Good afternoon to you all.

And thank you, Omar, for this initiative, which allows us to share this afternoon with English-speaking colleagues.

I’m going to say a few words about where I am in my work on this seminar. In other words, an interpretation of the very interesting notion of Knowledge without subject, maybe Knowledge without a subject. As you will notice, it is not a university speech, but a simple expression of my analytical experience.

There is a difficulty with the translation, or rather the distinction, between savoir and connaissance, which is essential in Lacan’s teaching. Words like wisdom or wit came to my mind, but they refer more to sagesse or esprit…

In short, connaissance refers to knowledge one can consciously acquire, and savoir refers more to what awaits us when we enter the world of langage.

A little story first.

I was in Argentina facing some kind of disagreements that went beyond what I could possibly bare. And it was in this context that I woke up with lumbago. You may know that in French we say: Je suis bloquée, I’m stuck. I then faced this little symptom with a certain courage. Like all things that finally disappear…

A small event took place the next day, after having lunch with some English-speaking friends, when I briefly mentioned my worries of the day.

As I was leaving the restaurant, suddenly, a very brief quotation from Finnegans Wake came to my mind, the one I stumbled upon during a workshop I organized at one of Mathinées Lacaniennes at ALI.

It was then that, unexpectedly, an expression from Joyce himself came to my mind: « Oh my Bach! My Bach! ». It made me laugh inside, secretly, to rediscover it at that moment, expression which Joyce, of course, wrote with the musician’s name.

And suddenly I realized that my pain had disappeared.

I was rather proud to see that my unconscious had cyphered[1] this symptomatic moment with this Joyce’s expression from the work we did with Helen and Tom, among others…

Proud as well because that Mathinée was also a moment of revelation for me.

This word « revelation » is not trivial, and I insist on this.

Here is what the CNRTL dictionary says about it:

An act that can be exercised in various ways, by which God or divinity manifests himself to man and communicates to him the knowledge of truths partially or totally unattainable to reason.

Indeed, it is enough to replace the word God with the unconscious, as Lacan invites us to do. By unattainable to reason, I understand precisely that the unconscious is a knowledge that pre-exists the solid establishment of the ego logic, in other words, there is a knowledge linked to the inscription of lalangue in a logical anteriority to anything that deals with meaning.

It was by relying on what took place during this Mathinée that I made a public remark about knowledge without subject at this year’s winter seminar of the ALI.

I am therefore seizing the occasion of this meeting today to develop this idea.

In short: for this Mathinée, I invented the following procedure:

It has been a workshop on a small fragment of Finnegans Wake. I gave out the one-page text in English to the room. And then we heard James Joyce reading this page, sentence by sentence. After listening to each fragment, all the participants were invited to make comments, whether by proposing a translation, making a comment, pointing out ambiguities, or identifying the use of different languages[2]. Certainly, the meaning went in all directions. We deciphered here and there brief dialogues or gossip, onomatopoeias, like Ding, dong, flap, splash, and opinions and descriptions of all kinds.

And once again, a revelation. A method of ciphering had appeared to us as the only place where the author’s presence was revealed.

After an hour of work, we understood that what we were listening to was the literal transcription by the author of everything that was heard. In other words, his use of the letter as a combination outside of meaning. We were the witnesses of his original procedure.

One can imagine a baby lying there, somewhere, submitted to the noise of speech and surroundings, enveloped by a ça parle (it talks) that he doesn’t necessarily understand. But which is registered somewhere. Yet, a baby can distinguish even before birth, voices that are familiar to him.

We can also imagine an AI machine that will automatically transcribe what is heard from the ça parle, with the instruction to use the letter without distinction of languages (tongues), and without worrying at all about the meaning of what is heard. This reminds us of stenotype used to transcribe sounds in real time using phonetic codes. But letters are something more than phonetical codes.

We experience this on a small scale when we find ourselves lost in translation. I was in China in 1982. And in Japan recently. But in these examples, the imaginary relationship to the semblable, or even the neighbour, remains. In Joyce’s text, there was no subject itself except the one who transcribes what is heard. No character created (pas de personage), no narrator either, no one who wants to tell us something. Only this kind of artifact that transcribes the continuity of what is heard including sound effects.

Lacan says that what Joyce does is the closest to what we do as analysts. This quote has always been a question for me.

I think the notion of knowledge without a subject can be referred to the continuous inscription of the sound chain, la chaîne sonore, that is involved in the primary process. And the absence of identification of the subject, other than the one we find when we have a hypothesis on the method used, the one who is engaged in the inscription of a series of letters, evoked for me the notion of the subject of science, as a foreclosed subject.

Let’s remember what Lacan tells us of the subject of analysis as being the subject of science. This is the question that I wanted to develop having in mind what James Joyce shows in his relationship to writing.

[1] Notions of Chiffrer-déchiffrer, the unconscius ciphers, the analyst deciphers.

[2] In the sense of langues, tongue like in mothertongue.