I am going to try to speak to you about the thing - das Ding.
If I introduce this term, it is because there are certain ambiguities, certain insufficiencies, in relation to the true meaning in Freud of the opposition between reality principle and pleasure principle; that is to say in relation to the material which I am trying to explore with you this year, so as to make you understand its importance for our practice as an ethics. And these ambi- guities have to do with something that is of the order of the signifier and even of the order of language. What we need here is a concrete, positive and par- ticular signifier. And I don't find anything in the French language - I would be grateful to those who might be sufficiently stimulated by these remarks to suggest a solution - anything that could correspond to the subtle opposition in German, which it is not easy to bring out, between the two terms mat mean "thing" - das Ding and the Sache.
1
We have only one word in French, the word "la chose" (thing), which derives from the Latin word "causa." Its etymological connection to the law suggests to us something that presents itself as the wrapping and designation of the concrete. There is no doubt mat in German, too, "thing" in its original sense concerns the notion of a proceeding, deliberation, or legal debate. Das Ding may imply not so much a legal proceeding itself as the assembly which makes it possible, the Volksversammlung.
Don't imagine that this use of etymology, these insights, these etymologi- cal soundings, are what I prefer to guide myself by - although Freud does remind us all the time that in order to follow the track of the accumulated experience of tradition, of past generations, linguistic inquiry is the surest vehicle of the transmission of a development which marks psychic reality. Current practice, taking note of the use of the signifier in its synchrony, is
infinitely more precious to us. We attach a far greater weight to the way in which Ding and Sache are used in current speech. Moreover, if we look up an etymological dictionary, we will find that Sache, too, originally had to do with a legal proceeding. Sache is the thing that is juridically questioned or, in our vocabulary, the transition to the symbolic order of a conflict between men.
Nevertheless, the two terms are not at all equivalent. For that matter you may have noted last time in Mr. Lefevre-Pontalis's remarks a quotation of terms whose thrust, as he brought out in his presentation, was to raise this question, it seems to me, in opposition to my doctrine - and it is all the more praiseworthy in his case since he doesn't know German. It had to do with that passage in Freud's article entided "The Unconscious," in which the rep- resentation of things, Sachvorstellung, is on every occasion opposed to that of words, Worworstellung.
I will not enter today into the discussion of the factors that would allow one to respond to that passage, so often invoked at least in the form of a question mark, by those of you who are inspired by my lectures to read Freud- It is a passage which appears to them to constitute an objection to the emphasis I place on signifying articulation as providing the true structure of the unconscious.
The passage in question seems to go against mat, since it opposes Sachvor-
stellung, as belonging to the unconscious, to Worworstellung, as belonging to
the preconscious. I would just beg those who stop at that passage - the major- ity of you presumably do not go and verify in Freud's texts what I affirm here in my commentaries - I would beg them to read together, one after the other, the article called "the Verdrangung" or "Repression," which precedes the article on the unconscious, then that article itself, before arriving at the passage involved. I will just note for the rest of you that it has precisely to do with the question that the schizophrenic's attitude poses for Freud, that is to say, the manifestly extraordinary prevalence of affinities between words in what one might call the schizophrenic world.
Everything that I have just discussed seems to me to lead in only one direc- tion, namely, that Verdrangung operates on nothing other than signifiers. The fundamental situation of repression is organized around a relationship of the subject to the signifier. As Freud emphasizes, it is only from that perspective that it is possible to speak in a precise, analytical sense - I would call it operational - of unconscious and conscious. He realizes that the special sit- uation of the schizophrenic, more clearly than that of any other form of neu- rosis, places us in the presence of the problem of representation.
I will perhaps have the opportunity to come back to this text later. But you will note that by offering the solution he seems to be offering in opposing
Das Ding 45 himself emphasizes and that can be explained by the state of linguistics in his time. He, nevertheless, understood and formulated admirably the distinction to be made between the operation of language as a function - namely, the moment when it is articulated and, in effect, plays an essential role in the preconscious - and the structure of language, as a result of which those ele- ments put in play in the unconscious are organized. In between, those coor- dinations are set up, those Bahnungen, that concatenation, which dominate its whole economy.
I have digressed too much, since today I only want to restrict myself to the remark that Freud speaks of Sachvorstellung and not Dingvorstellung. More- over, it is no accident if the Sachvorstellungen are linked to Wortvorstellungen, since it tells us that there is a relationship between thing and word. The straw of words only appears to us as straw insofar as we have separated it from the grain of things, and it was first the straw which bore that grain.
I don't want to begin developing a theory of knowledge here, but it is obvious that the things of the human world are things in a universe struc- tured by words, that language, symbolic processes, dominate and govern all. When we seek to explore the frontier between the animal and the human world, it is apparent to what extent the symbolic process as such doesn't function in the animal world - a phenomenon that can only be a matter of astonishment for us. A difference in the intelligence, the flexibility, and the complexity of the apparatuses involved cannot be the only means of explain- ing that absence. That man is caught up in symbolic processes of a kind to which no animal has access cannot be resolved in psychological terms, since it implies that we first have a complete and precise knowledge of what this symbolic process means.
The Sache is clearly the thing, a product of industry and of human action as governed by language. However implicit they may first be in the genesis of that action, things are always on the surface, always within range of an explanation. To the extent that it is subjacent to and implicit in every human action, that activity of which things are the fruit belongs to the preconscious order, that is to say, something that our interest can bring to consciousness, on condition that we pay enough attention to it, that we take notice of it. The word is there in a reciprocal position to the extent that it articulates itself, that it comes to explain itself beside the thing, to the extent also that an action - which is itself dominated by language, indeed by command - will have separated out this object and given it birth.
Sache and Wort are, therefore, closely linked; they form a couple. Das Ding
is found somewhere else.
I would like today to show you this Ding in life and in the reality principle that Freud introduces at the beginning of his thought and that persists to the end. I will point out the reference to it in a given passage of the Entwurf on
the reality principle and in the article entitled "the Verneinung" or "Dene- gation" in which it is an essential point.
This Ding is not in the relationship - which is to some extent a calculated one insofar as it is explicable - that causes man to question his words as referring to things which they have moreover created. There is something different in das Ding.
What one finds in das Ding is the true secret. For the reality principle has a secret that, as Lefevre-Pontalis pointed out last time, is paradoxical. If Freud speaks of the reality principle, it is in order to reveal to us that from a certain point of view it is always defeated; it only manages to affirm itself at the margin. And this is so by reason of a kind of pressure that one might say, if things didn't, in fact, go much further, Freud calls not "the vital needs" - as is often said in order to emphasize the secondary process - but the Not des
Lebens in the German text. An infinitely stronger phrase. Something that wishes. "Need" and not "needs." Pressure, urgency. The state of Not is the
state of emergency in life.
This Not des Lebens intervenes at the level of the secondary process, but in a deeper way than through that corrective acdvity; it intervenes so as to deter- mine the Qη level - the quantity of energy conserved by the organism in proportion to the response - which is necessary for the conservation of life. Take note that it is at the level of secondary process that the level of this necessary determinadon is exercised.
Let us return to the reality principle that is thus invoked from the point of view of its necessity effect. This remark puts us on the track of what I call its secret, namely, the following: As soon as we try to articulate the reality prin- ciple so as to make it depend on the physical world to which Freud's purpose seems to require us to relate it, it is clear that it funcdons, in fact, to isolate the subject from reality.
We find in it nothing more than that which biology, in effect, teaches us, namely, that the structure of a living being is dominated by a process of homeostasis, of isolation from reality. Is that all Freud has to tell us when he speaks of the functioning of the reality principle? Apparendy, yes. And he shows us that neither the quantitative element nor the qualitative element in reality enters the realm - the term he uses is Reich - of the secondary pro- cess.
Exterior quantity enters into contact with the apparatus called the φ sys- tem, that is to say, that part of the whole neuronic apparatus which is directly turned to the exterior or, roughly speaking, the nerve ends at the level of the skin, the tendons, and even the muscles and the bones, deep sensitivity. Everything is done so that Q quantity is definitely blocked, stopped in rela- tion to that which is supported by another quantity, the Qη quantity - the latter determines the level that distinguishes the ψ apparatus within the neu-
Das Ding 47 ronic whole. For the Entwurf is, in fact, the theory of a neuronic apparatus in relation to which the organism remains exterior, just as much as the out- side world.
Let us turn to quality. There, too, the outside world doesn't lose all qual- ity. But, as the theory of the sensory organs shows, this quality is inscribed in a discontinuous way, according to a scale cut off at each end and shortened in relation to the different sensory fields in question. A sensory apparatus, Freud tells us, doesn't only play the role of extinguisher or of shock-absorber, like the φ apparatus in general, but also plays the role of sieve.
He doesn't go any further in the direction of potential solutions that prop- erly belong to the domain of the physiologist, of the man who wrote The
Sensations, Mr. Pieron. The question of whether, in the field likely to pro-
voke visual, auditory or other perceptions, the choice is made in this way or that is not pursued further. Still, we do have there also the notion of a deep subjectivization of the outside world. Something sifts, sieves, in such a way that reality is only perceived by man, in his natural, spontaneous state at least, as radically selected. Man deals with selected bits of reality.
In truth, that only occurs in a function which is localized in relation to the economy of the whole; it doesn't concern quality to the extent that it provides deeper information, that it achieves an essence, but only signs. Freud only sees them playing a role insofar as they are Qualitatszeichen, but the function of sign isn't significant in relation to opaque and enigmatic quality. It is a sign to the extent that it alerts us to the presence of something that has, in effect, to do with the outside world; it signals to consciousness that it has to deal with the outside world.
Consciousness has to come to terms with that outside world, and it has had to come to terms with it ever since men have existed and thought and tried out theories of knowledge. Freud doesn't take the problem any further except to note that it is certainly highly complex and that we are still a long way from being able to outline a solution of that which organically determines its particular genesis so precisely.
But given this, is that all that is involved when Freud speaks to us of the reality principle? Isn't this relation no more than that which certain theorists of behaviorism suggest to us? The kind which represents the fortunate encounters of an organism faced with a world where it doubtless finds some- thing to eat and of which it is capable of assimilating certain elements, but which is in principle made up of random events and chance meetings, cha- otic. Is that all Freud expresses when he speaks of the reality principle?
2
Before going any further, I will once again draw your attention to the con- tents of the little table with its double column that I introduced two weeks ago (see p. 34).
In one column there is the Lustprinzip; in the other, the Realitatsprinzip. Unconscious activity is on the side of the pleasure principle. The reality prin- ciple dominates that which, whether conscious or preconscious, is in any case present in the order of reasoned discourse, articulatable, accessible and emerging from the preconscious. I pointed out that to the extent that they are dominated by the pleasure principle, the thought processes are uncon- scious, as Freud emphasizes. They are only available to consciousness to the extent that they can be verbalized, that a reasoned account brings them within range of the reality principle, within range of a consciousness that is perpet- ually alert, interested through the investment of its attention in discovering something that may happen, so as to allow it to find its bearings in the real world.
It is in his own words that the subject in the most precarious of ways manages to grasp the ruses thanks to which his ideas are made to fit together in his thought, ideas that often emerge in the most enigmatic of ways. The need to speak them, to articulate them, introduces within them an often arti- ficial order. Freud liked to insist on this point when he said that one always finds reasons for finding this attitude or that mood come over one, one after the other, but there is after all nothing to confirm that the true cause of their successive emergence is given us. It is precisely this that analysis adds to our experience.
There is always an abundance of reasons to make us believe in some rational explanation for the sequentiality of our endopsychic forms. However, as we know, in the majority of cases their true connections are to be found some- where completely different.
Thus the process of thought is to be found in the field of the unconscious - I mean that thought process through which access to reality finds its way, the Not des Lebens, which maintains at a certain level the investment of the apparatus. It is only accessible through the artifice of the spoken word. Freud even goes so far as to say that it is only insofar as relations are spoken that we can hear ourselves speak, that there is Bewegung, movement of speech - I don't think the use of this word is very common in German, and if Freud uses it, it is to emphasize the strangeness of the notion he insists on. It is only insofar as this Bewegung announces itself in the ω system that something may be known concerning whatever is introduced into the circuit to any degree - into the circuit that at the level of the φ apparatus tends above all to discharge
Das Ding 49 itself through movement, so as to maintain tension at the lowest possible level.
The conscious subject is aware of what is involved in the process of Abfuhr, and appears under the sign of the pleasure principle only insofar as there is something centripetal in the movement, that there is a sense of movement toward speech, a sense of effort. And that would be limited to a dim percep- tion, capable at the most of opposing in the world the two important qualities that Freud doesn't fail to characterize as monotonous - i.e., immobility and mobility, that which can move and that which it is impossible to move - if certain movements of a different structure didn't exist, that is, the articulated movements of words. That is once again something that is characterized by monotony, pallor, lack of color, but that is also the way everything that has to do with the thought processes reaches consciousness, with those tiny attempts to proceed from Vorsiellung to Vorstellung, from representation to represen- tation, around which the human world is organized. It is only insofar as something in the sensory-motor circuit manages to interest the ψ system at a certain level that something is perceived retroactively, something tangible, in