Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1961

Identification - this is my title and my subject for this year. It is a good title but not an easy subject. I am sure you do not think that it is an operation or a process that is very easy to conceptualize. If it is easy to recognise, it would perhaps nevertheless be preferable, in order to recognise it correctly, for us to make a little effort in order to conceptualize it. It is certain that we have encountered enough of its effects even if we remain at something rather summary, I mean at things which are tangible, even to our internal experience, for you to have a certain feeling about what it is. This effort of conceptualization will appear to you, at least this year, namely a year which is not the first of our teaching, to be without any doubt justified retrospectively because of the places, the problems to which this effort will lead us.

Today we are going to take a very first little step in this direction. I apologise to you, this is perhaps going to lead us to make efforts which are properly speaking called efforts of thinking: this will not often happen to us, to us any more than to others.

If we take identification as the title, as the theme of our remarks, it would be well for us to speak about it otherwise than in what could be called the mythical form on which I left it last year. There was something of this order, of the order of identification in particular, involved, you remember, in this point at which I left my remarks last year, namely where - as I might say - the humid layer with which you represent for yourselves the narcisstic effects which circumscribe this rock, what was left emerging from the water in my schema, this autoerotic rock whose emergence the phallus symbolises: an island in short battered by the waves of Aphrodite, a false island since moreover like the one in which Claudel's Proteus figures, it is an island without moorings, an island that is drifting away. You know what Claudel's Protée is. It is the attempt to complete The Orestia by the ridiculous farce which in Greek tragedy is obliged to complete it and of which there remains in the whole of literature only two pieces of jetsam by Sophocles and a Hercules by Euripedes, if I remember correctly.

It is not unintentionally that I am evoking this reference in connection with the fashion in which last year my discourse on transference ended on this image of identification. Try as I might I could not find a beautiful way to mark the barrier at which transference finds its limit and its pivoting point. No doubt, this was not the beauty which I told you was the limit of the tragic, the point at which the ungraspable thing pours its euthanasia over us. I am embellishing nothing, whatever may be imagined from the rumours one sometimes hears about what I am teaching: I am not overdoing things for you. This is known to those who formerly listened to my seminar on Ethics, the one in which I exactly approached the function of this barrier of beauty under the form of the agony which the thing (la chose) requires of us for us to join it.