Yale University Lecture on the Body

Jacques Lacan
This Lecture was delivered on November 25, 1975, at the Law School Auditorium,
Yale University.

Hysterics produce knowledge. An hysteric is an effect, just as any subject is.

Hysterics force “signifying matter” to confess, by virtue of which they constitute a
discourse.

Socrates is the one who started it. He wasn’t a hysteric, but something much worse – a
subtle master. That didn’t stop him from having hysterical symptoms. He would
sometimes remain standing on one leg, unable to move, there was no way of drawing
him out of what we call catatonia. And this didn’t prevent him from having lots of
effects. Just as an hysteric would, he would deliver anyone’s knowledge--knowledge
that, in short, he himself was unaware of.

That resembles what Freud, rather late in the piece, called the unconscious. In his own
way, Socrates wasn’t such a bad analyst.

A slave is defined by the fact that someone has power over his or her body. Geometry
is the same thing, it has a lot to do with bodies.

A body has the property of being able to be seen, poorly seen. People think of it as a
bubble of air, a bag of skin. Here one is dealing with a support, a figure (of the
imaginary, that is), with a material that I posit as real. (See figure 1)

How would a slave have reacted?

Slaves knew that the master would set a price on their body, they were property, and
in itself this protected them. A slave would know that the master wasn’t about to
carve up his body: small chance his body would end up fragmented. He thereby knew
himself to be safe from a good many things.
R, S and I are entirely independent of one another. If you draw S back, really far back,
then the knot will end up pulling on R at four points – which no doubt could all draw
closer together – though that requires that I is pulling on S; thus, you have the
following –

Ce qu’on dit ment. What one says lies – condiment. The fourth ring is the symptom.

Between the body in so far as it is imagined and what binds it (namely, the fact of
speaking), man imagines himself as thinking. He thinks in so far as he speaks.
Speaking has effects on his body. Owing to the fact that he speaks, he is almost as
clever as an animal. An animal gets by very well without speaking.

The real – merely introducing the term makes one wonder what one is saying. The
real is not the outside world; it is anatomy too, it involves the entire body.
The question is how all of that knots together.

The minimum requirement was that each of these three terms, imaginary, symbolic
(that is, chit-chat) and real, should have been strictly equal to one another , tied in
such a way that the parts are equal.

I have been striving to produce another geometry that comes to grips with what’s
going on in the chain. This has never, ever been done.

This geometry is not imaginary, unlike the geometry of triangles; it’s a geometry of
the real, of rings of string.

Suppose if you will that the body, chit-chat, and the real each go off on their own,
wandering about…

Freud’s id is the real.

The symbolic, which the superego comes under, has to do with the hole.

If a fourth element is required, it is what the symbolic, in so far as it forms a circle

with the unconscious, brings about.

If we want to put the real and the imaginary at each end, we get –

If you raise a horizontal bar or if you pull the vertical line to the right or to the left,
you find yourself wedged in. This makes a knot.
The straight line is equivalent to a ring of string if one presupposes it has an infinite
point.

Their symptom is the most real thing that many people have. For some people, you
could say: the symbolic, the imaginary, and the symptom.

Phallic jouissance lies at the joint between the symbolic and the real, outside the
imaginary, outside the body, as a parasite on the sexual organs.

Translated from the French by Adrian Price

Text originally published in Scilicet 6/7, 1976, pp. 38-41.