Jacques LACAN (1901-1981). Autograph manuscript, [L'Éthique - Lot 522

Jacques LACAN (1901-1981). Autograph manuscript, [L'Éthique de la Psychanalyse, 1960]; 26pages in-4 (small trace of rust from a staple on the 1st leaf). Important draft of a conference in Brussels on the ethics of psychoanalysis. This is the second of two lectures given by Lacan at the Faculté universitaire Saint-Louis, Brussels, on March 9 and 10, 1960, at the request of Canon Van Camp, on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis. The text of these lectures was published in spring 1986 in the journal of the École Belge de Psychanalyse, Psychoanalyse, no. 4, pp. 163-187 (an issue devoted to Lacan). The manuscript, in cursive handwriting in black or midnight-blue ink, on the front of pages paginated from 1 to 26 (some pages are unevenly filled), shows numerous erasures and corrections; page 22, corresponding to the quotation of a poem by Germain Nouveau, is missing. A final sheet, unencrypted in black ink, contains half a page of references to the Gospel of Matthew (including a sentence translated into English), and 6 lines in Greek. The manuscript, which bears the title "Bruxelles 2" at the top in brown pencil, with this note: "relu 30 VIII 64", differs from the published text in a number of respects. Lacan begins by recalling the "series of razor-sharp judgments on Freud, on his position in ethics, on the honesty of his aim", which ended his lecture of the previous day, and continues: "I believe that he is much closer to the evangelical commandment: Thou shalt love thy neighbor than he consents to it. Because he doesn't. He repudiates it as excessive as an imperative, if not mocked - as a precept - by its apparent fruits in a society that still calls itself Christian. But it's a fact that he talks about it, that he questions it in this astonishing work called The Malaise of Civilization. It's all in the sense of "comme toi-même" (as yourself) that completes the formula, and the suspicious passion of the unmasking man stops him in front of this "comme si" if it's the weight of love that's at stake. For he knows that self-love is great. [...] This force is what he calls narcissism, and it involves a secret dialectic that psychoanalysts find difficult to understand. [...] I am linked to my body by the energy of Eros, which brings living bodies together to reproduce. What Freud promoted as Libido. But what I love insofar as there is a self to which I attach myself with a mental concupiscence, is not this body whose beat and pulsation too obviously escape my control, but an image that deceives me by showing me its unity in its Gestalt, its form"... Etc. Further on, he wonders if it's "up to analysts to repress the fundamental perversion of human desire in the hell of the pregenital, as connoted by affective regression, and to make the truth confessed in the ancient mystery sink into oblivion: Eros is a black god." He evokes "the strange role of the phallus in the fundamental disparity [...] of its function, by which the virile assumption is situated in this duplicity of castration overcome by the Other"... Etc. And he concludes: "Isn't this libido, which Freud tells us is no longer capable of sublimation, the last fruit of the sublimation that responds to man's solitude? [...] I have perhaps foolishly posed before you the question that lies at the heart of the Freudian experience [...] the pitfalls of psychological mastery are scarcely vented: and I have been told that there are seminars where the psychology of Christ is taught. What does this mean? Is it to know by which end his desire can be caught? I'm teaching something for which the term is obscure, and I must apologize here. I was pushed there against my will by a pressing necessity [...] But I'm not happy to be here. This is not my place. And the philosopher doesn't get up, as Ibn Arabi is said to have done one day, to come and meet him, lavishing me with the mark of his consideration and friendship, and finally embracing me and saying yes. Because, of course, as it was my turn, I answered him with a yes, and his joy was heightened by the fact that I had understood him. But, realizing what had provoked his joy, I had to add... No!