“And you above all, Ladies and Gentlemen the analysts, what are you doing here, you to whom Freud specifically addressed the warning not to rely on those who are not confirmed in the practice of your science, on those so-called authorities, those literary intellectuals, who bring their soup to warm at your fire, without so much as recognizing your hospitality?”
“Permit me to marvel a moment at your presence, and at the privilege of your having lent me for a while that most precious of the organs at your disposal, your ear.”
“the Freudian field is not representable as a closed surface”
“The opening up of psychoanalysis is not the effect of the liberalism, the whim, the blindness even of he who has set himself as its guardian.”
“For, if not being situated on the inside does not relegate you to the outside, it is because at a certain point, excluded from a two-dimensional topology, the two surfaces join up and the periphery or outer edge crosses over the circumscription.”
“Concept of the Logic of the Signifier”
“What I am aiming to restore, piecing together indications dispersed through the work of Jacques Lacan, is to be designated the logic of the signifier - it is a general logic in that its functioning is formal in relation to all fields of knowledge including that of psychoanalysis which, in acquiring a specificity there, it governs”
“it is a minimal logic in that within it are given those pieces only which arc necessary to assure it a progression reduced to a linear movement, uniformally generated at each point of its necessary sequence.”
“By considering the relationship between this logic and that which I will call logician’s logic, we see that its particularity lies in the fact that the first treats of the emergence of the second. and should be conceived of as the logic of the origin of logic - which is to say, chat it docs not follow its laws, but that, prescribing their jurisdiction, itself falls outside that jurisdiction.”
“This dimension of the archeological can be grasped most succinctly through a movement back from the field of logic itself, where its miscognition. at its most radical because closest to is recognition is effected.”
“That this step repeats something of that which Derrida has shown to be exemplary to phenomenology will conceal to none but the most hasty this crucial difference, that here miscognition finds its point of departure in the production of meaning. We can say that it is constituted not as a forgetting, but as a repression.”
“To designate it I choose the name of suture.”
“Suture names the relation of the subject to the chain of its discourse; we shall see that it figures there as the clement which is lacking, in the form of a stand-in.”
“For, while there lacking, it is not purely and simply absent.”
“Suture, by extension - the general relation of lack to the structure - of which it is an element, inasmuch as it implies the position of a taking-the-place-of.”
“It is the objective of this paper to articulate the concept of suture which, if it is not named explicitly as such by Jacques Lacan, is constantly present in his system.”
“In order to grasp suture we must cut across what a discourse makes explicit of itself, and distinguish from its meaning, its letter.”
“his paper is concerned with a letter - a dead letter. It should come as no surprise if the meaning then dies.”
“The main thread of this analysis will be Gottlob Frege’s argument in Grundlagen der Arithmetik, crucial here because it puts into question those terms which in Peano’s axiomatic, adequate for a construction of a theory of natural numbers, are taken as primary - that is, the zero, the number, the successor.”
“This calling into question of the theory, by disintricating, from the axiomatic where the theory is consolidated, the suturing, delivers up this last.”