely predictable when, by your definition, sex operates
normally. It is easy to understand why, according to you, women are so
often frigid, and why you pay so much attention to the extinction of their
sexual life, which 'they do not even suspect!' (Safouan, p. 16 [p. 128]). Are
you ready to question the formations of your own narcissism so that things
might change? Have you decided to examine your topo-logic so that sexual
difference can be reorganized in order to prevent one side from paying the
narcissistic price of jouissance? So that women will not have to renounce,
and even forget, their own auto-eroticism in order to become the instru-
ments of yours?
And so, as your master Lacan suggests, we must take another look at the
status of the unconscious in women. For, 'if libido is only masculine, then
it is only where the dear woman is all, that is, only where she is seen by
man, there only, can the dear woman have an unconscious' (Lacan, Encore,
p. 90 [pp. 98-9]). 'That is why I say that the imputation of an uncon-
scious is an incredible act of charity,' concludes he - as a premise (Lacan,
p. 90 [p. 98])? But does this unconscious safeguard women's desire or take
it from them? Does it give them libido or take it from them? According to
men, it 'imputes' it to them. Well, that does not mean the same thing as
structuring their 'drives,' unless sexual difference is once again annulled in
a complementarity where the roles are divided up by men?
You say that you hear women speak of their desires - phallic desires
among others - the ones you 'impute' to them. Do they have no others?
When large numbers of women say that, since their analysis, they feel
'closed in,' 'closed off,' 'withdrawn,' 'that some part of themselves has
become inaccessible,' 'that they do not know how to get it back,' etc.,
what symptoms are they talking about? And the reactions you imagine are
very rare: paranoid legal cases brought against you, explosions of hatred,
desire for vengeance . . . More often, it is a question of profound depres-
sion or anguish. Caused by the disappearance of their power? By the
'imputation' of a jouissance that is not their own? And the resulting narcis-
sistic effects?
You object: 'Why listen to them? And why are you stuck at the
'manifest' level, and not hearing what is 'latent' in it?' What if it were you
who were not hearing yourselves try to close women up in your projec-
tions? In the discourse underlying the listening you do? A latent
substratum of your economy uninterpreted by you?
At a more manifest level, you have guided women to adapt to your
society a little better. Many of them recognize the debt they owe you: you
helped them to put up with the various types of conjugal-familial institu-
tions, or to enter the job market, or remain there. They experience fewer
crises in relation to your order. But what pain when they confess what it
actually costs them! That is, when they are not too ashamed to admit it . . .
Of course, some of them have, more or less triumphantly, acceded to
the phallic 'division,' to their 'lot'; they are past mistresses now in the
application of your laws, terrorizing and contemptuous of women who do
not submit to it. Like the vestals of a cult they believe in. Not without
having sacrificed part of themselves to it. And now they demand that
oblation from their peers, the ones you call militants. But the former's
militant orthodoxy is invisible to you, so you have as yet not begun to
analyze it. It is necessary for keeping order, is it not?
One of its current controversies is the (jubilant) assumption of bisexu-

ality as the path to salvation. A parry to women's demands to accede to
their own desires and their own language? While they are trying to become
men, they abandon their 'complaints' and their 'claims'? And then we have
peace and quiet once again.
But is bisexuality not both inscribed on the body and a process of
identification? And since the anatomical-physiological scares the devil out
of you (at least consciously), I imagine that when you claim that Freud is
'more revolutionary' than certain women 'when he posits a fundamental
bisexuality and a signifying differentiation' (Lemoine-Luccioni, p. 65 [p.
53]), you are referrring to questions of identity? Therefore - unless you
believe in sexual essences? — to the play of identifications. How does it
differ in men from in women? Does woman identify herself with the
other, or does she identify the other with herself? In the mechanism you
describe, and according to your interpretive schemata, she identifies herself
with the other. How could it be otherwise when there is one language
only, structured along principles, particularly principles of identity, deter-
mined by one sex alone? As for man, he begins by identifying the other
with himself: assimilating, incorporating, introjecting the other, in order to
constitute a matrix of identifications.
With respect to sexual representatives and representations, this allotment
of identifications ends up being a double polarity within the economy of
one sex and one sex alone. For whoever identifies the self with the other
abandons the 'identity' of her own sex, and whoever identifies the other
with the self reduces the other to his sex. So, where is woman's bisexuality
to be found? When she has become the other - masculine or phallic -
where are her own desire and jouissance to be found? In whatever these
kinds of identification eventually impose upon her?
Making claims for bisexuality does not pose much of a threat really . . .
except the threat of reinforcing the established order. It also has the advan-
tage of eluding or masking the question of the relationship to the same
body and the same sex. While they are hiding behind — phantasmatic or
identificatory - bisexuality, are psychoanalysts not really keeping their own
homosexual desires latent? Does that mean they have sublimated them?
How?
And are you not ready, even today, to look at and analyze what happens
between women, just in order to avoid analyzing your own homosexuality?
To avoid articulating something about it at last? In that case, might your
analytic practice not really be just acting out, whether it is about listening
to male or female analysands, or about your organizations and the theories
you create there? Why the show? For whom? According to your own expla-
nations, as you apply them to relations between women, it would be to
signify something to your father, 'something that occurs in the beyond,
not the beyond of language, but the beyond of what the subject can articu-
late in language' (Safouan, p. 39). What is it about your relation to the
father - including your father in psychoanalysis - that has 'remained
"blocked,"' and requires this detour through acting out so it can be
signified?
As for women, might it not be that they are trying to show something
to their mother - another woman - instead? The fact that the father sees
only a spectacle staged for himself can undoubtedly be interpreted as the
prevalence of his own scopic drives, and as the belief that a woman's desire
can be addressed only to him.
Would that be the reason for the lack, which appears perfectly normal
to him, of any possible language between women? For the fact that, in his
language, women cannot signify (to themselves/each other) their desires?
In order for the mother and the daughter to know that they have same-
sexed bodies, they do not need, as you seem to think, to use a mirror. All
they need do is touch each other, hear each other, smell each other, see
each other . . . without unduly privileging the gaze, without donning the
masks of beauty, without submitting to a libidinal economy that requires
that their bodies be covered with a veil before they can be desirable!
However, these two women cannot tell each other their feelings using the
existing verbal code, nor can they even imagine them within the governing
systems of representations. Love and desire between them, and in them,
have no articulatable signifiers within language. This results in paralyses,
somatizations, and lack of differentiation between them, imposed rejection
or hatred, at best 'doing like,' or 'acting like.' The daughter's first pleasures
remain wordless, her first narcissisms have neither sentences nor words to
speak themselves, even retroactively. When the daughter begins to speak,
she already no longer speaks to herself, of herself. She is already incapable
of auto-affection, exiled as she is in male speak. From her mother and
from other women, she is separated by this male speak, that all women
speak in to each other, without speaking of themselves.
Is the exclusiveness of this male speak of men among themselves not a

guarantee of strict cultural endogamy? Of incest, in indefinitely perpetu-
ated semblance, between father and son, and between brothers? Should it
not be our task to try to interpret that incest now? Mother-son incest is
supposed to be a threat to the order of culture, but the incest that culture
maintains between father and son is a threat to the order of life.
*
Listening too mechanically, you will have no doubt already discovered
some palliative interpretation for what I have been trying to tell you. For
you, it was all just 'desire for vengeance,' or 'revenge' I am taking, or

would like to take, 'against my father' (cf. Safouan), and the need to
demonstrate it to him openly; or, more generally, it was the exhibitionistic
drive to 'show off,' to 'expose myself before you men, so that I can exist
as a subject - or a female subject (cf. Lemoine-Luccioni). Unless perhaps
you can detect 'hatred' resulting from some unresolved - or only too well
resolved? - transference, depending on the way you describe the end of
analysis. Or perhaps you see here my inability to come through the
mourning process? Why?
Do you mind if I have a good laugh? Know you not that you hear only
according to your schemata, your code, your imaginary, your phantasms
. . . and they are really just too partial - in both senses of the word.
Women's desire, speech and jouissance elude them for the most part.
When it comes to women, you listen to, or you perceive, only what
signifies either a mimeticism that is impotent when confronted with the
power of your order, or the intention or the need to seduce you by
pretending to be what you say they are, out of fear of your various means
of retaliation, or a silence filled, through the power of suggestion, by your
own statements. Which means: not all. And not all women.
You distribute certificates of 'femininity' in due form (masculine or
feminine?); you assign the rank of 'theoretician of female sexuality' to
those males and females who consciously, or unconsciously, march in step
with your discourse, support your power, and lend themselves, in accor-
dance with your desires, to the phallo-capitalist-fetishistic market
economy. As for any others, you submit what they have to say to your
value judgments before listening, or even hearing, without ever giving
yourselves time to understand. You exclude them . . .
But you use their work, their desire, and their jouissance to fuel the
machines producing your writing, seminars, and colloquia. Never citing
your sources, except to refute them. Never indicating what's really at stake
in your debates; for example, the cause of your interest, all in all rather
recent, but oh! so prolific, in female sexuality. This renewed interest goes
along with arrogant and derisory verdicts handed down concerning
women's struggles to find, or to refind, access to the language of their
jouissance.
All of this might or might not be understood as a symptom of rejection,
or of contempt for the desire of the other, contempt and rejection related
to your own need to remain enslaved to your male masters and their
law(s).
Gentlemen psychoanalysts, it is time for you to understand that you are

rather pathetic exploiters! Because you have neither the audacity, nor the
stamina, nor the joy, nor the pride of your phallocratic convictions and
positions. You hide - in shame? - behind scientific honesty (?), benevolent
neutrality (?), and conformity to an image - guaranteed by whom? - of
the practicing psychoanalyst, nice guy, defender of the one true theory,
and of the future of psychoanalysis.
But you know, you have forgotten your age. You are more anachronistic
than the oldest man in the west. And in order to understand what our
male and female analysands tell us, we would be better off reading Greek
myths and tragedies than what you write, which is always already too
doctrinaire for any part of what you call the real to speak itself there. With
no memory of birth, or of childhood, or of those of your language.
So, before you go judging the desire that animates a woman, consider
that it is time - in order to re-evaluate the ethics of psychoanalysis - to
think about a new ethics of the passions.
Now there's an idea for your future seminars. But better yet: make sure
they are even more closed off than ever. Remain among yourselves.
Certain women might come and bother you with their 'cries,' 'chatter,'
'naivety,' 'complaints,' or 'claims.' And for those women - so long as you
have not interpreted the state of your own passions, and what is going on
among yourselves — wanting to come into, or to remain a part of, your
circles, can only be fatal.
And, when it comes to law, there is one you forget with a passion: the
law of real death.
XVII
The Language of Man
Paradoxically, the issue of the sexualization of discourse has never been

broached. As animal endowed with language, as rational animal, man has
always represented the only possible subject of discourse, the only possible
subject. And his language appears to be the universal itself. The mode(s) of
predication, the categories of discourse, the forms of judgment, the reign
of the concept . . . have never been questioned with respect to their deter-
mination by a sexed being. The relationship of the speaking subject to
nature, to objects both given and fabricated, to God the creator, and to
other worldly beings, has been called into question at different periods of
history; however, this domain, or this universe, has always been men's.
This a priori has never appeared, and still does not appear, to call for
scrutiny. A perpetually unrecognized law regulates all operations carried
out in language(s), all production of discourse, and all constitution of
language according to the necessities of one perspective, one point of view,
and one economy: that of men, who supposedly represent the human race.
This fact, which is both immediately obvious and inscribed in our tradi-
tions, must seemingly remain obscured, and function as the radically blind
spot of the entry of the subject into the universe of speech. Opening our
eyes to this amounts to an impudence, a heretofore unheard-of madness,
and a violence so extreme that all forms of argument - even apparently
contradictory ones - must be mobilized in order to maintain the estab-
lished order.
Such a reaction demonstrates that the question is not an idle one, and
that it shakes the very foundations of what is given as universal, as beyond
the reach of empirical imperatives, or of subjective or historical particulari-
ties. This questioning, therefore, cannot remain local. It is not related to
some types of speech only, to certain singularities of expression in one
language alone. It cannot be pursued within one existing general code. In
sum, it is not idiomatic. The problem of the sexualization of discourse
cannot be reduced to an idiolectical problem, unless it is admitted that the
language that makes the law is already the idiom of men, the manifestation
of man as idiot.
Etymology cannot soften the blow of the discovery of this truth: the
universal is a particular proper to man. Why not, after all? Has this parti-
cular not proved itself effective? Are power or will - doing or saying -
valuable only if they are universally valuable, if they can be imposed as

unique and exclusive? Does their unlimited extension not constitute a
limitation, and reduce their comprehensiveness? And does there not
remain in consciousness, in spirit, in the subject, and in all the figures of
discourse, a naivety (in the Hegelian sense of the term) masked by the
predication of the absolute: the neglect of the sexualization of discourse,
and, more generally, of language. Or in other words: the failure to recog-
nize that male-sexed matter produces its own truth, while affirming, and
denying, itself in the Truth and the Spirit, in Being and Presence, etc. Or:
in Language.
It is true that certain anthropologists studying distant or even local

peoples raise the question of the role of the male/female difference in the
mechanisms constitutive of a culture and of its language or languages.
However, their statements are always subordinate to a 'premier philo-
sophy,' and never examine the foundation of speech in order to interpret it
as andrological as opposed to anthropological. A sexed subject imposes his
imperatives as universally valid, and as the only ones capable of defining
the forms of reason, of thought, of meaning, and of exchange. He still,
and always, comes back to the same logic, the only logic: of the One, of
the Same. Of the Same as One.
How to reveal what can be revealed only outside this autological circle?
What cannot even come to be until after escaping from these types of
logic? Difficult question! Not using logic risks maintaining the other's
status as infans, ceaselessly supplying matter for the functioning of the
same discourse; using logic means abolishing difference and resubmitting
to the same imperatives. How can the other be spoken without subordi-
nating it to the One? What method will allow this question even to be
heard? I will here indicate, modestly, certain applications and implications
of the — male — sexualization of discourse, and employ in part its own
methods in order to expose its always occulted presuppositions.
(1) An eidetic structure controls the functioning of our truth. No being

can speak, no relation to being can be spoken, without reference to a
model that determines its manifestation as approximate imitation of its
ideal being. The generic dominates the appropriation of meaning. No
language is capable of speaking truth without submitting to the common-
proper terms that mold it into appropriate, that is, essential, forms.
How then to ask of such a logical economy: what happens to nature in
this discursive functioning? Always already subordinate to ideas, nature can
now be represented only through categories that abstract it from
immediate sense perception. Nevertheless, natural causality subsists and
THE LANGUAGE OF MAN 229
fosters the production of ideas.1 Where and how does it appear in the
forms of discourse? What remainder of silence resists such formations?
What does truth - or the logos - say or do about the immediately sensible?
And, for example, what affects does it permit us to articulate? To trans-
late into language? Can affects ever be ideal and not be diminished as
affects? Logic annihilates from the very beginning the specific relation of
man and of woman to the affect. For each being, and for each apprehen-
sion of being, there is nothing more than one idea.
Might this eidetic structure not be interpreted as man's inability to give
meaning to his natural beginning, to predicate his relation to a matter-
mother who is his origin, but with respect to whom he exists as a man by
separating himself from her, by forgetting her, by breaking off any ties of
contiguity-continuity, by suspending all sympathy (in the etymological
sense of the word) for this primary matter irreducible to his being man? At
least in the way that he represents it to himself? The controlling identity
principle keeps him safe from any backsliding into a heterogeneity capable
of altering the purity of his auto-affection.
Might not woman, women, have something different to say about this
relation to the natural? Not merely as complement or supplement to what
has already been said, but as a different articulation of the speaking animal
with nature, with matter, with the body. Women need not, as men do,
distinguish themselves from the mother-nature who produces them;
women can remain with her in affection, can even identify with her,
without loss of their sexual identity. Which would allow them, were it not
for the authority of the male identity principle, to enter differently into
the universe of speech, to elaborate differently the structure of language,
linking it to primary matter through a type of speech never yet produced.
This would call into question - at least for women? - the obstacle of
nothingness and of non-being always at work in our logic, these notions of
void, of absence, of hole, of abyss, of nothing . . . (the concept of the
negative?) to which the history of thought periodically returns. Science
continues to assist the latter in progressively naming these notions, and
yet, they persist - as attraction of the as-yet-unnamed - for and within
man himself. It seems that the closer physics comes to solving the problem
of the vacuum, the more often it comes back to haunt man as that which
he has projected into and onto nature. Perhaps because there is no answer
to the question of how and what it is in himself, and for himself?
The geometric, or more generally mathematical, model he has applied to
deciphering the natural world, has allowed man to elaborate and effectively
deploy theories; however, the control of this mathematicizing over the
functioning of discourse has also just as effectively dispossessed him as
subject. To what ratio, to what measure, has man, as sexed corporeal
matter, submitted? Has the ideal he has imposed as norm not assured his
power and his mastery, while simultaneously mortifying-annihilating his

relationship to living nature?
While psychoanalysis has been able to interpret certain aspects of this

schiz in the man-subject, it also recycles certain philosophical a priori. It
describes and organizes (male) sexuality according pre-eminence to the
death drives over the life drives, to repetition compulsion as privileged
spatio-temporal scan, to the triumph of the constancy principle, and to the
desire for homeostasis, etc.: love for the same and rejection of difference. It
subjugates the unconscious to the fundamental laws of consciousness. Or,
more precisely, it uncovers the unconscious as the back, or the reverse side
of consciousness, closing off the constitution of the subject within a circle,
and leaving it unchanged substantially. It unmasks, at least in part, the
underside of a functioning, but does not disturb it. It maintains, even
confirms, man in his destiny, his eternal discourse. It does not go so far as
to question the sexualization of discourse itself, of theory in general. It is a
theory of sexuality that misses its own sexual determination, and it remains
naively metaphysical in that way. In submission to the auto-logic of a
subject appropriated by and for the needs of the male sex alone, it claims
to be indifferent to sex: Truth.
(2) The Reign of the One, of the same as One, in occidental logic, is
built on a binarism that has never been radically scrutinized. The localized
examination of this regulating model by the sciences (including the logical
sciences), and by certain philosophers since the time of Nietzsche, does not
so far seem to have required that it be applied to discursive functioning.
Yes/no, within/without, good/bad, true/false, being/non-being, along with
all the subsequent resulting dichotomies, are still the oppositions ensuring
the entry of the subject into language, and they are still subjugated by
language to the principle of non-contradiction: yes or no, and not yes and
no at the same time, at least on the surface. They are henceforth alterna-
tives measured, tempered, temporalized and determined hierarchically: the
contradiction being supposedly always capable of resolution in the good
term, the right term, according to the right finality.
Founded on this bipolar split, its denial, and the mastery of contradic-
tions, is the substantial consistency of the one (of the subject), capable of
surmounting within itself its antagonisms: rational animal . . .
Yes and no to the mother-nature: consumed/rejected, introjected/
projected. The identity of the solipsistic subject, indefinitely playing over
and over the same game based on the solid ground of his language, is
affirmed through the no to this denied and unrecognized ambivalence. In
him/out of him, the nature-mother is assimilated and rejected, too close,
too within and merged with him to be perceived as different; too without
not to remain an imperceptible beyond, blind component of the world

with its within/without. In self/out of self of the subject, internal/external
to discourse, she obscurely nourishes its meaning and remains expelled
from the field of all possible references.
This contra-diction, always effective in the order of our reason, must
never be revealed as the trace of an original reduction of the other to the
same. It is forgotten in a determination of the natural world, in a physis
that is already man's creation, and whose perceived movements are already
subject to the imperatives of his culture, to his own spatio-temporality,
which discover in nature only that which his measuring instruments can
progressively dominate.
How does the denial of a rhythm specific to the mother-nature, that

fundamental fort-da always covered over and re-emerging in the multipli-
city of the hierarchical oppositions of/in language, also come to signify the
constitution of the world as a function of the alternations of male
sexuality: erection/detumescence? Another question that will be rejected by
that which claims to be universal, and refuses the reappearance of the
possibility of a contra-diction, where logic was not expecting it and cannot
resorb it. A contra-diction in women's speaking that seeks the truth
beyond logic's so-called unlimited limits, logic's excess, that which exceeds
it, and requires a reorganization of its autarkical economy. Contra-diction
showing man that his discourse and his language are the field and techni-
ques of man, marked by the particular imperatives of his sex. Intolerable
interpretation, which overthrows the order of his pretension to the
absolute.
And what if, for women, the dichotomous oppositions did not make
sense the way they do for men, unless they radically submit to the phallic
male world, leaving themselves mute, or reducing themselves to mimeti-
cism, the only language, or silence, permitted them in this discursive
order. What if women were not constituted on the model of the one
(solid, substantial, lasting, permanent . . . ) and its base of contradictions,
both effective and occulted within a proper hierarchy. What if women
were always 'at least two,' without opposition between the two, without
reduction of the other to the one, without any possible appropriation by
the logic of the one, without autological closure of the circle of the same?
Always at least two that can never be reduced to a binary alternative - that
logic of distancing from and mastery over the other? What if they always
spoke as several at the same time, and if those several were not reducible to
a multiple of the one? How would the truth resolve into its economy this
enigmatic word, having no principle of identity to the self, nor any known
principle of non-contradiction? What would happen to the law-making
universal?
(3) And furthermore: what kinds of unforeseen and unforeseeable

accidents would happen in the evolution of the essential forms it is the
goal of discourse to establish? Would a crisis in truth - or in being -
result, if a being, who had always submitted to the laws of predication
determined by men alone, actually spoke up? Would a disruption in the
premises ensuring their logic ensue? When a being moves out of the
ontological status that had been assigned it once and for all, the meaning -
of truth, of being - loses its immutability, its impassivity. Discourse comes
apart, overflows into the infinite, rediscovers its aporia.
In other words, there results from the privation, for women, of a specifi-
city of language and speech, a domination by logic in a form requiring
both a God (transcendence marked by the male sex) and the interdiction
or the impossibility of a regression to primary matter. Under the threat
that all substance might fall back into undifferentiation? Into lack of
individuation or of identity to the self?
What potency is thus deprived of its own deployment? Remaining as
substratum always available for the exercise of man's techniques?
Is discourse then nothing more than the archi-technique used by man in
order to evolve in his own being? Does it not constitute, from the begin-
ning, a useful tool for the becoming of man and of man alone? Inaugu-
rated as the space of an exchange, impossible except between man and
himself.
But if form could no longer be extrapolated from matter, and if matter

and form each engendered the other, without the end prescribed by the
domination of the one - the One - over the other, might other types of
exchange not be opened up in this perspective? Exchanges in which the
one and the other - man and woman, for example — would give each
other matter and form, potentiality and action, in a never teleologically
determined becoming, having no stable transcendence or immanence.
Would the opposition, as well as the complementarity, of the matter/
form couple — woman/man — come undone, thus confounding both the
power of binarism and the origin-substance it sustains and maintains?
Reference points of a single agent-subject, affected by his own activity,
producer and consumer of the energy he has always already appropriated
in a circular movement out of and back into himself: translocation having
in no other either its beginning or its end? Woman appears, or is signified,
at best as nothing more than non-man, with no specificity other than
negative, with no difference other than aporetic — the pole of lack - and
she must try to elevate herself to the level of the only valid human, or
divine, model. Within this logic, 'man' and 'woman' form strictly one
notion, still hierarchically dichotomized.
What if that other speaking nature acceded to (her own) language?
What if that subjectum heretofore non-subjectifiable unveiled herself as the

source of another logic? In what ways would the status of the subject and
of discourse be disrupted?
(4) Discourse, the logos, bear witness to the necessity and the mode of
the separation of man from the mother-nature. This separation, constitu-
tive of man as man, requires that he erect himself as solid entity out of an
undifferentiated subjectum.
In the pre-Socratics, we observe the casting out — or at least the framing
— of fluids by solids: the world-cosmos surrounded by a shell in Empedo-
cles, the world-thought closed off in a circle by Parmenides. Occidental
logic appeals to and is based on the mechanics of solids. Fluids always
overflow reason, the ratio, exceed the measure, plunge back into undiffer-
entiation: they are the universe of myths and magic, of darkness resistant
to the light of the philosophers who approach it only to enclose it within
the confines of their thought. Forgetting that, without fluid, there would
be no unity, since fluid always remains between solid substances in order to
join them together, to reunite them. Without fluid intervention, no
discourse could hold together. However, the operation of fluids is not
expressed as condition of the truth or of the coherence of the logos. That
would unveil its unstable edifice, its shifting foundations.
Have the sciences, in their own way, not interpreted the end of philo-
sophy as the end of the predominance of the logic of solids? Have they not
discovered or rediscovered the properties of a dynamics of flux to which
discourse remains resistant, constraining us in obedience to a world of
outdated reason, even though we are actually living in a universe where the
power of fluids is increasingly dominant?
The economy of flux requires a re-evaluation of that which has been
determined as subject. It exists only as scoria from an ancient world, as
debris submerged by the force of energies it can no longer master. Man's
discourse perpetuates itself as language overwhelmed by the technical
power of scientific formalizations, engendered according to their own
necessities, destroying and creating universes of which man is not even
aware. Man accompanies, witnesses, participates in or annihilates such
processes almost at random. These random connections or interferences
escape him, and their relation to a dynamics of flux, deploying itself
beyond the control of reason, still remains to be thought.
The so-called human sciences, methods of description and of normaliza-
tion of the psyche, are seemingly trapped in a conception of subjectivity
whose relationship to metaphysics has been insufficiently questioned.
Thus, when psychoanalysis bases its theory of the mechanisms of the
unconscious on thermodynamics, it reconstrains libidinal dynamics within
a closed circuit, imprisoning the flux of the drives within a reservoir of
solids. The importance of the constancy principle must be correlated with

the pre-eminence of the death drives. Psychoanalysis re-encloses desire
within the framework(s) of classical rationality, a circumscription against
which desire struggles, but from which it has not yet escaped. This
economy repeats itself indefinitely with no radical modification, as if the
subject were forced to remain immutable with respect to all becoming,
physical or historical. The subject's permanence is law for all nature and
all history; it can never be determined by them. Interpretive model for the
already past, psychoanalysis refuses to listen to what, in that past, was not
yet able to speak. It recycles the censorship and the repression of the
dominant order.
Thus, in the theorization of women's desire, psychoanalysis, with no
fundamental reservations, continues to manifest and practice an allegiance
to male-sexed logic. And yet . . . The formalistic discontinuity-continuity
marking the rhythm of this logic is very different from what women's
speaking would be: continuity—discontinuity whose movement would no
longer be subordinate to some assignable goal — neither 'ex-sistence' nor
ecstasy, neither temporary nor definitive — but engendered gradually with
quantitative and qualitative heterogeneities, physical modifications or
alterations, a dynamic unforeseeable from within the laws of the displace-
ment of bodies, a dynamic originating in an actual vacuum between two
infinitely close bodies. Speaking where infinity would really be actualized
physically, within the dynamics of flux where it would no longer represent
an aporia to be enclosed in some ideal reality, but a power whose energy
can never be closed up/closed off in one act, the potential and the actual
engendering each other without end.
However, this woman's/women's language(s) is today still censored,

repressed, unrecognized, a language held up and held back in latency, in
suffering, deciphered only in so-called hysteric symptomology, even
though the science of the dynamics of fluids could already provide a
partial explanation. The science of the subject is resistant to carrying out
its own 'Copernican revolution.' It refuses to question, in its mono-sexual
causality, the truth it has established as normative. Whatever the other sex
contributes is unacceptable, except as stylistic figures added on to a logical
functioning that remains unshakable. The reality of the dynamics of fluids
is dissolved into a few flowers of rhetoric, within a fundamentally
unchanged dis-course, regulating principle that does not recognize that the
logos represents a rhetoric of solids... .
Thus, psychoanalysts object that it is only a question of metaphors when
their definitions of the mechanism of the unconscious are questioned from
the vantage point of an economy of real flux. They have not understood
that the constancy principle, homeostasis, and the whole Freudian theory
of the libido come down to a system of metaphors. They listen, interpret,

and normalize the psyche according to a thermodynamic metaphorizing
whose effectiveness is not nil, but limited.
*
The artificialist perspective, from which the issue of natural evolution is
approached, is taken seriously as universal and eternal truth, even though
it has never been anything more than a hypothesis valid in certain places at
certain times. The subject and its discourse are correlates or counter-
weights, both indispensable and complementary, to the measuring forced
upon the natural-material universe at every moment in history. The
subject is then nothing more than an effect, or a residue, a reservoir,
constituted as a function of the partial techniques man uses to construct
himself a world, a kind of meta-stable reality, pre- and post-discursive,
more than ever overwhelmed by techniques being developed without its
knowledge.
How many subjects today still believe that their discourse is true,
unique, and definitive? In the name of which God do they still order their
Truth? For psychoanalysts, the answer is relatively obvious: the Phallus.
Let us imagine the death of this 'God' also. Does that mean that the
void he leaves behind will result in the disintegration of all language, its
grinding into dust, its splitting into atoms, as well as in the reduction of
the world into ever tinier and more innumerable units, and in the decom-
position, into infinity, of the entire universe? Or will this death leave a
place for that for which the Phallus has always stood: an excess in the
economy of solids which would no longer think of itself as a transcendent
entity, shielded from all evolution, but rather as extrapolated from the
infinite of a dynamics of real fluids.
XVIII
The Limits of Transference
The cathartic operation is analytic work's major difficulty; when accom-

plished without amputation or sacrifice, it is a task on the frontier of the
realm of the possible.
A pathway has yet to be invented, or created, in analysis of women,
between women. Women have always been the hidden stakes of the sacrifi-
cial, already deprived of themselves, already outside themselves at the
moment when the subject-object separation is posited in discourse. Our
grammar, within which female jouissance loses its auto-affection, and the
possibility of speaking itself, remains foreign to its evolution.
Unable to create words for themselves, women remain and move about
within an immediacy having no transitional or transactional object. They
take-give without mediation, commune unknowingly with, and within, a
flesh they do not recognize: maternal flesh, not reducible to a reproducing
body, amorous matter more or less unformed, with respect to which there
is supposedly no debt and no possible return.
Oedipal law forbids the daughter's return to the mother, except insofar as
she does as the mother does in maternity. It cuts her off from her beginnings,
from her conception, from her genesis, from her birth, from her childhood.
According to the norm, only half of herself is left her to make her
journey: the half that is not herself, but is all (all that) (the id that)1
remains for her to love.
Split in two by Oedipal law, (situated henceforth between two men, the
father and the lover?), she is exiled into the male, paternal world. An
errant beggar in relation to values she will never be able to appropriate.
In this respect, she is the only one desiring; desiring, however, from
within a lack or a dereliction that dispossesses the father himself of his
potential plenitude, since the accomplishment of desire can take place only
in an attraction that maintains the course of evolution of both.
According to Freud, the becoming of woman is never finished (which
does not rule out woman's being arrested at some point in her develop-
ment). From this perspective, it is effectively interminable, impossible. The
beginning and the end, the roots and the efflorescence, the memory of the
moment of embodiment, and the anticipation of the blossoming - all
are lacking. Women are thus dispossessed of access to life and death as
affirmative responsibilities, depositing in the other their identity as living

and free subject.
Imagined and thought of as sheath or envelope for the sex of the man,
the woman's sex puts her in a position of double closure. What is lacking
is a porousness that exceeds enclosure, fluidity that is not loss but rather
source-resource of new energy. Might the depth of immersion be propor-
tional to as yet undiscovered depths?
That does not mean regression to the intra-uterine, but rather access to
the as yet, or the never yet, formed, delimited, identified, or spoken. Not
yet born? Overflow of a flux that disconcerts entropy, reopens the world
and regenerates the organism in a difference that is neither complemen-
tarity nor inversion: the latter two figures always linked with the quantita-
tive, to calculations, and to the maintenance of what has already been
economized, assimilated, and disassimilated, rather than with access to the
qualitative, or to the source.
Two qualitative differences remain to be discovered and related to each
other - the difference in sexual difference and the difference that can be
lived in sympathy between women. There is no doubt that one is not
without the other, but they do not correspond to the same affection.
Folding them into each other, or effacing the one into the other, risks
reducing both to the quantitative; the effect of forgetting, or of not recog-
nizing, that there can be, that there are, two great others, two Others - a
female and a male? Each sex must measure itself against an ideal, its corre-
sponding transcendent. If each does not tend toward the accomplishment
of its potential, the alliance or the encounter between the energies of both
remains impossible. One always encroaches upon the other, without ever
accomplishing its own destiny, without rejoining the flowering of its
becoming and its fecundation by the other.
Deprived of an autonomous ideal, does the woman-mother not risk being
reduced to fiction? Simple gestures of an imposed everyday routine, unique
or plural image, mechanism or dream, shadow, phantom even, she is never
unified in her insistence, or in her existence,2 for lack of words that envelop
her, cover her, situate her in an identity, help her to move from inside to
outside herself, cloak her in herself, like a shelter that accompanies and
protects her without adherence or allegiance to the world of the other. In that
way could she open herself to that world while remaining separate, without
being continually split within herself. Discord between the sexes takes place
within a forgotten, repressed, denied, confounded maternal: universe same
and other that creates neither difference, nor encounter, nor alliance.
Without a setting for sublimation through and between women, does

the analytic scene not become impossible?
THE LIMITS OF TRANSFERENCE 239
Since women have no soul, how can female analytic partners mark off
the limits of their bodies, of their desire? Not to mention the fact that, for
them, there is no transitional or transactional object unless they create it,
and are able to exchange it or share it between them.
Traditionally, creation and sharing took place around food. The lot of
women was to provide food. Since that scene is forbidden in the so-called
analytic scene, and since that creation has no words to speak itself within
its own act, a practice must be invented that alienates neither analysand
nor analyst in unavoidable devouring, a scene must be invented that moves
beyond orality and the subsequent stages, but that carefully - and not in
the same way as the child psychoanalyst would - establishes a space for the
intra-uterine, and access to respiration, and to the gaze opening up onto
what is not yet an object: sensitive, sensual touching, a still contemplative
opening of the eyes, prior to any capture, or precise objectival definition.
The limit of transference would be this proximity without distance

between women - between mother and daughter? - without distance
because no symbolic process is able to account for it. Rather than recognize
this deficiency and try to overcome it, those who should articulate this
difference, both in the particular and in analytic practice in general, often
play at being mother, play the card of archaism and of psychoticizing
regression — doubles or understudies for the maternal who cannot fulfill
the same relationship to the placenta, to milk, to skin, or to the mucous,
and therefore aspire in empty transparency or in nothingness.
Playing the mother, the man-analyst renounces his own sex and deprives
the analysand of hers, reducing to nothing, or to oneiric charm, the carnal
mother-to-daughter, woman-to-woman relation. The man-to-woman
relation as well, except as aspiration to lost flesh, to lack, to nostalgia.
Although it is relatively common to speak of fusional relationships, what
is played out in those relations must be interpreted diversely. The placental
habitation and the adherence of the placenta to the mother's womb repre-
sent another economy and a different liberation.
There exists, however, another mode of confusion between subjects or

rather between psyches: the consumption (?) of the sex and body of
another woman, turning her inside out, and closing the threshold of her
partial opening. Woman therein is not in the place of, does not take the
place of, the mother. She is taken as woman, worn out well before the
reproduction, or before the imitation, of her appearance. What is most
intimate in her, the jouissance of her retouching, is used so that the other
may become, without becoming, what she is by her birth and her history.
This becoming therefore lacks roots and growth. It envelops itself in the
jouissance of another woman, or uses it as grounding for a flight that
neglects to secure its foundations, its landing, something of its identity, of

its identity to itself, of its fidelity to itself in the unfolding of a trajectory.
The lack of any imaginary and symbolic ground accorded, or recognized,
'on the part of women,' means that all of this happens in what could be a
death-dealing immediacy, prior to any master-slave dialectic.
A chiasmus ensues directly, without a mirror. Left and right are inverted
in a face-to-face leaving no place for the image of the other, appropriated
and traversed on the way to some traditionally paternal infinity. What are
taken as movements of the woman-mother are forgotten there.
It remains for women to come back to some tactile unfinished in-finite.
Foundation of all the senses, touch operates prior to clear-cut positioning
of subject and object. Its action is always almost immediate, the space of a
jouissance that cannot be posited as such, but that calls out for boundaries,
for covering over, for filling in . . .
Without subject or object, what 'do women want'? Absolute wanting.
Without identity, what 'does she want'? The wanting of the Other. Not
the want of the God-Father, but wanting more. Women want the mystery
of the infinity of enumeration, the infinitely great, for lack of tactile
perception of the infinitely small, or the infinitely close. Women want
something that overflows the numeric within numbers, that insists within
the form of the accounting. Women want what has not yet taken place,
what appears, becomes, takes shape before their eyes, or even what they
perceive prior to any gaze. Women want the movement of generation
because they lack a language that would grant them their participation in
engendering. Women want to appropriate unto themselves all that grows,
all that is coming into being, emerging from the chaos where they seek the
place where they are lost. They want what is not yet fixed-frozen into
finite architecture, what has yet to be born.
Women do? But as something borrowed from the desire of the other, or
the Other, who is still in night. Barely unveiled? That is already saying too
much. Becoming is more important to them than the secret of any fetish.
Always unsatisfied? If that means women want the very movement of
engendering, because they are arrested in their generation. Women want,
without end or model, the presumed wanting of anyone who follows the
path of wanting - model without a model, example whose paradigm they
efface. Women want to seize hold of what already exists in order to bring
it back to an invisible source (theirs?), a space out of which they would
create and create themselves ex nihilo? Has history not imposed the
following impossibility on them: they are to continue to live cut off from
their beginning and their end?
Woman must ceaselessly measure herself against her beginning and her
sexual determination, re-engender the maternal in herself, give birth in
herself to mother and daughter in a never-accomplished progression.

Mother is she who in shadow is in possession of the subterranean resource;
daughter is she who moves about on the surface of the earth, in light. She
becomes woman who can in herself unite in her body-womb the most
secret, the deepest energies, to life in the light of day. Then no longer is
the alliance attraction in an abyss, but encounter in the flowering of a new
generation.
Something happens on the order of the psychic and on the order of the
cosmic. An encounter that would never have taken place between the two?
A whole history to sort out and spread out, between morning and evening,
between evening and a new dawn, a history related to time and to our
ways of marking it, that could have an impact on the numeric itself?
Another economy of the whole requiring a new language.
The lips? Open, in-finite, unfinished — not the indefinite retreat from
what cannot be lived - but partially open here and now all the time.
Retouching? The most subtle return that progresses without going back,
without closing off in a circle or knot, feeling without feeling resentment.
How to make retouching perceptible to those who are nourished by this
touch in order to envelop and enclose themselves in it, to those who turn
this gift of space-time into skin folded over on the refusal to respond or
correspond in openness. How - in particular, women among themselves -
can they not take from this gift what they need to save themselves from
dereliction in a quasi-immediate and paradoxical mimetic identification?
The latter operation turns any giver inside out before any gift object is
given, and does not leave the path open for whoever takes, a gesture in
which a kind of capitalization of the mucous is played out, ejecting to the
outside what is most intimate. The daughter-wo man tries to re-envelop
herself in the desiring flesh of the other, covers herself in it more and
more, spurning her own birth and her own retouching. She turns herself
into protected gestures, without knowing from where she obtains what
shelters her, helps her.
Then, feeling secure, she can try to turn back toward the woman who is
the origin of her journey and of that other birth that covers her - that
other is no more. Or at least she is no longer apparent to her, clothed as
she is now in what, of the other, could appear. The Other-woman? Never
perceived as such, except insofar as she might be inexhaustible?
In the absence of an identity for the woman-mother, the word of the
'daughters' is either spoken as gestural mimeticism, or flows into the
mysterious desire of that female Other. Verbal exchange thus becomes
impossible or useless. Everything is played out before the word intervenes.
What is most terrifying is mimetic appropriation by women, because it
takes place without ideals or female models. Because they lack an ideal
female maternal figure, when woman imitates woman, one gets under the
skin of the other, in the reduction of the skin and of the very mucous
itself into figures into which they flow in order to exist, often completely
unconsciously. They take over the appearance of the other prior to any
image, eventually leaving her the one they no longer want - their own -
for lack of a representation of themselves to venerate, contemplate, admire,
and even adore.
This abduction takes place before any positioning in love or hate. In the
absence of a valid representation of themselves in the other - or the Other
- they destroy the face and appearance of the other-woman in order to
nourish and clothe themselves in it. They are deprived of an artistic,
iconic, religious (?) mediation that would permit them to look at and
admire themselves through some ideal supporting the perspective of their
face-to-face, some work of beauty that is neither the one nor the other,
that facilitates the passage from the in-finite, the unfinished, that they are
morphologically, to their quest for the infinite. Lacking this connection,
they either close off the infinite in a never-ending game, or they collapse it
into the unformed, as archaic primitive chaos.
The constitution of temporality, of habitable space-time no longer takes
place, or else is accomplished in blindness, in a night where the other has
no face. The other woman is exhausted from within, not recognized in the
contours of a carnal existence. And the word, unless it becomes the word
of the flesh, gift and message of flesh, is a skin that wears out, peels, falls
and grows back over and over again, without giving up its secret.
Two lips? Retouching, unclosed enclosure of the body. The envelope of

the skin is neither sutured nor open onto a 'canal' that takes in or rejects,
but partially open onto the touch of two mucouses, or of four, at least: the
lips above and the lips below.
If the skin is removed or turned back, there is no more retouching. The
mucous of one becomes that which surrounds the other. The skin inside
out? The absence of possible caresses and the capture of the intimacy of
the body, consumption of the flesh becoming the placental envelope of the
other. Woman tacitly becoming daughter? Inside this inhabiting, all regres-
sions can be imagined, or lived, prior to imaginable phantasms. Uncon-
scious exploitation of a primitive shelter and of what is given there — what
is necessary for life.
In this nourishing shelter, oral, anal, and phallic scenarios are played
over again. The one this excess is borrowed from pays dearly for this
fiction, in usage and usury of a first home without debt, without payment,
without acknowledgment. Without consciousness or memory therefore,
except the anguish of abandonment?
So this primitive cavern or womb is imagined as a dangerous fault-line,
as chaos, as 'empty vase'? This container does not correspond, on interpre-

tation, to a procreative matrix: maternal-feminine space capable of engen-
dering beyond conception in the strict sense of the term, intimacy of a
receptacle as potential for engendering, out of the retouching of the lips,
female desire.
Without this, without this reversal or positioning of female jouissance
within its relation to the maternal, how do we articulate limits between
women? The partial openness of their bodies, of their flesh, of their sex,
makes the question of boundaries difficult. Qualitative difference is
required. Of course, no woman has the morphology of another. Does this
alone allow us to move beyond competition within the quantitative? More,
Better - two sames each trying to outdo the other - persist for lack of
discovery and valorization of a — female — sensible transcendental, against
which every woman could measure herself, rather than developing only
through taking the place of the mother, of the other woman, or of man. Is
that the task assigned her? With no sign of the subjective operation in play
there.
Most often, the step of like (the other) is skipped, effaced. Through lack
of identity? If like is explicit, it becomes the minimal object: 'like you.'
And I owe you the remainder of the leap between past and future? Price-
less. Like you — and I owe you my development and the scale of my devel-
opment.
What is lacking is a double scale, double stakes, a double game, and
qualitative difference. Can sexual difference potentially be a function of a
relation to the divine? In reserve there? If God is always imagined as a
Father, how can women find a model of identity in him, an accomplished
image or representation of themselves allowing them to escape from trying
to outdo each other quantitatively?
For women, how can the greatest be joined to the least at every instant?
And especially how can they move from one qualitative to another? Diffi-
cult question of energy, notably when the object or measure between the
two poles is lacking. They must become creations. Objets d'art? Two
subjects can thus come to be, one for the other, and an alliance between
the two is made possible.
It is less a problem of mastery than of a creative goal, open to participa-
tion in the enjoyment of the object and its co-creation: a useful work since
it marks without destruction the limits of energy, of the flesh and the
body, of desire and its possibilities. The creation or elaboration of the
object becomes an architectonics of the body, of a life and a death that do
not kill the other.
This creation could be the only thing that would permit the resolution of
transference. Used to privation, women do not deal well with frustration,
with the intervention of a discontinuity different from the one they know,
with a fragmentation of space-time that cannot be assimilated to the

amputation of one part of the world. Of themselves as part of the world?
They tolerate not existing, or not insisting,3 more easily than feeling they are
measured off in time and space; they tolerate remaining pure reservoir more
easily than perceiving their limits, which do not constitute the limits of a
body or of an envelope, but the living boundaries of partially open flesh.
Keeping the lips closed? Feeling, without feeling resentment, the touch
that doubles before doubling in consumption: fetal, oral, mimetic . . . That
is what is said in silence, and exchanged only with difficulty . . . The
amorous female gesture that can be affirmed and preserved without depri-
vation or closure remains to be found or created.
In transference, a certain limit, a certain threshold, are never crossed and

are ceaselessly transgressed - the porosity of the mucous membranes. Many
events may take place, even meetings of hands, of eyes, of ears, of odors,
but the mucous never retouches itself carnally in transference.
Already constructed theoretical language does not speak of the mucous.
The mucous remains a remainder, producer of delirium, of dereliction, of
wounds, sometimes of exhaustion. The mucous that is deployed during the
course of an analysis risks death if it is not relocated in its own space. In that
case, all thought becomes skin torn from the other, speculation lacking roots
and branches, feet and head, and it consummates-consumes the intimacy-
interiority of the body that ensures the passage from lowest to highest.
It so happens that the projection of 'good' can turn into 'no good,'
anchored in an orality that has forgotten that it is already secondary. If the
source is invisible, the other can believe she is the source; the site where
she received herself is seen in reverse, as she situates herself above the place
from whence flows that which gives birth to her, quenches her thirst,
nourishes her.
How can women — in particular? — be prevented from taking from this
gift that which would save them from dereliction in a quasi-immediate
mimetic gesture, turning the one who gives (herself) inside out, and
closing the path to the one who would like to be nourished? What
economy(?) can be taught women so that they, understanding the full
import of the question, become without becoming closed, so that they
exchange in openness something that is not nothing, that cannot be
reduced to nothingness.
At times naively vitalist, do women not become murderers through
indifference to the meaning of death? Our traditions have not taught them
to take responsibility for and keep their own deaths.
However, transference is not merely projection or reprojection of a

history; it is also appropriation of the other - here and now, nourishment
the analysand feeds on in order to carry out his or her analytic task and
life. The analyst also functions as raw material for the cure. The fact that
the analyst is the security for, or the guarantor of, knowledge does not
spare her or him from having to make the two extremes meet: remaining a
reservoir of dynamism, of breath, of all that the analysand comes to seek
in order to sustain himself or herself, and remaining the analysand's
anchoring in knowlege. The analyst must hold as the guarantor of these
two spaces, of the two bridges (that can always be renovated), between the
other and herself or himself, without complacency for consumption and
without closing in or closing off in theory the needs or desires of the one
who has confidence in him or her.
Transference comes down to who best perceives the other, who returns
the other, or in the other, the closest to his or her source, a gesture that is
almost never perceived as bilateral. The third term in transference becomes
the limit not only of the skin but of the mucous as well, not only of walls
but of the most extraordinary experience of intimacy: communication or
communion respecting the life of the other while tasting of the strangeness
of his or her desire. Impossible to touch bottom? At the very boundaries of
interpretation, beyond which the risk of conflict is most implacable.
That is also where the perception of the possibility or the necessity of
calm is discovered. Interval between two, temporary lull in quantitative
measuring, opening for an encounter of a different, peaceful quality.
Another ground, and yet the same as the most highly intense? This access
is required for there to be otherness.
Peaceful does not mean death, either violent or contained within
neutrality. It is rather a state of tranquillity permitting two to be, without
life-and-death struggles, and without lethal fusion. What is peaceful can be
engendered as harmony with the self, both prior to and beyond the closure
of language, harmony that lets the other be, a kind of reserve outside trans-
ference, allowing the analyst to ensure his or her own solitude, and to
guide the other in or toward his or her own.
Within sexual difference, this peace and this harmony would signify
acceptance and accomplishment of one's own sex, without will to outdo
the strange or the stranger who insists in the other. This dimension of
sexual difference constitutes a horizon for the potential deployment of
analysis as opening or enigma, rather than as peremptory imposition of the
authority of a word, a language, or a text. It organizes a space or a site for
liberty between two bodies, two types of flesh, that protects the two
partners by refixing their boundaries.
For this to be a possible alternative, the analyst must always keep in
mind the dimension of his or her own transference, must always remain
close to and yet distant from the one to whom he or she listens, in a
transferential relationship, reversible and open, linking up all possible

positions in time and space. Remembering the configuration of bodies and
of their synchronic and diachronic relations, the analyst perceives herself or
himself as she or he is, was, and will be, in order to hear the other without
confusion. This listening marks the limit of what is possible for her or
him, what passes for horizon between analysand and analyst: horizon of
life and death, matrix-like envelope to be ceaselessly reconstituted as it
nourishes and protects, remaining partially open for its own becoming and
for reception of and by the other.
This matrix, both anterior and posterior to that of all constituted
discourse, matrix of the singular history of a subject, is required in the
transferential relationship between women; it is an absolute necessity. This
does not imply that it is not a necessity in any analysis. However, in its
absence, one woman listening to another becomes the destruction of the
one, or of the other, or the assimilation of both to a word or a discourse
they have not produced, and of which they make themselves the object.
Analysts must ceaselessly reinterpret their own transference, and not

simply their own counter-transference, but the ground from which they
listen and give space-time, from which they give themselves as space-time
where they listen. This space-time they give remains non-perceptible for
most, who never return to the analyst his or her own skin or intimacy:
space-time that gives itself, crossing from the inside to the outside, like a
body already become flesh, offering itself or proposing itself as space in
which the analytic scene is held.
But who understands that analysts are giving space at the same time as
listening? That they are giving the horizon, listening in a setting made
possible thanks to their relation to space-time. No analysand can success-
fully constitute an irreducible horizon for himself or herself. Such,
however, is the goal of analysis - access for the one and the other to their
respective horizons, no longer constituted by rejection, hatred or mastery,
but fluid and remaining partially open to the other. Permanent construc-
tion without closure, of amorous and musical rhythm and scansion.
The goal of analysis could be expressed thus: 'Let us invent together that
which will allow us to live in and to continue to build the world, and first
of all, the world that is each of us.'
XIX
In Science, Is the Subject Sexed?
How does one speak with scientists? What is more, with scientists of
different disciplines, each discipline a separate domain, and each system
within each domain claiming, at one time or another, to be global? Since,
at every moment, every one of these domains is totalized, closed off, how
can the various fields be reopened in order to encounter and speak to each
other? In what language? Using what type of discourse?
The problem has no evident solution. Each scientific field seems to have
its own vision of the world, its own goals, its own experimental protocols,
its own techniques, its own syntax. Each appears isolated, cut off from all
the others. Can one take a bird's-eye view of all these different horizons in
order to locate common ground, viable intersections, possible passages
from one to the other? Does one have the right to take an outside point of
view? How does one claim this right? Historically, there was God, trans-
cendent to any episteme. But if, as Nietzsche said, 'when science is in
power, God is dead,' then how can these different worlds be brought
together? My hypothesis is that the place for collective questioning is inside
and not outside, subjacent and not simply transcendent, 'underground' as
well as 'in the sky,' deeply buried and not relegated to some absolute,
unquestionable guarantee.
How can we discover this space for inquiry and make it perceptible?
How can we speak of it? In the language of science, there is no /, no you,
no we. The subjective is prohibited, except in the more or less secondary
sciences, the human sciences, and we cannot seem to decide whether they
are indeed sciences, or substitutes for science, or literature, or poetry?...
Or even whether are they true or false, able to be proved or disproved,
formalizable or always ambiguous because expressed in natural languages,
too empirical or too metaphysical, dependent on the axiomatization of the
so-called exact sciences or resistant to such formalization, etc.? Old debates
and old quarrels, potentially involving reversals of power, rises and falls of
imperialism, that are still current.
These cycles can repeat themselves indefinitely. However, one could
perhaps wonder if, in some subterranean underground, there might not be
one common producer making science. But who? Is anyone there?? Can
we see them? How do we question them? Not for a long while have I
experienced so much difficulty with the idea of speaking in public. Most
of the time, I can anticipate to whom I will speak, how to speak, how to
argue, make myself understood, plead my cause, even please or displease
my audience. This time, I know nothing, because I do not know whom I
have before me. Is this the reverse side of scientific imperialism: not
knowing to whom one speaks, or how to speak? Anxiety in the face of an
absolute power that hovers in the air, in the face of judgment by an imper-
ceptible but ever present authority, in the face of a tribunal without judge,
lawyer or defendant! The judicial system is in place nonetheless. There is a
truth to which one must submit without appeal, against which one can
unintentionally and unknowingly transgress. This high court is in session
against your own will. No one is responsible for this terror, or this
terrorism. Nevertheless, they are in operation. In this very classroom or
conference hall. For me, in any case. If I met individually with each one of
you, male or female, it seems to me that I would be able to find a way to
say you, /, we. But here? In the name of science?
My first question would be: what schiz does science impose on those
who practice or convey it in one way or another? What desire is in play
when men and women are making science, and what other desire when
they are making love or creating love, individually or socially?
What schiz or what rupture: pure science on one side and politics on
another, nature and art on a third or as conditions of possibilities, love on
a fourth? Are not this schiz and this rupture, which you claim are above
scientific imperialism, already programmed by it in the separation of the
subject from itself and from its desires, as well as in its dispersion into
multiple sectors, including those of science, among which encounters
become impossible, verifications of responsibility impracticable. What
remains is an imperialistic there is/there arey or a one, that the power-
holders, the politicians, take advantage of as opportunities arise. By the
time the scientists react, the game is already over: in the name of science?
Imperialism without a subject.
*
• So, looking at things a little bit differently, and playing the game of
those questionnaires that flourish in women's magazines (replacing the
crossword puzzles found in gender-neutral daily newspapers, which
actually are all too often exclusively male?) let us make an effort:
If I tell you that two ova can engender a new life, does this discovery
seem to you possible? Probable? True? Purely genetic? Or related also to
the social, economic, cultural, political order? To be within the domain of
the exact sciences? Check the appropriate box or boxes. Is this type of
IN SCIENCE, IS THE SUBJECT SEXED? 249
discovery going to be encouraged, and funded? Will it be discussed in the

media? Yes? No? Why or why not?
Your answer? How do we interpret the answer? Through the importance
of sperm in partriarchy, and its link to property and the symbolic?
Through the importance of reproduction and its ambiguous correlation to
pleasure and desire in sexual difference?
And, while we are dealing with reproduction and its hormonal compo-
nents:
• Is male contraception hormonally possible? Yes? No? Why or why not?

If it is, is this information disseminated, is the practice encouraged?
• Is the left hemisphere of the brain less developed in women than in

men? Yes? No? Would this discovery be used to justify the social,
cultural, and political inferiority of women? Yes? No? Would this affir-
mation concern innate or acquired characteristics? Give your own inter-
pretation and your own hypothesis. Explain how you establish a parallel
with the inhabitants of certain oriental countries who, as science tells us,
share the same anatomical destiny as women. Do the types of mental
and physical practices found in these Asian countries signify an uncon-
scious (?) desire on the part of men to become women? Or a resistance
to the liberation of women and an appropriation of all values, accompa-
nied by lack of recognition of a symbolic sexed morphology?
• The girl-child, according to a certain number of observations, develops

more precociously than the boy-child: she speaks earlier on and her
social skills are precocious. Yes? No? Can it be proved? Disproved? Does
she employ these early accomplishments to make herself into a desirable
object for others? Resulting in regression? True? False? Justify your
response.
• What percentage of the world's population is men and what percentage

is women? What are the percentages of men and women in positions of
political, social, and cultural leadership? Does that seem a foregone
conclusion to you, does it correspond to a male or a female nature, and
to men's and women's desire? Is it innate or acquired?
• Are women naturally more limited, more ignorant, more animalistic, or

better at language than men are? Are they inept at political, economic,
social, or cultural leadership? Innate? Acquired? Verifiable? Unverifiable?
• Is a woman scientist really just a man? A genetic aberration? A monster?

A bisexed individual? A submissive or a non-submissive woman? Or ...?
• Is there or is there not a dominant discourse that claims to be universal

and neuter with respect to sexual difference? Do you agree that it should
be perpetuated? For a year? Two years? One hundred years? Or forever?
• Who, according to our epistemological tradition, is the keystone of the

order of discourse?
• Why has God always been, and why is He still, at least in the west, God
the father? That is, the strictly masculine pole of sexual difference? Is
that the way we designate the sex that is hidden within and beyond all
discourse? Or . . . ?
*
In fact, what claims to be universal is actually the equivalent of a male
idiolect, of a male imaginary, of a sexed world - and not neuter. There is
nothing surprising in this, unless one is a passionate defender of idealism.
Men have always been the ones to speak and especially to write: in the
sciences, in philosophy, in religion, in politics.
However, nothing is said about scientific intuition. It is supposedly
produced ex nihilo. Certain aspects or qualities of this intuition can never-
theless be distinguished. It is always a question of:
• positing one world that one confronts, constituting a world before

oneself, as separate from oneself;
• imposing a model on the universe in order to appropriate it, an

invisible, imperceptible model, projected over it like some piece of
clothing. Is that not the same thing as clothing it blindly in one's own
identity?
• claiming that one is rigorously exterior to the model, in order to prove

that the model is purely and simply objective;
• demonstrating that the model is not dependent on the senses, even

though it is always prescribed at least through privileging the visual, and
through the absence and distancing of a subject who is nonetheless
surreptitiously present;
• ensuring independence from the senses through the mediation of instru-

ments, through the intervention of techniques that separate the subject
from the object of investigation, and through processes that distance
and delegate power to that which intervenes between the observed
universe and the observing subject;
• constructing an ideational or ideal model, independent from the

physical or psychical existence of the producer, according to ideally
elaborated rules of induction and deduction;
• proving the universality of the model, at least for x amount of time, and
its absolute power to constitute (independently of its producer) a unique
and totalized world;
• backing up this universality with experimental protocols about which at

least two (identical?) subjects agree;
• proving that the discovery is efficacious, productive, profitable, exploi-

table (exploitative? of a more or less inanimate nature?), all of which
means that it is progress.
The above characteristics exhibit isomorphism with the male sexual

imaginary, a fact that is supposed to remain rigorously concealed. 'Our
subjective experiences and our feelings or convictions can never justify any
statement,' affirms the epistemologist of the sciences.
It should be added that discoveries must be expressed in a formal

language, a language that makes sense. And that means:
• expressing oneself in symbols or letters, substitutions for proper names,

that refer only to intra-theoretical objects, and therefore never to any
real persons or real objects. The scientist enters into a world of fiction
incomprehensible to all who do not participate in it.
The signs forming terms and predicates are:

+ : or the definition of a new term
= : which marks a property through equivalence and substitution
(belonging to a set or a domain)
E: signifying belonging to a certain type of objects.
The quantifiers (not qualifiers) are:

><
the universal quantifier
the existential quantifier, subordinated, as its name indicates, to the
quantitative.
In the semantics of incomplete entities (Frege), the functional symbols

are variables taken from the limit cases of the forms of syntax, and the
preponderant role is accorded the symbol of universality or the universal

quantifier.
The connectors are:

• negation: P or not P
• conjunction: P or Q
• disjunction: P or Q
• implication: P results in Q
• equivalence: P equals Q.
There is therefore no sign:

• for difference other than quantitative difference;
• for reciprocity (other than within the same property or the same set);
• for exchange,
• for permeability,
• for fluidity.
Syntax is dominated by:

• identity to, expressed by properties and quantities;
• non-contradictiony or reduction of ambiguity, of ambivalence, or multi-
valency;
• binary oppositions: nature/reason, subject/object, matter/energy, inertia/
movement.
Undoubtedly, formal language is not simply a set of game rules. It serves

to define the game so that all the participants play the same way, and so
that a decision can be made in case of disagreement over a move. But who
are the participants? Is it possible to intuit something outside the language
utilized? How could such an intuition be translated for the participants?
*
The non-neutrality of the subject in science is expressed in many ways. It
can be extrapolated from what is, or is not, being discovered at any given
moment in history, and from what science sets, or does not set, as goals
for its research. For example, in relative disorder and disrespect for the
hierarchy of the sciences:
• Psychoanalysis is based on the two main principles of thermodynamics

underlying the Freudian model of the libido. These two principles
appear to be more isomorphic with male sexuality than with female
sexuality. The latter is less subject to alternations of tension and
discharge, to conservation of required energy, to the maintenance of
states of equilibrium, to functioning as a circuit that is closed and then
reopened by saturation, to the reversibility of time, etc. Female sexuality

may harmonize better, if we must evoke a scientific model, with what
Prigogine calls 'dissipative' structures, which function through exchange
with the outside world, which proceed in energy stages, and whose
ordering is based not on seeking equilibrium, but on crossing thresholds
corresponding to leaving disorder or entropy behind, without discharge.
• Economics (and the social sciences as well?) has emphasized scarcity and
survival phenomena rather than those associated with life and
abundance.
• Linguistics remains attached to models of the utterance, to synchronic

structures of speech, to models of language that every normally consti-
tuted subject can intuit. It has not considered the question of the sexua-
lization of discourse, and sometimes even refuses to do so. It accepts -
out of necessity - that certain terms of the lexicon have been added to
the accepted stock, that new figures of style eventually impose
themselves, but is unable to imagine that syntax and syntactic-semantic
organization could be sexually determined, and neither neuter nor
universal nor atemporal.
• Biology is beginning to approach certain issues rather late: for example,

the constitution of placental tissue, or the permeability of membranes.
Are these questions more directly correlated with the female and
maternal sexual imaginary?
• Mathematics is interested in set theory, in closed and open spaces, in the

infinitely large and the infinitely small. It shows little interest in the
question of the partially open, of fluid sets, of analysis of the problem of
boundaries, of passages between, of fluctuations taking place between
thresholds of defined sets. Even these questions are raised by topology, it
emphasizes that which closes back up, rather than that which remains
outside circularity.
• Logic is more interested in bivalent theories than in trivalent or multiva-

lent theories that still appear marginal.
• Physics conceives its object of study according to a nature it measures in

ever more formalized, ever more abstract, ever more modeled, ways. Its
techniques, expressed through increasingly sophisticated axioms, deal
with matter that does still exist, of course, but that is not perceptible to
subjects conducting experiments, at least for the most part. Nature, the
target of physics, risks being exploited and disintegrated by the physicist,
even without his or her knowledge. The Newtonian revolution ushered

scientific practice into a universe where sense perception is almost non-
existent, and where the matter (however it is predicated) of the universe
and of the bodies that constitute it — the stakes and the object of physics
itself — may be annihilated. Inside physics itself there are cleavages:
quantum theory/field theory, mechanics of solids/dynamics of fluids, for
example. In any case, the imperceptibility of the matter that is studied
often leads to a paradoxical privileging of solidity in discoveries, and to
a lag in, even an abandonment of, analysis of the unfinished in-finite of
force fields. Could this be interpreted as a result of the refusal to take
into account the dynamics of the researcher-subject?
*
In the face of these observations and questions, are we faced with an alter-
native: either be a scientist or be a 'militant'? Or even: continue to be a
scientist and divide oneself up into different functions, into several
different people or characters? Should the truth of science and the truth of
life remain separate, at least for the majority of researchers? What kind of
science and what kind of life are we dealing with then? The question is all
the more pertinent since life in our times is largely dominated by science
and its techniques.
What is the origin of this schiz that is both imposed by and inflicted
upon scientists? Is it a non-analyzed model of the subject? A 'subjective'
revolution that never took place: the splitting of the subject having been
programmed by the episteme and the power structures put in place by it? Is
it that the Copernican revolution has occurred, and that the epistemolo-
gical subject has so far neither acted upon nor moved beyond it? Has it
modified this subject's discourse about the world in such a way that it is
even more disappropriating than the language that preceded it? Scientists
now claim to be standing before the world', naming it, establishing its laws,
axiomaticizing it. They manipulate nature, use it, exploit it, but forget that
they are also in it, that they are still physical, and not simply confronting
phenomena whose physical nature they sometimes fail to recognize.
Progressing according to an objective method that shelters them from all
instability, all moods, all feelings and affective fluctuations, all intuitions
not already programmed in the name of science, all interference from their
desires, notably sexual ones, that could affect discoveries, they settle down
into the systematic — into what can be assimilated to the already dead?
Fearing, sterilizing the destabilizations that are, nonetheless, necessary for
the coming of a new horizon of discovery.
Inquiry into the subject of science, and its psychic and sexual implica-
tion in discourse, and in discoveries and their development, is one of the
sites most capable of provoking a re-evaluation of the scientific horizon.
In order to ask oneself if the so-called universal language(s) and

discourse(s) (including those of the sciences) are neuter with respect to the
sex that produces them, we must pursue research in view of accomplishing
two goals: the interpretation of the law-making discourse as subject to an
unrecognized sexual dimension of the speaking subject, and the attempt to
define the characteristics of what a differently sexed language would be.
In other words: is there, within the logical and syntactico-semantic
mechanisms of accepted discourse, an openness or a degree of liberty that
would permit the expression of sexual difference? We must analyze, in
order to interpret their position within a sexed logic, the laws (including
those that are not explicit) that determine the acceptability of language and
of discourse. This work can be pursued from different angles:
• The causal mode that currently dominates discourse considered normal,

as well as the conditional, unreal, and restrictive modes, etc., that fix its
'practicable' framework, limiting the liberty of a subject of enunciation
who does not necessarily obey certain criteria of normality, may be
studied. While these causal and restrictive modes (the two are linked)
permit the accumulation of information and a certain type of already
coded communication, do they not inhibit intra-discursivity and prevent
all possibility of any qualitatively different enunciation?
• The means or conjunctions of co-ordination also participate in the

economy of the principle of causality dominating so-called asexual
discourse: juxtaposition, including the summation of clauses and
subjects (and . . . and); alternative (either . . . or); exclusion, including
the eventual elimination of the subject of enunciation (neither . . . nor);
co-ordination proceeding in the direction of the syllogistics regulating
discourse (for, therefore, but).
What modes of subordination or co-ordination would authorize the

discursive relationship between two sexually different subjects?
• The symmetry (notably right-left) in intersubjective relations and its

impact on the production of language may be analyzed. Can the issues
of symmetry and asymmetry result in criteria that would be able to
determine a qualitative difference between the scxes^ Is the 'blind spot
in the old dream of symmetry' (cf. Speculum) situated in the same place
in a relationship between individuals of the same sex, as it is in a
relationship between individuals of different sexes? The dream itself,
however, dream that may underlie the economy of the speaking subject,
seems to be invalidated by cosmic laws in the face of which no observer
of nature and language can remain indifferent, any more than a speaker
or interlocutor from the outside.
• When women are held back in a potential language, they constitute a

reservoir of energy that could be eliminated, or could explode for lack
of possible forms of expression. When they represent only the underside
or the reverse side (in specular symmetry?) of discourse, they close it off
on itself. Forced into a mimetic defense or offense, women risk
absorbing the meaning of discourse, by collapsing it through lack of any
possible response. They may be intercepting the goal or the intention-
ality of discourse, and thus accelerating the destructuring process -
which could be acceptable if a new language were to ensue. The
question that must be asked is whether women's language would fulfill
an as yet unrealized potential for meaning, while remaining within the
same general discursive economy, or whether what women think and
may be able to say would require a mutation of the horizon of language.
That would explain the resistance to their entry into the networks of
communication, and the even greater resistance to their entry into the
spaces - theoretical and scientific - that determine the values and laws
of exchange.
*
Certain questions should be asked regarding the access of women to
language and discourse.
(1) Why is their potential energy for language always on the vanishing
point, never able to get back to the subject of enunciation? Recent research
in discourse theory, as well as in physics, may shed light on the site, in
darkness until now, of women's lack of access to discursivity. We must
come back to a study of temporalization and its relationship to the place
from which the subject is either able, or unable, to position itself as
producer of language. If the discourse of the hypothetical interlocutor
intercepts the word, cutting it off from memory of the past and from
anticipation of the future, all that is left for the subject are attempts to get
back to that place from which she or he can be heard. We should empha-
size in this context the importance of locality in the constructions of
women's language. The circumstances of place largely determine the
programming of 'discourse.'
(2) Do we not find, in this insistence on the question of place, an

attempt to give form to a subject of enunciation, for lack of temporaliza-
tion in a dynamics of communication? The utterance's potential for
reversibility, or lack thereof, notably between speaker and interlocutor,
should be approached from this perspective, as well as its eventual repeti-
tion or reproduction. These conditions are absolutely essential for
admissible discourse, since the other is placed in the position of a mirror
that both inverts the received discourse, and responds to it after this retro-
action.
(3) The problem of the possible, or impossible, mirror in the other,

dominates the enigma of the language and silence of women. Whatever
the case may be, 'they' do not say nothing, and the fascination felt, by
certain practitioners in particular, for what they do say certainly indicates
that some kind of deciphering of the production of language is expressed
through them.
These issues could also be approached from the following angle:
(1) Does what we call the mother tongue establish a space for a specific
production of language by the mother, and for exchange between mother
and children? Is socially admissible language not always paternal? Does a
fault-line open up at the entry into discourse? A fault-line that ceaselessly
threatens discourse with total collapse, with madness, with sclerotic
normalization.
(2) The creation of language — in all forms — by the maternal has been
barred since the origin of our culture. The maternal has been allocated to
the procreation of children, and has never been a site for the functioning
of a productive matrix. From this perspective, it is useful to reinvestigate
and reinterpret the Freudian texts - notably Totem and Taboo - that
define the foundation of the primitive horde as the murder of the father,
and the sharing of his body by the sons. Deeper than the murder of the
father, at the origin of our culture, can we not decipher (in Greek tragedy,
mythology, and even philosophy) an even more archaic matricide? This
murder of the mother in her cultural dimension as fecund lover, continues
to govern the establishment of the symbolic and social order that is our
own. What consequences does this matricide have for the production of
language and the programming of discourses, including scientific
discourses?
(3) Since psychoanalytic 'science' is supposed to be the theory of the

subject, Freud's hypothesis concerning the constitution of the relation of
the subject to discourse calls for reconsideration and reinterpretation.
Freud puts forth, as the scene of the introduction of the subject into
language, the 'spool game.' The child - a boy, as it happens - tries to
master the absence of his mother by using an instrument he throws
away and then pulls back, first banishing it, and then bringing it in close
to his space, into his space, alternating vowel sounds along with his
gestures: o-o-o (far), a-a-a (near).
This 'game,' the so-called fort-da game, complete with its alternating
vowels, supposedly marks the entry of the child into the realm of symbolic
distancing. The boy-child (Freud does not provide any hypothesis as to
how all of this might happen for a girl) is able to make this transition -
while producing sounds, a kind of musical scale - by assimilating his
mother to an object attached to a string that allows him to control, or
even eliminate, the distance between her and himself. Does the fort-da
scene still have a significant function in the constitution of the meaning of
language? How are the vowels articulated with the consonants?
This scenario, as it is described by Freud, requires the absence of the
mother as interlocutor, and the presence of the grandfather as observer and
regulator of 'normal' language. What gestures, what other kinds of
language, between child and mother, mother and child, are left out of
acceptable discourse? Do the systematicity and the madness of so-called
admissible discourse not result from this 'outside' of the spoken and the
speakable, since a scenario for exchange between mother and son, mother
and man-subject, has not been put into place in language? We had better
make sure that this means of distancing does not become deadly.
(4) Freud says nothing about the entry of the little girl into language,
except that it takes place earlier than for the little boy. He does not
describe her first scene of gestural and verbal symbolization, in particular
in relation to her mother. On the other hand, he does affirm that the girl
will have to leave her mother, turn away from her, in order to enter into
the desire and the order of the father, of man. A whole economy of
gestural and verbal relations between mother and daughter, between
women, is thus eliminated, abolished, forgotten in so-called normal
language, which is neither asexual nor neuter. Does discourse then consist
only of partially theoretical exchanges between generations of men,
concerning the mastery of the mother and of nature? What is lacking is
the fecundity of the sexed word, and of a creation, beyond procreation,
that is sexual.
Notes
II LINGUISTIC AND SPECULAR COMMUNICATION
1 Translator's note. Although I have everywhere tried to use gender-fair language

in this translation, in the case of 'Linguistic and Specular Communication' I
have decided to maintain the generic masculine in which it was originally
written. The topic itself is ambiguous in this respect, in that it deals with the
moment of the emergence of subjectivity, when gender identities are only just
coming into being. It would be questionable in this context to interpret the
third person singular pronoun 'he/it' (the French //) as identifying a particular
gender. '//' is in this case neither a 'he' nor a 'she,' and the use of the generic
masculine 'he' is, at least debatably, appropriate in this context. It would have
been theoretically possible to use 'she,' the equivalent third person singular.
However, given the cultural and linguistic resonances of 'she,' I believe that
that choice of translation would have risked skewing the meaning of the text
in the direction of gender identification, and would have misrepresented its
principal theme, which is the emergence of subjectivity.
2 Translator's note. I have used the numeral to distinguish between the French
un (the numeral 'one') and on (the pronoun 'one').
3 Author's note. Brackets indicate that the concept has been laid down without
being actualized in discourse. Parentheses indicate the partners of enunciation.
Quotation marks: for example, 'I,' are used to designate the subjects and
objects of the utterance.
4 Author's note. Today I would not write this statement. The father and the
mother are not permutable unless they are sexually undifferentiated. We are
dealing with a more complex operation: a sexually marked triangulation which
engenders a sexed subject in its relation to language. I leave the text as it is, as
the trace of theoretical distance covered, and of a question about the constitu-
tion of the subject of discourse.
5 Author's note. G. Frege, Les fondements de Tarithmetique, Paris: Seuil, 1969.
6 Author's note. K. Togeby, Structure immanente de la langue francaise, Paris:
Larousse, 1965, p. 157, quoting S. Mill, Brondal, L. Hjelmslev.
7 Translator's note. The French 'one' Irigaray refers to here is more appropriately
translated into English as 'we.'
8 Author's note. R. Jakobson, 'Les Embrayeurs,' Essais de linguistique generate,
Paris: Minuit, 1963, p. 177, and Togeby, p. 157, referring to Hjelmslev.
9 Author's note. At the specular level, the terms of the schema of communication
can never be understood as realizations of actual discourse. Hence, the
constant usage of brackets in the paragraphs devoted to specular 'communica-

tion.'
10 Author's note. J. Lacan, 'Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction
du Je,' in his Ecrits, Paris: Seuil, 1966.
11 Author's note. I leave in abeyance here the question of the creation of writing
that is not duplication of the word.
12 Author's note. The transformations carried out here on the theoretical model
previously defined make no claim to explaining all of the disorders of
linguistic and specular communication. They serve as examples and block out
a program for future research.
13 Author's note. J. de Ajuriaguerra et ai, 'A propos de quelques conduites devant
le miroir de sujets atteints de syndromes dementiels du grand age,' Neuropsy-
chologia, 7:1, June 1963, 59-73. Cf. also my book: Le Langage des dements, in
Approaches to Semiotics, Paris: Mouton, 1973.
14 Author's note. At the level of the theoretical model, the subject can be found in
the 'zero' that founds it, and in the structure that singularizes it.
Ill N E G A T I O N A N D N E G A T I V E T R A N S F O R M A T I O N S I N T H E
LANGUAGE OF SCHIZOPHRENICS
1 Translator's note. The ambiguities referred to here are not always easily trans-
lated into English. In some cases they can be made clearly 'ambiguous' in
English, and in others will remain so only in the French, especially where
these ambiguities are phonetic. For example, to be born (naitre in Frenchj
cannot be distinguished phonetically from not to be (n'etre in French).
2 Translator's note. Obviously 'to be reborn,' 'not to be,' and 'to disappear' do
not rhyme in English. The French terms renaitre, ne pas etre, disparaitre, most
definitely rhyme.
3 Translator's note. Since most adjectives in English are not marked by gender, it
is impossible to show the distinction being made here. Even the previous
distinction between handsome and beautiful is only partially valid in English,
since the two adjectives are not invariably, but only sometimes, gender-
specific.
4 Author's note. We find here perhaps one of the divergences noted in the perfor-
mances of schizophrenics depending on whether we are dealing with adjectives
or verbs. In the case of adjectives, the cue word can be understood as an
acceptance or a rejection of certain aspects of the word, whereas for the verbs,
especially if they imply an animate subject, it would necessarily be received as
a request to transform a statement after having assumed responsibility for it as
one's own.
NOTES 261
IV T O W A R D S A G R A M M A R O F E N U N C I A T I O N F O R
H Y S T E R I C S A N D OBSESSIVES
1 Translator's note. The French hysterique is the same for both masculine and
feminine, and I have translated it as 'he or she', 'him or her', and so on,
because in Irigaray's work it is almost always female but not exclusively so.
The French text uses the masculine form obsessionnel, which I have translated
as 'he', 'him', and so on because in Irigaray's work the obsessive is almost
always male.
2 Translator's note. The following abbreviations will be used in the text: NP1 =
noun phrase 1 = the subject of the sentence; V = the verb; NP2 = noun phrase
2 = direct or indirect object of the verb; NP3 = noun phrase 3 = adverbial
phrase, complement of a preposition of time or place.
3 Author's note. These are the terms of traditional clinical and phenomenological
nosology. Why use them in this work? It is impossible to move, without
transition, from one code to another, from one dictionary to another. Using
the already existing terms is one way, among others, of finding the means to
subvert them. As for the risk of tautology between the provisional naming of
the speaking subject and the analysis of the discourse, it is nil: the first time. It
is no longer nil when the relation has been established through work on the
corpus. Only that which remains at the level of metalanguage goes into its
own feedback loop, rediscovering only its own hypotheses.
V O N P H A N T A S M A N D T H E VERB
1 Translator's note. Although the theological reference is obvious in this sub-

heading, it is useful to point out explicitly here that the French verbe means
word, in the sense of the logos - 'In the beginning was the Word . . . ' - as well
as verb. I have chosen to use verb in the English translation, since the article
deals with verbs, in the linguistic sense.
2 Author's note. That is to say that what will be designated as subject and object
does not belong to the register of the utterance. Nor will it be a question of a
specific subject or object, but rather of the subject function - f(s) - and of the
object function - f(o) - determined by the structuring in question. In cases
where the term subject designates the whole of the structuring, or even of the
structure, it is written <subject> and designates another functional level.
3 Author's note. Phantasm is to be understood here as the primordial formation of
the subject resulting from the reciprocal integration of its body and an indivi-
dual discourse. It must therefore be distinguished from the drive - a limit
concept, the effect of the union of the body and of language — and from the
projection of phantasms specified in the form of animated scenes, the stage
where representation appears, and which is, as spectacle often passively under-
gone, to be opposed to the more active structuring which presupposes the image.
4 Author's note. However, a passive form anterior to an active form, and not the
result of a passive transformation: to live — to absorb — to be absorbed.
5 Author's note. The term 'partner of enunciation' - sometimes written as (you)

- indicates the space of the possible functioning of an other <subject>.
6 Author's note. I continue to use the term analysand in the text. Strictly
speaking, the 'analyst' and the 'analysand' are both analyzing and analyzed.
VI L I N G U I S T I C S T R U C T U R E S O F K I N S H I P A N D T H E I R
PERTURBATIONS IN S C H I Z O P H R E N I A
1 Translator's note. The example given in this context does not make sense in
English. The French word 'parent' does indeed mean both 'relative' in the
general sense and, more specifically, 'parent.'
2 Translator's note. The words 'ormeaux' (elm striplings), and 'jumeaux' (twins)
rhyme in French; their English translations do not.
3 Translator's note. In French, the plural generic masculine 'neveux' can include
both nephews and nieces.
VII S E N T E N C E P R O D U C T I O N A M O N G S C H I Z O P H R E N I C S
A N D SENILE D E M E N T I A P A T I E N T S
1 Translator's note. Sea (mer), mother {mere), and mayor (maire) are
homophones in French. The point is that the respondents with dementia do
not notice this ambiguity.
2 Translator's note. See note 1, above.
3 Translator's note. The word for 'window-shutter' in French is volet, which
sounds exactly like the verb voler, 'to fly.' The word for 'sheet of paper' in
French is feuille, which also means 'leaf.'
VIII T H E U T T E R A N C E I N ANALYSIS
1 Author's note. For the meaning of the term 'phantasm,' see Chapter V, 'On
Phantasm and the Verb.'
2 Author's note. See Chapter I, 'Linguistic and Specular Communication.'
3 Translator's note. Savoir ['to know'], s'avoir ['what he/she has'], ca voir ['to see
that'] are homophones in French. The context here indicated a literal transla-
tion, but the rhyming word-play should be noted.
4 Translator's note. Irigaray frequently uses the term "insister in contrast to the
verb 'exister! I have chosen to maintain this usage in English. 'Insist' here
indicates being within', 'exist' would indicate without, or being outside.
5 Translator's note. The 'puns' do not literally translate Irigaray's examples, but
are meant to illustrate the psychoanalytic operation on language she is
discussing.
NOTES 263
IX CLASS L A N G U A G E , U N C O N S C I O U S L A N G U A G E
1 Translator's note. My translation of Saussure. The page reference is to Luce

Irigaray's citation of the French text.
2 Translator's note. The T in parentheses, here in brackets, is the subject of
enunciation.
3 Translator's note. See Chapter IV, note 1.
4 Author's note. See Chapter 4, 'Towards a Grammar of Enunciation for
Hysterics and Obsessives.'
X T H E RAPE O F T H E L E T T E R
1 Author's note. For example, those of J. Derrida: De la Grammatologie, Paris:

Minuit, 1967; L'Ecriture et la difference, Paris: Seuil, 1967; 'La Differance,' in
his Marges de la philosophic, Paris: Minuit, 1972; or 'La double Seance,' in La
Dissemination, Paris: Seuil, 1972.
2 Author's note. Derrida's text also includes the ambiguity that its scribe is
marked as simultaneously included and excluded in the closure he or she
designates and denounces.
3 Author's note. For the meaning of the term 'phantasm' see Chapter V, 'On
Phantasm and the Verb.'
4 Translator's note. Irigaray here notes that Derrida translates Aufhebung into
French as releve.
5 Translator's note. Irigaray uses the term 'differance, and notes in a footnote,
'This term is Jacques Derrida's. Cf. "La Differance," in Marges de la philoso-
phic It means the temporalization of difference as J. Derrida tries to think it
in our epoch after Nietzsche, Heidegger and Freud.' Some writers use the term
'differance' in English, while others do not. I have used 'deferral' to translate
'differance'
6 Author's note. This is not to say that the constitution of my image as other does
not require movement. A certain number of reiterations or displacements with
respect to the environment are necessary for the articulation of the play of
same and other. (Cf. Lacan, 'Le Stade du miroir,' in his Ecrits.)
7 Author's note. It is, on several accounts, deceptive to say 'the' phoneme, or 'it,' etc.
8 Author's note. Phonological analysis, in what it takes or defines as the field of
articulation, founds for the act of articulation a structural method that is not
without suspensions or reservations.
9 Author's note. The fact that phonological features are accounted for in binary
terms is obviously another issue. Still 'open at present.' In addition, 'only
phonological features are strictly binary... . Phonetic features can have many
values' (Sanford A. Schane, Introduction to Langages, 8, on 'La Phonologie
generative')
10 Author's note. Historically linked to the consignment of language to writing?
The logos, logic, are determined only by the coming of literal, as opposed to
figurative, graphism.
11 Translators note. 'Between' (entre) and 'cavern/antrum' (antre) are

homophones in French.
12 Author's note. Not necessarily the split involved in 'archi-writing,' or even in
'writing' (cf. Derrida's text). The letter and the grapheme cannot be confused.
13 Author's note. Thus one interpretation, among others, of Freud's discourse
could be as an encyclopedic 'after the fact,' after-effect of a double submission
to the alphabetic order.
15 Author's note. And not only phonetic articulation, which has been wrongfully
privileged.
17 Author's note. Is the history of silence surrounding writing the result of the
silence imposed by its non-figurative alphabetic apparatus? The absence of
writing from history could be interpreted as the reaction to the rejection, the
answer to the foreclosure, acted out in literal writing.
XI SEX AS S I G N
1 Translator's note. Entrer, 'to enter,' and entre, 'between,' present a homophony
in French that Irigaray is both playing with and emphasizing. See Chapter X,
note 11.
2 Translator's note. The word lca'means 'this/that/it,' as well as the 'id' in French.
3 Author's note. Cf. what Lacan articulated about the way they function, in the
Ecrits and particularly in Subversion du sujet et dialectique du desir.
4 Author's note. For the problematic of writing, refer to Derrida, in particular to
'La Dissemination,' in La Dissemination, Paris: Seuil, 1972.
5 Author's note. The question of the hymen, of its structure and its functioning,
was taken up by J. Derrida in 'La double Seance,' in La Dissemination.
6 Translator's note. See Chapter X, note 11.
7 Author's note. In this context, one should consider the androgynous structure of
the enunciating machinery.
8 Author's note. And especially not: /, here, now, the traces, by now so obvious
that they are not even read as such, of the metaphoric process taking place.
XII I D I O L E C T O R O T H E R L O G I C
1 Translator's note. These terms translate the French, but do not illustrate the
'rhyming' phenomenon discussed here. Appropriate expressions in English
might be: to be reborn, to deform, to be torn.
2 Translator's note. See Chapter VI, note 2.
3 Translator's note. See Chapter VI, note 3.
4 Translator's note. The first of these is really a 'proverb' in English; the others
are translated French. In any case, the results from the exercise on 'Like father,
like son' are the only ones discussed at length in the analysis.
NOTES 265
5 Translator's note. The terms translate the French, but do not illustrate the
phenomenon in question. An appropriate choice might be 'master ->
remaster.'
6 Translator's note. The terms are literal translations from the French, and while
they do present certain ambiguities, these are not necessarily the same ones as
in French.
7 Translator's note. The terms given do not attempt to illustrate the concept
discussed, but are literal translations from the French. 'Body - booty' would
illustrate the phenomenon more appropriately.
8 Translator's note. Se note 7, above. 'Tile - toll' would illustrate the example
more appropriately.
9 Translator's note. See Chapter IV, note 1, for an explanation of abbreviations.
XIII D O E S S C H I Z O P H R E N I C D I S C O U R S E EXIST?
1 Translator's note. Irigaray here gives an example to illustrate the point she is
making. The respondent answered: 'I kill everyone.' 'I kill ['je tue] in French
is a homophone of the second person singular pronoun tu [you].
XIV S C H I Z O P H R E N I C S , O R T H E REFUSAL O F S C H I Z
1 Translator s note. This and all subsequent translations from Saussure are my
own. Page references are Luce Irigaray's references to the French text.
2 Translator s note. This and all subsequent translations from the Ruwet text are
my own. Page references are Luce Irigaray's references to the French text.
X V T H E S E T T I N G I N PSYCHOANALYSIS
1 Author's note. This text was first presented, in March of 1975, at the Univer-
sity of Strasbourg, in a seminar entitled 'The science of texts,' directed by P.
Lacoue-Labarthe and J. L. Nancy. It could also be called: 'Philosophy Viewed
from behind,' or: 'What is the Psyche of a Vegetarian?'; 'What Kind of Philo-
sophy Is Written while Dancing?'; 'Why Does Nietzsche, the Mobile One,
Spend the End of his Life Lying down, and Not Writing?'; or finally: 'Who Is
this Freud, Never from Both Sides?'
2 Translator's note. I have used 'backside' for the noun Derriere, 'back side' /
'behind' / 'in back' for the preposition, but the French text puns on the single
word.
3 Translator's note. See Chapter XI, note 2.
XVI T H E P O V E R T Y O F PSYCHOANALYSIS
1 Translator's note. lMisere de la psychanalyse' would theoretically require a very

long and unwieldy title, since no one word in English can account for the
multiple meanings of the French 'misere! After much consideration, I have
selected 'poverty,' a translation already used by David Macey and Margaret
Whitford, in the English-language collection edited by Margaret Whitford,
The Irigaray Reader, London and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1991, pp.
79-104). I would now like to express my appreciation and respect for the
entire Macey-Whitford translation, a text I have long known, and knew for
many years before undertaking this translation. I have tried, in the opening
paragraphs of the article, to render some of the other resonances of 'miserel
which are not represented in the title.
4 Author's note. The journal Critique, in which 'Misere de la Psychanalyse was
published in 1977, required that examples be cited; the 'you' to whom the
text is addressed should nevertheless be understood as plural. My decision to
write this text is linked to the suicide of a woman friend, a psychoanalyst. The
psychoanalytic world is reponsible for her suicide, among others — particularly
in its rejection of the ethical and theoretical questions asked about psychoana-
lysis by women and men who then have no other choice but to kill
themselves.
5 Translator's note. This, and all subsequent translations, from Partage des femmes
are my own. The first references given following the citations are Luce Irigar-
ay's, and refer to the French edition of Partage des femmes. For an alternative
translation of Partage des femmes, the reader should consult Eugenie Lemoine-
Luccioni, The Dividing of Women, or Women's Lot, trans. Marie-Anne Daven-
port and Marie-Christine Reguis, London: Free Association Books, 1987. The
second page numbers, given in brackets, refer to this translation.
6 Translator's note. This and all subsequent translations from Jacques Lacan's
Encore are my own. The first reference given following each citation is Luce
Irigaray's reference to the French edition of Encore. For alternative translations
of the Encore citations, the reader should consult Jacques Lacan, Encore:
1972—1973, an English-language edition of which is On Feminine Sexuality:
the Limits of Love and Knowledge, facques Lacan, trans. Bruce Fink, in the
series Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, New York: Norton, 1998. The
second page reference, given in brackets, is to this translation.
7 Translator's note. All translations from the Safouan text are my own. See note
9, below.
9 Translator's note. A translation of Chapter 1 of Safouan's La Sexualite feminine
dans la doctrine freudienne has been done in the collection facques Lacan and
the Ecole Freudienne: Feminine Sexuality, ed. Jacqueline Rose and Juliet
Mitchell, London: Macmillan, 1982, under the title 'Feminine sexuality in
psychoanalytic doctrine,' trans. Jacqueline Rose. As mentioned in note 6,
NOTES 267
above, all translations of the Safouan text are my own. The first page reference
included for all citations is Luce Irigaray's reference to the French text. When
the citation is from Chapter 1, I have indicated the reference to the alternative
translation in brackets.
10 Translators note. See note 2, above.
XVII T H E L A N G U A G E O F M A N
1 Author's note. Cf. the analysis of the myth of the cavern in Speculum of the
other woman. [An English-language edition, trans. Gillian C. Gill, was
published in New York by Cornell University Press, 1985.]
XVIII T H E L I M I T S O F T R A N S F E R E N C E

2 Translator's note. See Chapter VIII, note 4.
XIX I N S C I E N C E , IS T H E S U B J E C T SEXED?
1 Author's note. The following questions were presented, in part, at the 'Seminar
of the history and sociology of scientific facts and ideas,' at the University of
Provence, in Marseilles.
Index
abreaction 96 as 'wall' 194
absorb (verb) 56-7, 58 animates, and inanimates 29, 33, 37, 93
and transference 59-60 in hysterical language 45
abstract images 49-50 verbs and 31, 56, 57, 260 n. 4
abstract terms 113, 114, 116 anorexia 59
acoustic image, as 'signifier' 184-5 anthropology 228
adjectives aphanisis 144
in hysterical language 46 aphasics 27, 36
in obsessive language 50 archi-writing 131, 133
in senile dementia 89 'as if 52, 142, 144, 148
adverbs Assal, G. 94
in hysterical language 46, 48-9 assertion 174
in obsessive language 50-1 Austin, J. L. 171, 176
affectation auto-affection 199, 229
stylistic marks of 34, 160, 163
affective connotations 92 banal messages 92
affirmation 38-40 Benveniste, E. 171, 173, 176
see also negation 'between',
age, relative, in kinship terms 65 and entering 137, 264 ch. XI n. 1
agglutinative languages 109 'between' games 133—4, 135-6, 147
air 140 between-the-two, of enunciation 105, 184,
alienation 14, 16-17 195
see also space(s): spatial alienation binarism, in language 5, 263 n. 9, 230,
alphabet 121-3 232, 252
see also letters (of alphabet) biology, as science 253
ambiguity 29, 40, 89, 92 bisexuality 223
see also disambiguation; referential see also homosexuality
ambiguity; semantic ambiguity blanks, in discourse 134, 189-90
analysand body
levels of communication 100 and language, integrated 9, 211
as network 101 psychoanalytic signifiers of 219
response to psychoanalysis 96-9, 106, rejected, for beauty 212
196, 209 sex constitutive of 218-19
supine position of 194, 195, 201 brain, in men and women 3, 249
analyst capacities, of men and women 249
authorization for 206 castration
interventions of 99-100, 101, 105 analogy in psychoanalytic discourse 103,
as 'keeper' of memory traces 199 202, 212, 218
as mirror 195, 196-7 and 'between' games 134
responding to metaphor 141-2 catatonic patients 36
role of 21-2, 60, 99, 100, 102, 103, catharsis 237
105-6, 245-6 causal modes, in discourse 48, 52, 255
270 INDEX
cavern 130, 134 and archi-writing 131

censorship, in psychoanalysis 205, 234 between nature and representation 128—
chiasmus 9,202
in hysterical language 46-7, 48 delusional patients 22
in transference between women 240 demonstrative indices 169, 175-6
child development 249 derivations, schizophrenic 185-6
Chomsky, N. 110-11 Derrida, J. 130, 263 ch. X nn. 1, 2, 5, 264
circuit of exchange n. 5
in constitution of subject 10-11 desire 4
class determinations 114-15 object of 104
class language 111 women's 234
see also middle-class language; working- desire (verb) 62
class language differance 263 n. 5
co-phantasm 59 difference, qualitative
collaterality, in kinship terms 65 sign lacking in science 252
in schizophrenic language 68, 157 sign lacking for women 243-4, 255
communication disambiguation 29, 90, 160
structures of 26-7, 43-4 discourse 176
comparatives 48 as cause and effect of social mediations
competence, and performance (in language) 114
110, 181-4 emptying 96, 196
concept, as 'signified' 184-5 and fluidity 233
conditionals 48, 51-2 pathogenetic process 5
conjunctions 255 rules of production 111
Conklin, H. 63 time and place, in programming 256-7
connectors (scientific) 252 dissociation
connotations 160, 163, 170 and infinitives 55
consanguinity, in kinship terms 64, 157 from utterance 28, 30, 39
consumption, in transference 239-40 doubt 117
constancy principle 230, 234 Dubois, J. 65, 94
contra-diction, in women's speaking 231 dynamics of flux 233, 234, 235, 238
see also non-contradiction, principle of dysgraphics and dyslexics 121
Copernican revolution 234, 254
copula 106, 141, 144, 147, 151 economic development, and language 109,
couch, analyst's 194, 215 111
counter-transference 59 economics, as science 253
creativity, linguistic 116, 171, 181-2 e
g°
Critchley, M. 88 in linguistic kinship structures 64, 66,
6 7 , 6 8 , 7 1 , 157
'dance of the veils' 211-12 see also T
death, in psychoanalysis 226 Empedocles 233
exclusion from communication, as 10, enunciation
12,97 analysis of 25
specular image and 15 grammar of 43
in transference 62, 207 machinery of, in psychoanalysis 138-40
death drive 4, 230 metaphorical 144
debriefing, in psychoanalysis 96 models of 53, 118
deep and surface structures poles of 118
schizophrenic language and 184 problems 27
universals analysed in 110-11 theorizing 5
deferral 123, 125, 127, 263 n. 5 trajectories within 104
INDEX 271
and utterance 13, 54, 60 God

exchange, values of 10-11, 256, 258 as father 243, 250
sign lacking in science 252 and science 211, 247
Goldstein, K. 88
grammar
face-to-face 197, 201-2
in schizophrenic language 25-6, 168-9,
'fall', the 16
181, 182-3
father 10, 211, 224, 259 n. 4
graphemes 125, 130
debt owed to 199, 219
graphism 121-5
murder of 257
as oculocentrism 130
female ideal, need for 243-4
producing scribe as form 125
female sexuality 225
and subjectivity 2
scientific model of 252-3
Greek myths and tragedies 219, 226, 257
filial relation
in schizophrenic language 69, 7 0 - 1 , 158,
159 habitual language 127
Fillmore, C. J. 168 hallucination 201
fluidity Harris, Z. S. 110, 167
sign lacking in science 252 have (verb) 58-9
see also dynamics of flux and transference 61-2
fluids, and solids 233, 253, 254 hebephrenic patients 36, 157
food, and women in analysis 239 Heidegger, M. 210
form and matter 221, 232 historical enunciation 176
^-^231,258 homeostasis 230
fragmentation homophones 29, 175
in identity of hysteric 20 homophonic analogy 35, 163
in psychoanalytic interpretation 61 homosexuality 223—4
Frege, G. 11, 251 female 218
Freud, S. 206, 208, 217, 223, 237, 257-8 human sciences 247
setting for analysis 193, 202, 203 hymen 142
Totem and Taboo 257 hypertransformation 33, 37
hysteria 202
hysterical patients 19-20
game(s)
language 23, 44-9, 53-4, 117, 234
defined by language 252
played by analysand 102
in schizophrenic language 90, 92, 93-4, 'I'
116, 166, 167 in obsessive language 49
see also 'between' games; power play; and 'one' 2 - 3 , 93, 167
'spool game'; word play in senile dementia 89
gaze as sexed subject 6
in analytic setting 200-1 I-you relation 173
domain of 99 in schizophrenic language 174
and graphism 122, 125 id
and specular image 15, 17, 18, 22 'it' 137, 207
generations, in kinship terms 65 reification of unconscious 14
in schizophrenic language 6 7 - 8 , 157 identification 10
generative grammar 181-2 double polarity, within one sex 223
generic kinship terms 65, 157 mimetic 241
gestures 124, 128-9 specular 15-17
give (verb) 57, 58 idiolect 87, 93, 161, 170, 188
and transference 60-1 male, as universal 250
272 INDEX
idiosemiological context 89 linearity 123, 189, 203

dissociation from 115 linguistics, as science 253
of utterances 22, 31, 86-7 see also psycholinguistics; socio-linguistics
imaginary 9 lips see 'two lips' model of women's
female 215, 221 language
male, as totalitarian 215-16, 218, 219 live (verb) 56, 57-8
specular 15 and transference 61
incest 224 logic, as science 253
incompleteness linguistic 114, 171
in female imaginary 221 logocentrism 130, 142, 263 n. 10
in hysterical language 19-20, 45, 47, Lorenz, M. 25
117 Lounsbury, F. G. 63, 64
in obsessive language 117
symbols for, in science 251-2 male identity principle 229
in verbs 58 male sexuality 218
indexical elements of language 173-7 Mallarme, S. 183
indirect discourse 176 marker words
inertia, linguistic 30, 35 in analysand's utterance 102
infans 228 market economy, of psychoanalytic values
schizophrenic 187, 190, 191 225
inflected languages 109 Marr, N. Y. 109-10, 111
interlocution 173-5 Marr-Stalin debate 109, 110, 111
interrogation 98, 174 marriage 218
of analyst by analysand 98, 99 Marx 216
interrogative transformation 44, 9 0 - 1 , 117 master-slave dialectic 210
intuition, scientific 250-1 mathematical model of nature 229-30,
Irigaray, L. 65, 94 253-4
isomorphism, with male imaginary 251, mathematics, as science 253
252 meaning 180
analysand seeking 101
Jakobson, R. O. 30, 171, 173, 184 in schizophrenic language 182, 184, 185,
judicial process 186
in scientific discourse 1, 248 medicine 219
memories 195-6
Kant, I. 195, 210 memory traces 198-9
kinesthetics metalanguage, of science 6
and gesture 128-9 metaphoric practice 145-6
kinship terms metaphoric—metonymic movement 119
in schizophrenic language 63-84, 157-8 metaphorization 37, 95, 114
in psychoanalysis 138, 141-52, 234-5
Lacan, J. 139, 206, 210-11, 214, 221, 222 metonymy 113, 114, 152
language distortions 23 middle-class language 114
language/speech dichotomy 179-81 sentence production exercise 111-12,
laughter, at word play 145-6, 202 113-14
leadership 249 'militant feminism' 216, 222
Lemoine-Luccioni, E. 208, 211, 212, 2 1 3 - mimeticism, of women 4, 225, 231, 241-2,
15, 223, 225 256
letters (of alphabet) 121-5, 129-33 mirror(s) 16, 195
capital 216, 217 for hysterical patients 20
lexical rule 86 metaphorization and 142, 148-50
libido 222, 252 for obsessive patients 21
INDEX 273
for psychotic patients 19 nouns

and writing 124, 132 predominance over adjectives 35, 37
modalization 31, 37, 50, 62, 90, 93, 161, and verbs 147-8
177-8
monologue
object 11-12
analysand's 200
in hysterical language 45, 47-8
becoming dialogue 10
metaphoric linguistic objects 115, 116,
morpho-logic, sexed 220, 221, 249
196
mother 10
in obsessive language 49-50, 51
and daughter 224, 237, 241, 242, 258
in schizophrenic language 162
debt owed to 219
objectivity, in science 250-1, 254
and eidetic structure of truth 229
objectivization
murder of 257
of enunciation 51
mother tongue 139-40, 161, 257
of subject 13-14
and schizophrenic language 178, 182,
obsessive patients 21
184, 186-7, 188, 189
language 23, 49-52, 53-4, 117
mucosity, and transference 242, 244
Oedipal law 11, 108, 237
murmuring 61
'one' 2 - 3
analogy with 'zero' 11, 14
nature
see also T
ambivalence of man towards 230-1
opposites
mathematical model of 229-30, 253
lexical 28
as origin 123, 219-20
in schizophrenic language 161, 163
representations of 228-9
negation 38-40
exclusion as 156 painting 125
morphological 36 paradox of discourse 105
negative transformation 26, 2 7 - 8 , 39—41, paralysis, hysterical 202
51 paranoid patients 37
experimental exercises 28-30 parental relations
in schizophrenic language 38, 91, 260 n. of hysteric patient 19-20
4, 155-6, 174 of obsessive patient 21
of verbs 58 of psychotic patient 19
neo-codes 32, 36, 69, 71, 9 2 - 3 , 160 Parkinson's Disease 35
neologisms 36, 164 Parmenides 233
neurotic patients 19, 43, 116-18 partners of enunciation 53-4
neutrality pathos 1, 2
of analyst 97-8, 209, 214 patriarchy 219
ethics of 4 - 5 , 214 performatives 177
as indifference 212 permeability
in language 1,2, 139 sign lacking in science 252
Newtonian revolution 254 personal indices 169, 173-5
Nietzsche, F. 230, 247 personal pronouns 12-13, 26
non-contradiction, principle of 230, 252 in schizophrenic language 165, 174-5
see also contra-diction, in women's 'zero' signified 14
speaking phallocentrism 142, 203, 205, 211, 2 1 9 -
non-neutrality, in sciences 252-4 20, 235
nothingness 208, 212 phantasm 9, 55-6, 261 ch.V n. 3, 95, 104-
vacuum, as man's projection onto nature 5, 118, 121
229 detecting of 106-7
see also zero reality and 216-17
274 INDEX
phantasm - continued Ramier, A. M. 94

in transference 59-62, 196 rape anxieties 216-17
verbs corresponding 56-9 reciprocity
philosophy, and psychoanalysis 205-6, sign lacking in science 252
210, 213 redundancies
phoneme 102-3 in working-class language 13
in pronunciation 126-8, 263 n. 8 referent 11, 4 1 , 129
phonetic articulation 128, 133 and phantasm 107-8
language subservient to 140 referential ambiguity 64, 164
phonetic interpretation regression 242-3, 249
from surface structures 111 reification 13
phonology 126 relative clauses 52
physics, as science 253—4 repetition 96-7, 202, 230
place indices 169, 175-6 representation 193-4, 197, 201, 202-3
Plato 195 specular 124
polysemy 89 repression 205, 211, 220, 234
Port-Royal 110 reproduction 249
Postal, P. M. 181 resemblance
power, in science(s) 247-8 and metaphor 143
power play 216 Rilke, R. M. 208
pre-Socratics 233 Russell, B. 175
Prigogine, I. 253 Ruwet, N. 181
primal scene 211
pronouns 89 Safouan, M. 215, 216, 217, 218, 220, 221,
see also personal pronouns 225
pronunciation 126-8 Saussure, F. de 110, 179, 181, 184, 188,
proper names 12, 16 189
senile dementia and 88 'schiz'
symbols for, in science 251 in graphemes 131, 264 n. 12
psychiatry, and language 171 in man-subject 230-1
psychoanalysis between science and nature 248, 254
goal of 246 see also splitting
interpretation of language in 5, 95-108, schizophasia 35-6, 37, 70, 156, 158, 161,
119, 197-8, 207-8, 209 164, 169-70
metaphysical theory of sexuality 230 schizophrenic patients 22, 27, 28
neglect of cultural context 206, 220 characteristics of language 25-6, 32-8,
questionable nature of 145, 209, 212, 4 0 - 1 , 66, 6 7 - 7 1 , 91-4, 115-16, 1 5 3 -
225-6, 266 n. 4 71, 180-91
representation of 193-4, 197, 201, 202-3 interlocution 174-5
rules of 137-8 reactions to linguistic exercises 30-2, 66-
as science 252-3 7 , 9 0 - 1 , 166
of women 237, 238-9 science(s)
psychoanalyst, see analyst language of 1-3, 247, 251-2
psycholinguistics and literature 6
methods 25, 26, 63. 171 politics of 248-50
survey of kinship terms 65-84 psychoanalysis as 208-9
psycho tics 18-19, 27 Searle, J. R. 171, 176
Seglas, J. 88
qualitative difference see difference, self
qualitative identity of 11
quantifiers (scientific) 251-2 objectivization of 14
INDEX 275
semantic ambiguity 64 letters and 124-5

semantic anomalies 88, 89 and symmetry 255, 256
semantic correlation 35, 37-8 specularization 15-18
semantic interpretation speech
in deep structures 111 language and 110, 179-81
semantic rule 86 and voice 140
senile dementia 22, 27, 30, 35, 36, 157 see also silence(s); speaking; voice
sentence production exercises 86-90, 93 splitting
sentence production of subject 1 5 , 2 3 0 , 2 5 4
competence model 85-6, 94 woman as bearer of 213
sentences see also 'schiz'
for analysis of utterances 25 'spool game' 257-8
sex Stalin 110, 111
in kinship terms 65 stereotyping
in psychoanalytic discourse 97, 141, 142, of identity of obsessive patient 21
143, 146, 1 4 8 , 2 0 2 - 3 , 2 1 1 , 2 1 4 Strawson, P. F. 175, 176
of subject 3 stylistics 141
sexual difference 4, 220 subject
and difference between women 238 in discourse 1-4, 235, 257
hidden cause of anxiety 217 of enunciation 13, 27, 28, 36-7, 117
linguistic mechanisms for expressing formation of 3
255-8 mediated by language 9-10, 21-2, 230,
science and 249-50 257-8
in transference 245-6 removal of, in science 1, 247, 250-1
sexualization of language 5, 6—7, 139, 2 2 7 - sexed 228
8 splitting of 15, 230, 254
exposing 228 of utterance 13, 27, 43-4
sign(s) zero status of 10, 11-12
of sex, as metaphor 148 subject-object relations
theory 184-5 presupposed in verbs 55-9
those lacking in science 252 subjectum 233
signifier and signified 9, 15, 18, 22, 184-5 sublimation 146
in schizophrenic language 35, 156, 161, suggestion 209
185-90 symbols, in science 251-2
silence(s) 134, 187, 264 n. 17 symmetry, in relations 255-6
of analyst 97, 98, 99 synchronic functioning
of women 257 of specularization 16, 18
socio-linguistics 119 synecdoche 152
sound, see acoustic image, as 'signifier' synonymy
space(s) 134 schizophrenic language and 160, 161
experience of nothingness 10 syntactic rule 85-6, 91
spatial alienation 16-17, 215 syntagmatic indicators
and time, for subject 4, 256 semantic information from 111
speaking syntax
avoiding 61, 96 generative powers 182, 188
in public 248 syntax/lexicon dissociation 111
see also silence(s) synthetic languages 109
specular experience 14—15, 16
and language 23, 257 temporal forms 176-7
specular image 16-17, 22 temporality
as alter ego 15 of verbs 57-8, 113
276 INDEX
temporals 50, 52, 168 universals

text in language 109, 110-11
discourse as 103 in psychoanalysis, and interpretation
of psychoanalysis 193 208, 218, 220
reading 121 utterances 13, 25
specular 17-18, 124, 203 analysis 26-7, 43
thermodynamics 233, 252 models of 111, 114, 115
time neurotic 116-18
discourses transcending 1, 189 psychoanalytic interpretation of 60, 9 5 -
and space, in graphism 125 108
touch 240 responsibility for 31, 37, 47, 90
traces structuring determinants 118-19
memory 198-9
signifiers as, in schizophrenic language Vendler, Z. 176
185 verbs
traits, differential 126-7 of attribution 91, 113
transference 245-6 in hysterical language 45
in mirror 148-50, 196-7 infinitive, corresponding to phantasms
phantasms in 59-62, 104-5, 106-7 10, 55-9
representations of 151-2 metaphor functioning like 151
sexual difference and 245-6 in middle-class language 113
witticisms within 145-6 nouns and 147-8
women and 239-41, 244 in obsessional language 49
transformations 25, 44, 87 in senile dementia 89
in middle-class language 113 tenses 176-7
play of, in schizophrenic language 115 in working-class language 112
types of 26 voice
in working-class language 112 in analytic setting 199-200
transitional objects speech and 140
denied to women 237, 239 in writing 200
treatment (psychoanalytic)
transgressing boundaries of 101 Wolfson, L. 183
tropism 142, 145, 149 women
metaphor and 151, 202 as binary alternative, non-man 231, 232,
truth 256
always partial 7 complaints 214-15, 222
eidetic structure 228-30 deprived, by sexualized language 215,
value judgements framing 1, 202, 203 216, 220, 224, 232, 243, 256, 258
'two lips' model of women's language 221, 'help' received from psychoanalysis 222
231 language of 221, 231, 256
relation to nature 229
unconscious 108, 213, 222 and sexual pleasure 217-18, 221-2
cultural context 205-6, 207 'splitting' and 213
'id' as 14 what they want 240
as structure 11 word definition
structuring of utterance 118-19 in schizophrenic language 162-5, 178,
and thermodynamics 233 185-7
uncovered, and undisturbed 230 word-discourses 91, 166
universal language word play 145-6
male idiolect as 250 working-class language 114
questioning neutrality of 255-8 sentence production exercise 111—13
INDEX 277
writing 121-5, 130-3 zero

creative work and style 6 ambiguity of 126
and specularization 18, 124-5 status of subject 10, 11-12, 14
voice(s) in 200

Luce Irigaray, Gail Schwab - To Speak Is Never Neutral (2002)

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To Speak is Never Neutral

Translated from the French by Gail Schwab

Routledge is an imprint ofthe Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Continuum

This English cranslation CD Continuum 2002

WHrtJ • %.Ultl • Prtlllntitl

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-415-90812-2 (hbk.)

Typeset by Acorn Bookwork, Salisbury, Wiltshire

This affirmation is sought - perhaps - in the esthetically variable graph-

say T in certain research, certain publications. And deciding to say T

is chaotic. And the problem of sexual difference weighs in heavily, no

The analysis of language is a precious source of information and of

for neutrality in language, it is always just a goal, or a tangent, and never

How else can we understand the current effervescence centered around

The reciprocal integration of the body and of language, origin of the

The constitution of the circuit of exchange is none other than the

These things can be considered differently. In their initial non-reversible

[I = one] + [youl = one] + [you2 = one]

At this stage, fictional of course, the functioning of the exchange is not

<hel>. But it also occurs when he is designated as 'son,' 'man,' /woman,'

The constitution of the object of communication, of 'hel,' is a death

Although they are objects of the partners of the enunciation, T and

At every stage of the differentiation and lack of differentiation of persons

In response to the imposition of the proper that which constitutes it as

such, it is a privileged moment for taking note of the assumptions, as well as

Death is also found elsewhere. All structure presupposes an exclusion,

specularization. Thus the specular experience is reminiscent of the passage

As seductive as it is, specular identification is nonetheless spatial aliena-

Thus I can feign possession of the specular image, bestow it or take it

Instability in the terms of 'communication' results from the totality of

These different modes of specular <discourse> can be explained by the

This type of structure can also be found at another level of linguistic

tion of her unconscious. Not having assumed her own non-identity to

rejection, derisory because unable to sustain the comparison with the

analyst will be to restore his non-identity to himself, his identity to <zero>

Thus the distortions of language - aberrant prevalence of the signifier or

For an approach to schizophrenic language, psycholinguistics can use

specific to the schizophrenic, whose language can be seen as a whole,

These two types of approach to schizophrenic language remain above all

(or indirect utterance), and narrative. The indirect utterance, systematically

Linguistic perturbations and deficiencies were noted, among aphasics, in

I have just indicated, in a general overview, that variations in the structures

the ability to dissociate the subject of the enunciation, who generates

Respondents are asked to perform two different exercises in order to

• ADJECTIVES: grand, pauvre, chaud, doux, profond, beau, absent, vrai,

• VERBS: naitre, aimer, savoir, etc. [to be born, to love, to know

Negative transformations require a disambiguation. In receiving the cue,

T h e instructions operate on two levels.

• T h e so-called 'normal' groups consisted of 15 respondents in the neuro-

the University of Tours. The performances of these two groups of

The schizophrenics' behavioral reactions to the instructions are specific.

(a) This type of exercise is well received by respondents, which can be

(c) Very often, a comment accompanies the response. The comments

(i) The comment expresses a modalization of the response: on pourrait

This interpretation is confirmed by two behavioral reactions.

The results of the survey: in comparison to the responses of the 'normal'

(b) Systematic quantification through negative hypertransformation: the

(e) Predominance of the signifier: responses show homophonic analogy