Jacques-Alain Miller, Salvation through waste

I will first explain my title. And indeed, I have to correct what was printed in the programme.
It is not "salvation through waste"(déchet), but "...through waste products"(déchets), in the
plural. It's important to be accurate because this formula is in fact a quotation. It is by Paul
Valéry. It's with this formula - salvation through waste products - that he defines surrealism,
the way chosen by surrealism. And I say the “way" in the sense of the Tao. It is the path. It's
also the way of doing, of placing oneself, of slipping into the world, into discourse, into the
course of the world which is discourse. And it seems to me correct to say that André Breton
promised salvation through the way of waste products. But it's even more accurate to say
that about Freud. And besides, the surrealist promise would never have been uttered if it
weren’t for psychoanalysis before it, Freud's discovery, which, as we know, was from the
outset the discovery of waste products of psychic life, of waste products of the mind, that is
the dream, the slip of the tongue, the bungled action and, beyond that, the symptom. The
discovery also, that by taking them seriously, and paying attention to them from the outset,
the subject has some chance of being saved (de faire son salut).

Being saved, the expression is religious. But it is not such a bad translation as it is not only a
question of health, of a cure, but that beyond or under the symptom, it is a question of truth.
Of a revelation of knowledge which brings with it the attainment of a satisfaction and, if I may
say so, the lasting development of a higher (supériure) satisfaction.

Thus, I transfer Valéry’s formula to psychoanalysis. And I say to myself that it was enough
for psychoanalysis, and its promise of salvation through waste products, to appear for us to
realise that until then we had only sought salvation through ideals.

In the myth it was Hercules who was given the choice between two paths: the path of vice
and the path of virtue. Well, everything happens as if humanity had been this Hercules and
had been faced with this choice: either salvation by ideals or salvation by waste products.
And as if by a forced choice, we could say that humanity always would have chosen
salvation by ideals up until Freud, the first, to open another way, totally unprecedented,
salvation by waste products.

What is waste? The term has a lot of resonance for those who go through Lacan’s teaching,
even at an elementary level. It is what is rejected, and especially rejected at the end of an
operation from which only the gold, the precious substance it carries, is retained. The
alchemists called this waste the caput mortuum. It is what falls, what falls out of what would
otherwise stand up. It is what is evacuated, or made to disappear while the ideal shines.
And that which shines has form. One could say that the ideal is the glory of form. Whereas
waste is formless (informe). It is extracted from a totality of which it is only a detached piece.
In this regard, I would correct what I said quickly about surrealism with a nuance. Sure it
aligns with psychoanalysis. It is one of its most rapid and resounding effects on art. But
can’t we also say that it is in the name of/to some extent a defence? Surrealism is indeed an
art. That is to say it proceeds to an aestheticisation of waste. It makes waste pass into the
register of the aesthetic and by doing so it modifies the definition of beauty, it does not put
beauty into question/it does not dispute beauty. We can note that since then, so-called
contemporary art has been busy, at least since Marcel Duchamp, offering us the waste itself
as an object of art. And if you think about it, this is not specific to surrealism, it is what art
has always done. It is the essence of art, or rather its process which through Surrealism had
been, if I may say so, laid bare. The essence of art is to aestheticise waste, to idealise it, or,
as we say in psychoanalysis, to sublimate it.

We recall Lacan’s definition of sublimation: to elevate the object, the object little a – and
before this assembly I’m not going to redefine it – to raise the object to the dignity of the
Thing. This definition is certainly very enlightening, but nevertheless it cannot satisfy us
today. For what he describes as the Thing is already a sublimated version of jouissance.
This sublimation is already denoted by these two words: the verb “to raise” and the noun
“dignity”. However, jouissance as such, does not head towards the heights. And it is naked
(nue), it is raw (crue), in the sense of the opposite to cooked. It is raw, it has no dignity in
which it could be draped. What Lacan aims at is the Thing idealised, cleansed, emptied of
jouissance. It is reduced to lack, reduced to castration, reduced to the absence of sexual
relation. When jouissance is raised to the dignity of the Thing, that is, when it is not lowered
to the indignity of waste, it is sublimated, that is to say, socialised. What we call sublimation
achieves a socialisation of jouissance. Jouissance is socialised, that is to say, integrated into
the social bond, into the circuit of exchanges. It is put to work in the discourse of the Other
and for its jouissance.

It is from this perspective that, this morning, I see sublimation as the way in which
jouissance, fundamentally autistic of the One, engrains on the discourse of the Other and
comes to be inscribed in the social bond. I don’t see why we shouldn’t extend this argument
to say that it is only through sublimation that jouissance becomes a social bond. Ah, I don’t
forget that it requires the production of an object susceptible to being, as one says, raised to
the dignity of the Thing! This is why coitus is not in itself an act and as such does not
establish any social bond. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed, in his second discourse,
when he described the hazardous couplings of his primitive pre-social humanity. Sexuality is
only socialised in regard to reproduction, within the symbolic framework capable of raising
the child, as an object, to the lineage of the Thing. In the absence of this symbolic insertion,
he is lowered to the unworthiness of the object. And he bears the mark of this in what
appears as his destiny.

The problematic jouissance of the Other

I note the problematic character of what we designate as the jouissance of the Other, and
that I touched on earlier. When this Other is incarnated in the form (espèces), of another
body, the jouissance that it arouses in the body of one evidently remains separated from the
jouissance that this other body experiences. When the Other designates the social body, if I
may say, its jouissance, the jouissance of this Other, remains an abstraction. An abstraction,
a fiction which is supported by numbers, by masses, like here for example. Afterall, I speak
to please you. Vicente Palomera told me there are 1100 of you here this morning. Not bad.
However, it happens that the social Other’s jouissance takes body (prenne corps). That
jouissance manages to be identified in the place of the Other. That it doesn’t evaporate
there. That it does not vanish into thin air. That it doesn’t get confused with the empty
splendour of the Thing. It is when one can say, or imply or be persuaded that “the Other
enjoys me”. Such is the axiom that sums up, as Lacan says – as I hear it, as I interpret it, it is
not said as such – such is the axiom which sums up the subjective position the psychiatry
recognised under the name of paranoia. Paranoia is a pathology without a doubt. However
Lacan also says that the personality, as such, is paranoiac. Paranoia accompanies
sublimation like its shadow. As shown by what we might call “the paranoia of creators”, of
which we have all the examples in the complex, infinite quarrels between author and
publisher, the painter and his dealer, that are the source of their biography. In a certain way,
let’s just say it is impossible to be someone without being paranoiac. It is impossible to be
someone who is talked about, someone whose name is conveyed in the discourse of the
Other, and therefore vilified, defamed and diffused, it is impossible to be someone without
the support of paranoia. This is simply to say that the social Other is always a wicked Other,
who wants to enjoy me, to use me, to make me serve his own use and purpose. Paranoia,
the one I am talking about – paranoia in the extended sense, if I may say so, “mild paranoia”
is consubstantial to the social bond. It is present and active from the mirror stage, matrix of
the imaginary. The slightest signifying chain, the most elemental signifier, an obscure
symbolic oracle, conveys this paranoia, and one could say that this paranoia motivates all
defence against the real as well.

In the thread I’m drawing this morning, I thus posit that paranoia makes the consistency of
the personality. It is paranoia, as I said, both extended and mild, it is paranoia that stabilises,
unifies and densifies the instance that psychoanalysis designates as the self. Without this
paranoia, the self would be, in fact, only a bric-a-brac of imaginary identifications. And thus, I
am led to say that it is paranoia that socialises the subject by the supposition to the Other of
a will to jouissance, a will that does not pretend to work for his good.

Where it is represented by legal authorities, it is this attribution of malicious intent that the
social Other is constantly trying to deny. On all sides, through all those innumerable voices
of the administrative people that it reproduces, it says only one thing: “I want your good”. It
takes very little personality to give it credence.

Well, this lack of personality is undoubtedly the common trait of those who come to depend
on the healthcare institutions that welcome them with open arms and mouths free of charge,
under the implicit aegis of “I want your good”. Those who believe in this are the scraps
(rebus) of the will of jouissance.

If the social bond is paranoid in essence, then the difficulty of entering it is of the order of
debility. If we call debility the subjective slippage between discourse and the position outside
of discourse for which psychiatry has coined the term schizophrenic.

It must be said that debility thus defined is very generally that of psychoanalysts themselves.
What saves them – what saves them all the same – is that they have succeeded in making
their position of waste the principle of a new discourse. To have succeeded in sublimating
their failure enough to raise it to the dignity of a practice, that is to say, of an object of
exchange. They get paid, it’s all there. They sell what they sometimes call their art. But they
are still fundamentally, and they want to be, undocumented. Even if they have a fixed abode,
they are not completely integrated into the social order. They have only one foot in it. If it
were to be accomplished. If it were to be perfected, the social insertion of psychoanalysis
would be at the same time its disappearance. The proof is in the pudding that it is a delicate
path to have the social utility of psychoanalysis recognised. For if analysts were to take this
recognition seriously and not as a semblance, it would force them to want the good. That is
to say, to participate in this misrecogniton where the evil Other parades his good will, his
good intentions.

The clinic of disinsertion presents a variety that demands to be serialised, degrees that
deserve to be noted, and that is confined to the out-of-discourse of schizophrenia.
The pragmatics of disinsertion, when it is not a question of the “right” or “wrong” way of
thinking, is a very different matter. The pragmatics of disinsertion when it proceeds
psychoanalytically, consists, in the sense that I’ve outlined, in paranoising the subject. The
formula is daring, but after all it can be authorised by the definition Lacan once gave of the
psychoanalytic cure. A directed paranoia. There are subjects whose paranoia, in order to be
directed, first needs to be produced. And one could say that the subject will be sufficiently
paranoid when he is willing to pay out of his own pocket to be listened to and treated.

What does the pragmatics of disintegration seek to achieve when it is confronted with the
defect of paranoia? It seeks to accomplish an identification, without doubt, which allows the
subject to find his place in one of the multiple routines of which social organisation is made
and which have the property of stabilising the relationship of the signifier and the signified,
the relation of the subject to the great human significations. But it is not only a question of
obtaining a signifying identification of the subject, his inscription under a master signifier. It is
a question of an identification of jouissance in the place of the Other, that is to say, the
equivalent of what his fantasy provides to neurosis as to the perverse/the counterpart of
what his fantasy yields to the neurotic as well as to the pervert. . It is a question of detaching
from jouissance a parcel that can become the object, and first of all the object of a narrative,
of a scenario–like the scenario of the fantasy–of a storytelling, as we have learned the word
today, of a legend, of what Lacan called an ‘individual myth’ and which can take the place of
the fantasy.

That which, of jouissance, remains unsocialisable

These days (footnote…presented at…) are welcome, because it was urgent to clarify the
clinic and the pragmatics of disinsertion, since psychoanalysis, at least those who are
attached to the Freudian field, have become passionate narodniks. Narodniki – untranslated,
it is Russian – describes those who went to the people, in the momentum of a movement
that had seized the Russian intelligentsia of the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the
twentieth century. Well, I compare the CPCT movement to the narodniki. This was good
news: analysts coming out of their offices. The traditional stance was that the analyst would
wait in his office for the demands to come in. A passive attitude, expectant, consisting of
receiving. In its place instead, a method of institutional provocation aiming to arouse
demands by removing obstacles that we could say are imaginary. We would now treat free of
charge and patients would be addressed as a collective, not as an individual. It was
supposed that for an ignorant subject, a collective would make it obvious that they would
guarantee each other/a collective would be the self-evidence required to mutually guarantee
one another. This free treatment implied its limited duration.

I have to say that if you look at this method in retrospect, one sees nothing there that an
association of psychoanalysts would not have been able to do if it had agreed to finance it. I
see nothing in this method that is off putting, the free nature being compensated for by the
time limit. But we (on) added an element here–that’s what I have written: “we” added an
element, I plead guilty – we added an element that changed everything. This new institution
would be financed by public subsidies. Fatal error. Interposed between the analyst and the
people was a third instance: The State, its administrations. Thus, the operation would
consecrate, it was believed, the recognition by society of the benefits of psychoanalysis. But
at the same time, it would force the CRCT to be like Harlequin, servant of two masters, the
analyst’s discourse and the master’s discourse. Pot of clay against a pot of iron. The analytic
discourse was smashed against the iron of the master’s discourse. The experience
demonstrated the power of collective formations, and when it comes to inserting in it all at
once the weakness, the fragility, the debility of the psychoanalyst. The discourse of the
master proceeds by signifying identification exclusively. And it is in this way, in this sense,
that it prohibits the fantasy. As the bottom line of Lacan’s formula of the master’s discourse
shows clearly. Identification reigned therefore alone, without being challenged. The patient
was immediately identified with its symptom and became the exemplar of a class, of a
category. For his part, the analyst was invited to identify himself with the good will of therapy,
to his therapeutic function. After a phase, we have fortunately returned from this.

The analyst does not at all have to fit into the social bond prescribed by the discourse of the
master. Free treatment and limited duration is only justified if it introduces the psychoanalytic
experience, specifically that it introduces into the social bond what is woven around the
analyst as a waste, representative of that which of jouissance remains
unsocialisable/incapable of being socialised.

Because it prohibits the fantasy, the master’s discourse believes in mental health. This ideal
is forbidden to the analyst who offers a pathbreaking way, more precarious and yet more
certain/convincing: salvation by through waste (déchets).

(Draft translation Robyn Adler)