Chapter 1

EMMA: BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND

PSYCHOANALYSIS

Jean-Frangois Lyotard

I. Nothings

Excitatio, from citare, frequentative of ciere or cire— to set into motion, to

arouse— and of ex— to bring forth (excitare sommo, to awaken). In Latin, the
semantic field is energetically judicial: one cites in order to be recognized. One
exits the city of one’s private darkness, and makes it appear in the light of the
law. And behind the law, the hunt: a crouching animal is flushed out and
thrown into the bright, finalized, human field of the chase. (I invoke here the
origins of Roman Law, said to relate— according to Yan Thomas— to “natural
possession” through capture.)1 According to the principle of modern science,
excitation activates a specific, although dormant and invisible, field: that of
electricity. A magnetic field is excited by placing a tension (a current, an “exci-
tation”) on an electromagnetic inductor. Informed by his reading of Fechner,
and under cover of this electromagnetism— accredited by physical science—
Freud first came to use the term “excitation” while sketching his Project fo r a
Scientific Psychology in 1895. Clearly, some forcing takes place in this excita-
tion. A forcing, in Aristotelean terms, of the act so far as potential is con-
cerned. The object cited must be excitable. This forcing is the occasion for the
citability of the excitable. There one stumbles, it seems, in the pure tautology of
the event: it happens. Yet, afterwards, one will say not so much that “it hap-
pens,” as that the occasion actualizes a potential field. Or, at least, that the
potential field that it excites is what gives it its quid. The event only happens,
but what happens is not just any occasion. It is determined by the field of
excitability. It has its presupposition, a capacity or excitability, with regard to
the law, to the chase, to magnetism. After the event, its predisposition is dis-
closed. Covering over a latency, Nachtraglichkeit refers back to Vorzeitigkeit.2
For example, in The Ego and the Id, Freud underscores the extent to which
philosophers are incapable of conceiving “anything both unconscious and men-
tal” (iSE, 19:216). This inability, or ineptitude, stems from the fact that “philoso-
phers have never taken account of hypnosis, they have not concerned
themselves with the interpreting of dreams” (SE, 19:217). As philosophers, they
have no clinical practice. And if philosophers were to have one, they would not
confine themselves to the citadel of consciousness and its philosophy.

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Philosophy, hidden behind a web of evidence that ensures its bright life, resists
psychoanalysis. Analysis refers (cites) philosophy to a court of darkness that
resists understanding and reason, the court of an inconsistent, yet persevering,
anguish, one incurable to all consolatio. Yet this anguish, this contradictory
affect, sorrow and pleasure, sorrow caused by pleasure, is without doubt the first
spirit of philosophy— its excitatio— the recurrent occasion for the act of philos-
ophizing. Philosophy knows it and has named it in its own ways: absolute skep-
ticism, nihilism, the taedium vitae spirtus, the desperatio cogitandi. The field
of philosophical excitability is stretched to the four comers of Nothing, named
by Kant as follows: ens rationis, an empty concept without object; nihil priva-
tivum, an empty object of a concept; ens imaginarium, an empty intuition
without concept; and the terrible fourth, an empty object without concept, nihil
negativum, the Un-ding, the no-thing.3
After Lacan’s rereading of Freud, this no-thing, a nullity of object and of
concept, is called the Thing. In this divergence concerning the name given to
what preoccupies them lies the differend between philosophers and analysts.
According to the latter, the unconscious knows nothing of negation (nihil negi-
tativum); in the former, negation is the way of ignoring the unconscious, of
speaking of it as ens rationis or nihil privativum. In this vein, any philoso-
pher, as philosopher; will find it impossible to intervene in Freudian affairs
without redressing them, changing their notion of negativity, i.e., distorting
them. This is not to describe the diverse ways of amendment (such as Jungian-
ism, for example) that the spirit of philosophy can and has inflicted upon the
unconscious. The motive of excitation, to hold myself to that theme, induces
the philosopher to suspect the dynamic and economic metaphor supporting
this motive— to doubt the legitimacy of metapsychology as such. The philoso-
pher is at least tempted to get rid of “transcendental appearances” and the
metaphysical illusions perceived there. He tries to force this general physical-
ity through the Gaudine yoke of the Critique. He examines the a priori condi-
tions of possibility of an “unconscious judgment.” Such a law would be
something like: act always as if the maxim of your will (desire) could never be
known, shared, nor communicated . . . not even with yourself. And, for the
philosopher, this parody immediately appears inconsistent. How could the
“you” to which the law is directed supposedly address itself, or even have
knowledge of this prescription, if it is not allowed to know and share any
motive of its deeds?
Yet certainly, this inconsistency, this simultaneity of an addressed being
(addressee, “you”) and of a being not addressed (and thus beyond all address-
ing), is precisely what philosophy must persist in thinking if it wants to do jus-
tice to psychoanalysis and to its own melancholy. The effort to proceed to the a
priori conditions of the thesis of the unconscious obliges the philosopher to pre-
suppose a transcendental consistence to the inconsistence of primary
processes. If philosophy claims to have stopped ignoring the unconscious, its
reason has to have made reason apt to reason with the unreasonable. The stake
is of the same order as that at which Heidegger aimed in The Principle of
Reason. But if the rule alone is not enough to identify this “irrationality” with
Diehtung (largely assimilable to what I call metaphor) as the only possibility of
accessing the Id-side of the rational, then the game is much more serious (and
will avoid the unworthy consequences that we know). Psychoanalysts know the

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title of this question: myth of the origin/origin of the myth, origin of the fan-
tasy/fantasy of the origin, or in what they treat defacto in the usage made of lit-
erature as a witness to this Id-side. I am attempting here to maintain something
of a philosophical claim: to speak in an intelligible fashion on the subject of the
Id-side of the articulable, that is to say, of a Nihil, which is also what excites this
very same claim.
In the scope of this dispute, what follows arises. I speak here as a philosopher,
with no (clinical) authority on the matter of excitation, but with the (philosoph-
ical) obstinacy “to set right” something of the Freudian lesson. On somewhat
of a slippery slope, I have tried, for some fifteen years, to drown the thesis
of the unconscious in the deluge of a general libidinal economy. This was
pure metaphysics, and consequently parodical and strongly nihilistic, despite
being clothed in a cheerfulness and an affirmativity adorned with the name of
Nietzsche. Here, I went straight to the “drives.” Now, with the topic of excita-
tion, I would like to tackle the Id-side once again, only now in a critical, if not
Kantian, fashion. Kant’s thought remains dependent on presuppositions and on
implications (on both, no doubt) still too strongly attached to subjectivist
thought, i.e., to a philosophy of consciousness. When reading the later Wittgen-
stein on this topic, one remains struck by his recurrent observation that one
does not need to know the rules of a language-game in order to master or play it.
But one also worries about the very expression “play of language,” which does
not clearly determine whether it is the speaker who plays the language or the
language that plays the speaker (as one plays a piano). I have been led to this
myself in The Differend,4 where this worry presents itself (rather than being
conceptualized) under the name of phrase. The phrase resists doubt, and there-
fore nihilism and melancholy as well, much better than the uncertain Cogito.
Whether one suspects that a phrase is there or not, it is still necessary to voice
this suspicion. By the same token, I would admit that a silence could be a
phrase. A slip, a lost act, etc. And an affect.
Along these lines I sense a way to philosophically approach a matter proper
to the psychoanalyst. Analysts deal only with phrases and eminently partake
in their certainty. Indeed, the talking cure is a treatment through phrases,
though one that comes at the price of stretching the sense of talk just as far as
that of phrase. As much as I am informed, or am willing to be informed, by the
Id-side to which I am singularly the host or hostage, I can presume that in this
talking, the kind of phrase that guides the cure is the affect. The affect is a
very curious kind of phrase, one Freud isolated from those classed under the
general function of the Reprasentanz. Affective phrases function according to
the regime of the Vorstellungsreprasentanz, of delegation by representation.
First, they are referential only insofar as they are representations; they relate
to an object, “thing,” or word, which is what they “speak of.” The measure of
illusion and truth such phrases convey is played out in relation to this object
(their grammatical subject), the represented, which is there for an other and is
delegated. The measure mentioned takes shape insofar as it sketches, in the
texture of associations, the other (or the others) of the object first exhibited.
The progress from one point of the associative fabric to the other is, without
doubt, interminable. The object phrased as the “sofa” (for example) is not the
delegate of one other, but of several others. Truth is not located in the fabric. It
is the fabric itself, i.e., the deferral.

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Thus two dimensions of substitution need to be carefully distinguished. I

will not focus on this here, called (excited) as we are by the question of excita-
tion. Only just one word: the representatives involved in representation by
“things” or by words are substitutes insofar as they represent the pulsional
energy which is invested, counterinvested, or neutralized in the figure or in
the discourse. Furthermore, they may possibly even be substitutes for each
other, in a tangle that dazzles philosophical understanding. The second sense
relates to displacement and to condensation, but the first (which necessarily
includes, in my opinion, the disposition for metaphoricity) is of an entirely dif-
ferent order. The “thing-phrase,” or word-phrase, is always substitutive, abso-
lutely speaking, in that it happens in place of a “motion.” Not a thing for an
other, a word for an other, but— be it word or thing— an articulated element of
language (articulated in a skewed way, as in the rebus of a dream), a phrase
which therefore presents itself in the place of a pulsional “investment.” The
latter is supposed neither to obey nor disobey the rules of this language but to
be so strange to it that one would not know, at first glance, to speak of the
translation of the dynamic into the verbal. The motion delegates one or several
representatives (Reprasentanz) in an order, a language, which implies refer-
ence (Vorstellung). Why must the pulsional not present itself in its own place,
but be delegate to the phrases of an articulated language? Certainly it does not
have an assignable place for itself. Speech is necessary in order to place it, for
the pulsional does not speak for itself.

II. Phrases
At issue, insofar as such repression commands the event of excitation, is the
question of an original repression. The metapsychological hypothesis, the eco-
nomic and dynamic metaphor (and, doubtless, the topical as well) that I will
here call the physical metaphor, implies that the unconscious operates as an
appearance that obeys the rules not of an articulated language but of a mechan-
ics: forces, conflicts of forces, composition of forces, points of physical contact
(that of the application of a force), transformation of potential into kinetic
energy (discharged by “specific action”), works therefore (of dream, of mourn-
ing, of repression) as the expenditure of energy necessary to these mechanical
operations, energy used in a differentiated system (bound), or free-moving (a
reservoir where the aforesaid system draws the sustenance necessary to escape
from entropy). In general, quantity is the only category pertinent to this
mechanics. It explains the terms: quantum of affect, inversion in the contrary,
reversal of the proper person. These terms all point out that the quality of the
affect, its addressing or its “addressee” (the you, the ego), is not pertinent to the
physics of force (logically speaking, the quality of yes or no, applicable here
since it involves a question of feeling, of pleasure and pain). We will have to
examine whether this quantity, taken as “object” of the general physics of spirit,
is not what Kant called the empty concept without object, and the space-time
where it works, an empty intuition without object.
The rules Freud imagined for this mechanics underwent a change from 1895
to 1920. What Beyond the Pleasure Principle introduced with the two principles
is more than just another mechanics. It is a biomechanics, where the system of

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forces (called “psychic apparatus” in 1895) certainly remains defined, in the

final analysis, by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Still, there remains an
incertitude whether this system is driven with all speed to the probable, absolute
zero of excitation (i.e., death)— which is, in principle, the case with isolated
energetic systems— or whether such a course is retarded because the system is
equipped with the capacity to draw from energy, in itself or elsewhere, that is
still free. The latter amounts to a reconstitution of the thermal polarity of its
sources (internal differentiation) because it then has some reserve of useful
energy. Likewise, in the case of Maxwell’s demon, Brillouin’s theorem shows that
in the long run the death of the system is inevitable because the selector dis-
penses too much energy in maintaining the work of its improbable differentia-
tion. Freud attributed this capacity for selecting and differentiating to Eros. In
any case, with Eros the adjustment (provisional, precisely the duration of a life)
of the system does not tend to the zero degree, but to the optimum of the input
(excitation) /output relationship (which is the pleasure of discharge), an opti-
mum determined by the state of differentiation.
I only invoke these well-known elements of the physical metaphor to empha-
size that if the unconscious is structured, it cannot be so as a language, or,
rather, that this language cannot be not articulated. Of course, by articulation I
do not refer to what is meant by this term in linguistics (double articulation), in
grammar (articulation of meaning by syntactic operators), or in logic (well-
formed expressions and their combinations). And, certainly, I do not mean the
great articulation of “symbolic/imaginary/real.” Not that this articulation is
wrong (I will not discuss it here), but for a philosopher it is pure metaphysics
(precisely the Platonism of Republic VI-VIII). It is also too immense— much
like the cave or the plan of some top general— to help our little phrases infiltrate
the no-man’s-land of forces. Instead, I try to impoverish; articulation is much
less than this. What I call a phrase is, in the impossible immediacy of its occur-
rence (the phrase-token), the presentation of a universe, however tiny and dis-
abled. “Universe” has several meanings simultaneously. A phrase presents
multiple instances at once— quid, de quo, a quo, ad quod (respectively: a
meaning, a referent, an addressor, and an addressee). This quadrangle (to recall
Peirce’s analysis) is provisional, even when a certain instance does not take
place in the universe presented by a phrase, i.e., when it is not marked in an
occurring phrase. It nonetheless constitutes the articulation of which I speak. A
phrase can lack two, three, even four instances (in comparison with Kant’s four
Nothings, the phrase-silence can at least have four valences: silence with respect
to the meaning, to the referent, etc.). Nonetheless, these valences are presup-
posed or preunderstood, since in each case it is necessary to link up with even
this silent phrase, and this will be through one and/or the other of these
valences. For the instances that articulate what the phrase presents in a uni-
verse are also the valences by which the molecular phrase finds its linkages to
one or several others, either without a rule for linking— as in free association—
or, on the contrary, in accordance with a certain rule (which, also, partly defines
a genre of discourse).
I cannot here develop this idea further, as I have done in The Differend. But
what is missing there is precisely what is introduced here and what I am trying
to philosophically supplement: the quid of the unconscious in terms of phrases?
Philosophically this is not a question of theory. Either theory is mathematical,

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and, as Wittgenstein said of the world, has no regard for “the whole of what
arrives,” or it is scientific, and, insofar as it formalizes to the greatest possible
extent everything one thinks or believes will happen, has no more than a hypo-
thetical value. Theory comes with the risk of having to change the hypothesis
when something new arises. But as for our present topic, the unconscious is
what happens precisely insofar as it escapes from theory. Moreover, it happens
“in the phrases,” and therefore— even if unarticulated— as phrase. The universe
of this phrase lacks one or all of the instances that the capacity to articulate
(common sense, reason) awaits from this universe in order to link up with
another phrase. To add that these “silences” do not occur in a regular fashion is
useless. This is why theory, and mechanical theory to begin with, is in principle
incapable of explaining them. Theory earns only the title of metaphor.
And if the aforesaid were not the case, psychoanalysis would be a science.
Thus it is an art. Psychoanalysis can be well aided, if not resolved, by theory,
much as medicine, the art of care, is aided by genetics and biochemistry. Evi-
dently, because one brings into consideration the singularity of “it happens,” the
enterprise cannot be either theoretic or scientific. The patient and the analyst
work on phrase-tofeens with phrase-tofeens as they arrive. In my opinion, this
rule of immanence belonging to psychoanalytic technique has by itself, if one
holds it to itself, its doublet ( “analogue” would be to say too little) in the Kantian
rule of reflexive judgment. To judge is to link up without criteria (“synthesize,”
to use Kant’s term), to regulate without a rule of regulation, to discriminate and
to assemble by analogy. Jurisprudence when right (theory) is lacking. To philoso-
phize is only this, an artistic condition or “technique.” It is why Kant, again, says
“one only learns to philosophize,” and not philosophy itself. I suppose, equally,
that one does not learn psychoanalysis but, rather, how to psychoanalyze.
Nonetheless, the difference between the psychoanalyst and the philosopher
persists. It is the clinic. The phrase-tokens making up the world of the former
are those of the patient (and of the clinical situation itself). The tokens of the
philosopher come from everyday life, certainly, as with “everybody,” and they
come from books. And among these books are those of Freud, who reports the
tokens of his patients. One can say that these two cases are “textual.” Yet this
remark seems evasive to me. First, in the cure, the “text” is subsumed under a
rule (technique) of nonregulated meaning (free association). Second, the text
is subsumed under a rule of the deregulation of the addressee (transference:
the analyst serves as the addressee for all the phrases of the patient; this is
the point of determining to whom these phrases are addressed, of lifting the
silence that weighs on the ad quod; the philosopher, reading everyday life and
books, is well “addressed” by the phrases of his world but is never addressed
as reader— in short, a philosophy of the philosophical “reader”). Third, the
text is subsumed under the rule of real time (duration, frequency of sessions,
length of analysis, and the indispensable “presence” as far as absenteeism is
concerned, whereas the philosopher is a priori and at his best optional and
unpaid, if one neglects constraints on the “use of time” by the teaching profes-
sor, who is by no means essential to philosophizing).
As we know, the supposition of the physical metaphor is that these rules,
taken together, have the function of exciting, of making appear before the tribu-
nal of phrases, of letting be chased by these phrases something supposed to be

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hidden in the silence which is not a phrase, the silence of forces. This silence is
no more articulated language than that silence which reigns in the galaxies. All
of modem mechanics— modem because accompanied by the critique of a
Nature that is finalized and would speak to us; mechanical because the remains
of a physics without physis— speaks of what is silent on behalf of itself. The
sense of the physical metaphor is to open a view, and only a view (by no means
to lend an ear), to these mute movements. The phrase universe of the physicist
is well structured, it makes sense (in many senses) of its polarities. But this
world, which is nothing other than energy in transformation on a macro- or
microcosmic scale, says nothing.
Posed in this way, as the basis of the physical metaphorization of primary
processes, the analytic task appears impossible to the philosopher. The enter-
prise is doomed to failure, since either the structure of the phrase-universe
(signification, referentiality, addressing) is illegitimately inserted into the
world (of forces) in order to retranslate the representing phrases, or else the
substitutes, substituted into the representing phrases, would be the primary
processes. In this case, one has filled in the abyss opened by the physical
metaphor and dissolved in advance the persistent resistence of the uncon-
scious. Or else one preserves this resistance intact, and no interpretation will
be able to overcome the mechanical silence. One can only “let it speak” arbi-
trarily. I listen: axiomatically, as in modem mechanical explanations, which
exclude the interpretation or the hearing of what arrives in its singularity. The
anamnesis of unconscious “life” and the explanation of its symptoms (taking
them as the effects of established rules of a definite makeup, which is psycho-
analysis’s conflict with psychiatry) cannot be undertaken simultaneously.
The alternative, I confess, is typically philosophical. It arranges all meaning
on the side of consciousness or at least on that of articulated language. It isolates
the physical as it isolates the world of the insane, of which only a science—
externally, axiomatically— could render an account. Freud makes no mistake in
responding to this objection as follows: if we altered the conscious processes by
the cure, then we will have produced evidence that unconscious processes exist
(SE, 19:215-1217; 7:266). According to good epistemology, this is evidently not
true. We will have given evidence that the analytic relation has had some effect.
And even if evidence that an unconscious exists were produced by the cure, the
principle question would remain entirely unanswered: How is the transforma-
tion of mechanical silence through talking, and of silence in talking, possible?
Once again, we are faced with a philosophical question and alternative, i.e.,
one established in a conceivable or at least representable order. And yet, here
the philosopher must become alert— or the very point could be missed. There
are representatives, says Freud, without representation, in the sense of substi-
tutes that do not make themselves known as substitutes. “How then do you
know they are substitutes?” the amused philosopher asks. The analyst responds:
“because the affect, this representative without the mark of representing, this
nondelegate that comes and goes, is guiding us, the analysant and myself,
through our wanderings in the maze of associations.” A difficult point to grasp, as
what gives no sign of its origin and permits no localization is precisely the key to
the transference of memories. Durcharbeitung verses Erinnerung. And as far as
memory is concerned, the philosopher seems to know only the latter.

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III. Moments
As I have already stated, the question of the transformation of silence in
phrases is tied up with that of original repression. I will examine this transfor-
mation here under the heading of time. The excitation we are concerned with
has an “effect,” the affect, which appears paradoxical in regard to time. This is
indicated by a Nachtrdglichkeit, the aftershock that accompanies, according
to Freud’s Project, the proton pseudos— a double error of dating.
When a philosopher announces a discourse on time, one can expect the
worst. Let us disentangle things a bit. The aftershock simultaneously supposes
and denies that the time called into question is physical or more precisely
mechanical time, i.e., the “the movement of enumeration.” 5 Movement counts
itself in time only with the aid of a measure, a movement standard. The stan-
dard itself is the relation between units of distance and units of constant time:
so many units of time by units of distance or the reverse. One knows, Aristotle
knew (P, 4:12), that this definition implies a petitio principii: the movement
that counts time presupposes time. This account is a beautiful example of
axiomatic physics, and is the “defect” common to all “definitions” used in
mathematics and science. Such definitions are actually expressions of proper
names which, being rigid, independent of circumstances, and reproducible,
are sufficient to measure a variation. Clock time determines one of the vari-
ables affecting the givens of transformation (kinetic, for example).
The aftershock requires a consideration of this time, since it presupposes
that the event has been given, let’s say, at time T 2 , but that its “effect” (the
affect) only at time T i or T0. The gap between T2 and T i or T o, even if it does
not need to be measured exactly, still requires a clock or, at least, a calender
time, i.e., Emma at the age of eight, at thirteen, and as an adult.6 But this after-
shock also imposes a denial of chronological time: the affect issued from
the shock at T 2 does not take place there, it does so at Ti. But at Ti the affect
is neither recognized nor localized, but takes place as a new feeling, a fear.
Then, in an always unexpected manner (and therefore, in the mode of a “once
again”), the affect repeats itself, introduction and repetition together. This
mode continues until T o, where Emma on the couch at last “consciously”
(says Freud) feels it, i.e., locates the source (the stimulant) of the representa-
tive phrase at T2 and, thus, perhaps “liquidates” it.
In order to accept the Freudian “reading” (and/or Emma’s), the denial of
chronological time must reside in the necessity of imagining either 1) an “out-
fitting” of the affect without transformation, without removal or representative
representation from T 2 to T0, despite the diachrony, or 2) its pure and simple
birth at To owing to memorization in its proper sense (with a considerable
deferral of impact, as if it were not the shock but the remembrance of the
shock that would bring the shock). Freud hesitated before this decisive alter-
native. I will come back to this, as the knot to be unwound in the matter of
excitation. But from either case, however, it follows that chronological time
does not modify the affect. Whether remaining intact all along or awakening at
the end (T o ) on the occasion of a representation (the remembrance of T 2 ), the
affect should have arisen from the start in the “lived experience” it represents.
This last observation already situates the problem in another temporality—
one still close to clock time, but different, in that a philosophy of consciousness

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or a phenomenology is now required. If one returns to Husserl’s famous Phe-

nomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, one sees that, since memoriza-
tion is taken into account, a bidimensional time is implied. As consciousness
moves from T 2 to Ti, then to To on the horizontal line of the chronological suc-
cession of moments, these moments themselves are not inscribed on the verti-
cal lines that “fall” from these moments, but only these moments as already
passed, their images “seen” from the later moments.7 Each of these images
changes as actual consciousness moves along the horizontal line.
The Husserlian arrangement, like a thread or a network of lines, admits of
several continuities that pose, or should pose, a problem for thinking actual (and
therefore discontinuous) intentionality. First, coming from a physical clock for-
eign to conscious thought, there is the nonphenomenal continuum of the hori-
zontal line. Next, there is the continuum of half-straight “verticals,” where past
events persist in images of themselves. This is not merely a projection at ninety
degrees from the first points, but the requisite for a memory that is not purely
imaginary, e.g., something of T stays, and would be retained at T', T", etc.
Husserl thought this requisite settled with the term Retention, illustrated by
the vertical continuity. But this term creates, in its own turn, a problem for a
philosophy of consciousness. It indicates that the “synthesis” of T with its
images does not result from an intentional act of memory, but is “older” than,
made “before,” it. Memory, therefore, has a matter; a store of remembrances
arranged on successive screens, the vertical lines, as in the schema of the
psychic appearance of the Traumdeutung (ITC, ch. VII). This does not belong
to phenomenological time, which is supposed to be undiluted, discontinuous,
and exempt from the influence of simultaneities or coalescences, nor to any
intentional act. Finally, the intervention of a third continuum (the oblique
lines) represents a “focus” oriented from “actual” intentionalities in the direc-
tion of their equally present intentional objects (but present only insofar as
past). This third continuity simply falls under the principle that all conscious-
ness is “consciousness of . . . ,” or that the intentional act is always referential.
Whether correct or not, this principle excludes all mnemonic persistence that
is not representative: T' and T" are images of T for a conscious vision. It also
excludes the occasion in which T' or T" would either not be intentionally envis-
aged or not be reattachable to T, which it is supposed to represent. Thus there
is here a double failure of representation, one both removed from vision and
lacking the mark of its substitution. A feeling, for example— remarkable because
of this double deficiency— could not serve as guide in the Husserlian network.
It would not have a place there and therefore would have only no place.
It would still be necessary to view the temporalities that are tied to the “fac-
ulty” of testing pleasure and pain as entirely on their own, as singular, in both
senses of that word. The philosopher, after Kant, and especially if he or she
takes an interest in the affect, must be persuaded that this power, or this sus-
ceptibility of the spirit, the soul, or the thought-body (the name doesn’t mat-
ter) to feeling good or bad, is inseparable from the faculty of knowing or of
acting. The Critique of Judgment shows that the beautiful is a pure happiness
of the soul, and the sublime a happiness mediated by suffering. Both are pure
feelings. But even if Kant did not greatly elaborate this point, these simple and
frustrated happinesses both develop, and develop themselves, in entirely spe-
cific temporalities different from those one comes to recall and differentiate

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between them. These temporalities owe their singularity to the purity of these
aesthetic feelings, i.e., that they be removed from all cognitive or volitional
interest. This point merits a separate analysis, one I believe of primary impor-
tance for the examination of the unconscious affect and of the aftershock.
If one “lingers” at the beautiful and if the happiness it gives derives from its
persistence, its “conservation,”8 and if the feeling of the sublime carries with it
a sort of spasm or stasis of time (C3, §27-28), constituting its unhappy compo-
nent, it would be useful to compare these temporalities of aesthetic pleasure
with the persisting content and the content in amnesia (temporal stasis) that
one finds in unconscious affect (mutatis mutandis, of course).
With the idea of original repression, I return to Freud’s question to Husserl.
An event (an excitation) occurs at T 2 . There is no representative trace of this
event in the vertical series of T ' 2 , T ' 2 , etc. The psyche (of Emma at T 2 ) does
not then have representations of the event. These images are not merely too
confused or too pale, they are not at all. In the place of the vertical line, then,
a blank— T 2 is forgotten straight away. It is not inscribed in the representative
order. The same can also be said in mechanical language: the energy intro-
duced by the excitation at T 2 is not and has not been tied up in representative
formations, neither consciously nor unconsciously. Or, again: the psychic
appearance has not had the means “to ward off the excitation.” It has been
affected without the power to imagine this affectation, that is to say, in good
Freudian doctrine, without the power to control and “liquidate” it. The psy-
chic appearance does not have the power to drive the energy charge that is
this affectation by some efferent ways towards its discharge. And, finally,
according to the problematic of the Reprasentanz: this affect is how the exci-
tation is present, i.e., as a cloud of energy not entirely fixed in psychic appear-
ance but also not “free” either. The affect is present but not represented.
By the same token, the affect is not subject to the representative substitu-
tions of things and words that form the associative fabric analysis explores and
that never cease appearing in the course of life’s history. So that, in escaping
from representation, the “effect” of the excitation— the affect— escapes from
temporality as well. At least, in so far as it is a quantity, since in terms of its
quality (its sentimental meaning) and its addressing (addressor/addressee), the
affect can repeatedly assume any number of meanings. Quality and address
are still, or already, what takes over in the affect— even from afar, from its rep-
resentatives, from articulated language, and from time.
In order to understand the status of the affect, a difference (which I believe is
“ontological”), such as that between Darstellung (presentation) and Vorstellung
(representation), must be admitted. The affect as “effect” of excitation is there,
but not for anything other than itself. This constitutes, at the same time, both its
irrefutability and its insufficiency as witness. The affect only “says” one thing—
that it is there— but is witness neither for nor of what is there. Neither when nor
where. Again, the affect says only that it is there if one pays attention to it. This
is what Freud means in qualifying the affect of the unconscious— an absurd epi-
thet, he conceded— when it is applied to what can affect only a consciousness.
Its status is not without relationship to the innere Empfindung, the feeling of
aesthetic pleasure analyzed by Kant. This internal sensation is at the same time
the witness and the thing of which it is the witness (C3, §9). It is what is some-
times called (in particular by Freud) the “lived,” though this is a very bad word,

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one that confuses everything. The affect is not lived. Its cloud colors represen-
tative life without reason. Most often this coloring is facile, and commonly ne-
glected. If attention is given to the affect, if treatment is sought, it is because the
affect’s “presence” for the patient is too intense and too recurrent. The analyst
has no other motive for which “to work” this presence. With a delicacy both
specific and severe, the analyst calls attention to the chromatics, an attention
that floats on the water without prejudging the important from the anecdotal.
As for time, the status of this nonrepresentative “present” is related to the
modalities of its recurrence. I imagine that the affect of anguish, which is
“present” each time Emma enters a store alone, “presents (itself)” each time
for the first time with the force (I appeal to physics here) of “conviction” or of
“viction,” with the suffocating energy of an event. This repetition by no means
renders Emma (consciously) powerless. One should not confuse the connota-
tion— if I can say (but can one say?)— of recurrence. Recurrence is a matter
of affect, with its supposed representativity. If it re-presents (itself), it rightly
represents nothing. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has carefully described this para-
doxical trait of repetition: it must not be thought in terms of identity/alterity,
but rather, from the point of view of time, of “initiation.” 9 One can very well
know that a mute inhabitant has newly introduced itself into the home with-
out knowing what it is, without knowing whether it is the same every time.
Such is the condition of the conduit under hypnosis and of the hysterical
attack. This “compulsion” (in terms of general physics, because its com— the
Latin “with”— is said from the outside) is what Kant would call an apprehen-
sion without reproduction and without recognition (C l, 111-23). What repeats
itself is the forgotten. What creates continuity is discontinuity.
Freud emphasized that what is important in the affect is quantity and not
quality or “address.” The yes and the no, the pleasure and the pain, and their
“address” are not decisive. The one is of signification, the other of addressing,
and as such they belong to articulated language, constructed of phrases that
hold messages sent from someone to someone. What is important in the affect
is the load it carries, how much it overloads the thought-body, the psychical
appearance. (Kant said that this is its qualitative variety; much in the affect
feels not so much sublime as “energetic.” Again, a physics.) By “overload” (a
mechanical metaphor), one indicates the “presence” of a nonsignificant phrase
(pleasure or pain?), neither destined (from whom to whom?), nor referenced
(of what is it a question?), which happens suddenly in the course of the
phrases. It creates a gap in the Husserlian schema of time and its representa-
tions. This gap, a “blank,” blinds mnemonic intentionality.
Are all of these negative traits nonetheless sufficient to make a phrase? The
phrase of affect “says” it is something, as Da, here and now, inasmuch as this
something is nothing, not meaning, not referent, not address. (Here it would
be necessary to elaborate the Kantian Nothings.) Since specific instances that
articulate a universe are lacking, one can say only that the affect presents a
universe. The something that it “presents” is its “presence” to itself, its being-
there-now. In its autonomy, the affect signifies an “internal feeling.” And in the
absence of a universe articulated in accordance with these instances, which
are also the valences necessary to link up the phrase with others, the affect-
phrase remains unlinked or, if one wishes, absolute. In particular, to capture
the affect-phrase in reference (in representation) by any subsequent phrase

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appears difficult. And with respect to a memory of an affect-phrase, it is hard

to imagine a remembered phrase that could reach back and chronologically
locate the original phrase in either a phenomenological or clock temporality,
both of which are equally unknown to it.

IV. Shocks
My intention is not “to rewrite” the unconscious but only to make a small
opening in the metaphysics of forces (from which my critical, and perhaps
political, responsibility repels me, since one knows the unconscious is threat-
ening in these times of “general mobilization” of energies).
In speaking of the status of the affect-phrase (it will be necessary to write: of
the “phrase-affect”), it is now appropriate to describe “original repression”
without appeal to physical metaphor. The nature of the phrase-affect is equal
to that of “repression.” As this “says” nothing, this consists in not repressing.
An “excitation” occurs, and it remains in place. This stasis is the phrase-affect.
This disposition, noticeable by the absence of “defense,” let us say, by a per-
fect susceptibility (ideally speaking), can “originally” say itself in that it is evi-
dently tied to the unpreparedness of childhood (with the initial absence, as
said, of articulated language). But if it persists always in this, then even the
articulated phrase owes the real or supposed extent of its linguistic compe-
tence only to the affects. This disposition persists into adulthood as a suscepti-
bility to “presence,” to a possibility both tempting and threatening, because
one is precisely “without defense” before it. This ambivalent Hilflosigkeit justi-
fies Freud’s frequently referring to anguish as an unconscious affect and his
hesitation in deciding upon what status to give it.
The status of an “original” susceptibility (in this sense of Hilflosigkeit) is
what is at play in the affair of Emma. Remember that the version Freud gives in
1895 depends on the absence of two hypotheses formulated by Freud in 1905
and 1914 (infantile sexuality and primary narcissism). These two hypotheses
equip the aftershock with a completely different “logic” (I would like to say
with a phrasistics).
The reading of the aftershock given in the Entwurf is brief. Emma, at eight
years of age, is sexually “assaulted” in the store (T 2). She does not remember the
assault and was not “affected” by it. Afterwards, a phobia— the fear of entering
into a store alone— emerges. The scene with the shop assistant (Ti), which took
place when she was twelve years old, is first invoked by Emma as the activator
of this fear. Additional associations yield access to scene T2, whose recall is finally
accompanied with a “sexuelle Entbindung” (sexual release). This last affect,
Freud concludes, is the deferred response to the shop assistant. Memory, there-
fore, is what provoked the affect. This reading is justified in the following terms:
The memory awakens [erweckt, now, at To] what it was evidently unable [to do]
then, a sexual release [sexuelle Entbindung] which is transformed into anguish.
(SE, 1:285)
“Was sie damals gewiss nicht konnte” (what it/she— sie— at the time
clearly could not do). The German sie grammatically echoes die Erinnerung.
But the echo is semantically inconsistent, since then the memory was not a

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memory. Rather she— sie—Emma— was then not capable of this “sexual dis-
charge.” Again, it is necessary to presuppose that she then (T 2 ), who did not
have an affect, is the same (always Emma) as the one who feels this release
(transformed by anguish) on the couch (T o ). I will return to this question of
Emma’s identity in the following section.
That this is Freud’s thought is evident when he sumarizes his reading as
follows:
The sexual release is linked with the memory of the shop assistant. But this is
completely remarkable, since it was not linked to the shop assistant when it was
lived experience. Here is a case where a memory awakens [erweckt] an affect that
it would not have awakened when it was actually experienced [als Erlebnis, same
semantico-grammatical paradox as the preceding], because going through the
change of puberty [die Veranderung der Pubertdt] has rendered possible another
understanding [ein anderes Verstandnis] of what one remembers. (SE, 1:286)

In short, apathy at eight years old; the capacity to suffer in puberty, i.e., with
genital sexuality. This excitability is what makes memory a stimulant and,
between times, a latency: memory is lost as a result of the affect it awakens.
There are several reasons not to accept this reading, which locates the true
source of susceptibility in the changes of puberty. One reason, and by no
means the least, is found in the text itself. We learn that Emma, when she was
eight years old (T 2 ), returns to the candy store a second time. She eventu-
ally gave up on the idea of returning there again because she blamed herself
for having to act, in returning “as if she again wanted to provoke the shop
assistant.” Freud’s comments here are a bit enigmatic: “Actually [tatsachlich],
it is necessary to attribute a state of ‘oppressed bad conscience’ to this experi-
ence” (SE, 1:284).
This lived experience (dies Erlebnis) seems to me to indicate the tempta-
tion or the quasi-temptation (the “as if”) of seducing and being seduced.
Alone, in effect, she can endure bad conscience. That this sensation had been
“lived” by the eight-year-old little girl, the text leaves no doubt. The localiza-
tion of this “oppressive bad conscience” remains enigmatic. Does it happen
when eight years old (T 2 ) or now ( T o )?
Despite this uncertainty, when speaking of scene 2, one has to agree that
Emma was greatly affected. The Erlebnis of the temptation of seduction makes
it authentic— under the guise of candy, I suppose, but this of little importance.
Emma would in no way suffer from apathy at this time, because the scene was
forgotten, put to sleep. The question then becomes the following: Why, having
been affected, has she forgotten that she was affected?
To have forgotten is to say that she does not possess, through what follows
and up to T0, any representation of scene 2 or of the excitation of which it con-
sisted (the temptation). There are two possible responses to the question of this
deficiency, both of which are found in the text. One invokes the repression that
Freud will call secondary, i.e., the representatives of thing and of word that
come to substitute for the representation of scene 2 up to the overshadowing.
This would be the case with scene 1, that of Emma and the shop assistant. Freud
enumerates the representative analogies with scene 2 (the store here and there,
the employees and the merchant, the ones laughing and the other “smiling
grimacingly,” clothes and dress, and, finally, Emma all alone in both cases). But

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in a “short discussion” that clearly appears as a judicial or historical sort of

investigation, Freud convinces himself of the inconsistency of reading scene 1 as
release. The elements that constitute it are incommensurable with the accom-
panying affect, the panicked fear and the phobia that supposedly results.
This interpretation is guided by the meaning of the affect reassembled by
the duo Emma-Freud in scene 2 (the text does not say which is the “author” of
the discovery), where they identify the “source” of the affect, i.e., its initial
stimulant.
One should be able to separate this kind of response from the question of
the forgotten, which invokes a secondary repression, i.e., the substitution of
representatives for one another. But this forgetting, obtained by an analogical
“slipping” of representations, consists of only a false memory, a representative
paramnesia. It provides no account of the affective amnesia, i.e., of the apathy
that interests Freud and on which his thesis of Nachtraglichkeit rests. What-
ever the representations, the affect itself was initially missing and appears sud-
denly only at the end. Remember it. Here we are close to the second response.
In effect, Freud sought to explain this initial apathy— according to him, the
true source of Emma’s affective amnesia— in terms of a general latency in sus-
ceptibility before puberty:

Again because it is not habitual, in the psychic life, a memory [Erinnerung] awak-
ens [erweckt] an affect that it would not entail when it was a lived experience [als
Erlebnis]. This is something still completely habitual when it is a question of sexual
presentation [Jur die sexuelle Vorstellung ], precisely because the postponement of
puberty [die Pubertdtsverzogerung] is a general character of the organization. In
adolescence, each person has some memory traces [Erinnerungsspuren] which are
only able to be understood [verstanden] with the entry onto the scene of proper
sexual sensations [ Eigenempfindungen], and each person must therefore carry in
himself the seed of hysteria. ( SE, 1:287).

This complement to the thesis of Naehtragliehkeit says both too much

and too little. At least three observations emerge. First, the puberty expla-
nation concerns only the appearance of “the sexual representation” or, what
amounts to the same thing, the capacity of “understanding,” verstehen (which
refers to the “anderes Verstandnis” of the shop assistant that Emma is suppos-
edly furnished with in puberty). One will conclude that puberty, through these
“proper sexual feelings,” does not bring another affectivity, and a fortiori, that
it does not give birth to affectivity but only alters the capacity to represent it.
But secondly, Freud contradicts himself. Some memory “traces” exist before
the adolescent is ever in a state of “reading” them as he claims, that is to say, in
the language of sexuality. Are these traces of representations (of Emma’s shop
assistant) produced in some other, prepubescent, language? Or are they even
the affects themselves? It seems that one must opt for this second interpreta-
tion. These traces are what must be read or presented; they do not derive from
preceding representations. The adolescent does not reinterpret childhood rep-
resentations. Rather, he interprets “sexually” what in childhood would have
been presented in another language ( “romantic,” for example). In this case,
these traces are affects. Puberty in no way creates them, as it creates only
another “reading” of an affect already there.

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Finally, in generalizing the cause of Emma’s amnesia (I no longer dare to

call it “affective”) by giving of an account of puberty’s delay, Freud only creates
a new obstacle. Puberty is a general event, Emma’s case is not singular, and
hysteria must be the most common thing in the world. This is an aporia lying
in wait for all art, including psychoanalytic art, when it wants to make itself
into a science: causal regularity crushes the singularity of a case. It would
require finding a difference specific to the hysteria of some unique type of
being (humanity) in which we all share and that is constituted by late puberty.
I will move on to what Freud proposes in order to characterize this differ-
ence. Not only does this characterization reiterate and thus aggravate the con-
tradiction Freud imposes on his thesis of initial apathy, but it returns us
directly to the question of time:

Experience teaches that to recognize in the hysterics of people that one knows for a
part that they are becoming sexually excitable [sexuell erregebar] in a premature
way [vorzeitig, before term, before the time of the arrival of sexuality] thanks to a
mechanical stimulation [Reizung, exactly: an irritation] or some feeling (masturba-
tion) and which one can only admit, for another part, that their disposition [Anlage]
consists in a premature sexual release [always the Sexualentbindung]. But starting
with premature sexual release or more intense [starkere] premature sexual release,
it is clear that this is equivalent. This “moment” [emphasis added] boils down to a
quantitative factor. ( SE, 1:287)

I emphasize “moment” here in order to indicate the word’s ambiguity. It indi-

cates not only a brief period of time, but a component in an ensemble of
forces. By “reducing” the moment to a quantitative factor, Freud eliminates, or
believes he has eliminated, the temporal connotation. In this way, the physical
metaphor appears to recapture the high ground in extremis. Eventually, Freud
himself invokes excitability or an “outburst” in his explanation of exceptional
hysterical susceptibility, the trait of the sexual Vorzeitigkeit. This erasure with-
out doubt derives from an insistence on the dynamic and economic metaphor,
which haunts Freud at this time. But it testifies also to a remarkable uncer-
tainty regarding what “sexuality” means in this text. Invoked in principle to
explain the late appearance of the trouble afflicting Emma at the evocation of
scene 2, and linked as such to puberty, the word “properly” designates genital-
ity. But it also extends to a time “before” genitality, so that it would be neces-
sary to grant the hysteric a sort of pregenital genitality.
The philosopher is not the one to decide whether this immaturity is due to
a “predisposition” or to a stimulation. But one can guess that the philosopher
comes back to this question when trying to remove the uncertainty, not in
order to teach the father of psychoanalysis (still young at the time, he had
already placed on the philosophical table the bread of a temporality that even
now we are not even close to digesting) a lesson, but so as to add precision to
his own intuition that the affect can and must be thought as a phrase, without
recourse to physical metaphor. Yet the obscurity of the 1895 text disappears
easily enough if one admits that genitality provides the occasion for a memory,
and that, far from creating the affect-phrase, is a modification (eine Veran-
derung) of a family of phrases. If the shopkeeper had fiddled with [geknijfen]
the little Emma through her dress, “to the genital parts [in die Genitalien],”

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this only implies that Emma’s affectivity was genitally immature. Most likely,
the man himself had felt a genital affect.
The question then of the hysterical aftershock, and of what probably reaches
far beyond this, is not the production of affect— absent beforehand— on the
occasion of a remembered mnemonic representation. Rather, it is a matter of
the late representation of a “pure” or ideal affect-phrase, whose singularity had
previously been located according to a time when genital organization, depend-
ent on that of “adult” articulated language, retroactively tried to assimilate it.
This way of posing the question of the Nachtraglichkeit only provides an
example of what Freud later elaborated concerning the subject of affectivity
and childhood “sexuality” in the Three Essays and in On Narcissism: An
Introduction. These texts provide an elaboration of the “sexual” that appears
to result from certain traits that make it possible to augment what I have said
regarding the “pure” phrase-affect.
What I have said has concerned primarily time and linking. What Freud
elaborated, even if in other terms, concerns the referentiality and polarization
of the addressor/addressee relation, both of which, I have said, constitute the
universe of a phrase if it is “articulated.” The childhood affect (or “sexual”)
phrase is noticeable in that it is neither referential nor addressed and is articu-
lated neither according to the axis of its object nor according to that of its
addressing.
In order to shorten this demonstration, I will combine these two negative
properties by supposing that “addressing” and “referentiality” generally oper-
ate together. One establishes the identity of what one speaks (the referent) in
order to have it admitted by the speaker; the other is required in order to
establish the identity of an interlocution’s referent (in its “objective” mean-
ing). But in terms of phrases, the latter is only possible if the entities (let us
say: the proper names) which respectively occupy the positions of addressor
( “I”) and addressee ( “you”) in a phrase Pn can change their position during a
phrase Pn+1. These are known features of philosophies of language and of the-
ories of communication. They comprise the elementary conditions for a dis-
course of cognitive finality, but require many other constraints; they apply also
to the title of sufficient conditions (in the hypothesis according to which you
and I speak the same language) for a sort of discourse adults find as common
as “discussion” or even “conversation.”
To simplify even further, I would say that the phrase is articulated insofar as
it distinguishes and distinctly places the three pronominal persons: the “first”
two on the axis of the “addressing,” the third on that of “referentiality.”
The hypothesis of a primary “narcissism” implies that affectivity is origi-
nally ignorant of the instance “I,” since this “narcissism” is, paradoxically, pre-
egoistic. Freud already anticipates this, by the way, in the Entwurf, when he
observes that, in order to avoid the disarray felt by the ego during a traumatic
memory, it is necessary that “during the first release of displeasure [der ersten
Unlustentbindung] the inhibition on the ego [die Ichhemmung] not be im-
paired, and that the process not unfold in the manner of a posthumous expe-
rience of a primary affect” (SE, 1:359). Which, adds Freud, is impossible
by hypothesis, since “the very first traumas escape the ego altogether” (SE,
1:359). In truth, there is no ego already there to deal with the first shock, be it

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pleasure or pain. If the shock is a “proton psendos, ” this is not because it has
sidestepped (at T 2 ) the defense of an inattentive “ego,” but because the “ego”
(at T o ), wrongly thinking it has been deceived, afterwards misinterprets its
own primal or precocious state. Since it is always simple “presence,” the affect
at T 0 is not “posthumous”; the ego hallucinates the affect as a thing (or a non-
thing) it believes to have buried.
Just as the instance of the “I” lacked the childhood phrase-affect, the second
person, that of the addressee, is foreign to it as well. What I suggest is that “pres-
ence”— which is this phrase (without signifying it)— is addressed to no one, nei-
ther as a question nor a reply. Here again I will content myself with a more or
less lateral example in which Freud comes to our aid. In discussing Rank’s
hypothesis of the traumatism of birth, Freud asserts that birth could not be the
first shock, as Rank maintained, unless on this occasion the newborn suffered a
loss of object (an argument discussable in itself). Yet the maternal womb (the
placental fold) is not an object for the infant. This objection extends to the
entire primary relation of an unweaned infant to the mother. This relation is
neither that of addressor to addressee, nor the reverse. What one loosely calls
the “body of the mother” is in no way a “you.” The “dual relation” Lacan
defined is not that of a duo.
To say that the body of the mother is grasped by the child as if it were its
own is of no help in accounting for the “nothing” of the addressing of the
childhood phrase-affect. Indeed, one can only speak of one’s own body insofar
as an “I” pretends to assure its ownership and conservation. It would again be
necessary to take up an exegesis of Fort-Da and of the Mirror under the head-
ing of the constitution of the “you” and the “I” in the childhood phrase-affect.
For the time being, I will only go so far as to say that the “pure” childhood
phrase-affect itself cannot involve a demand. It cannot question the affect or
the affect’s excitation, because it is the affect. A demand is an expectation of
linking. And yet, as an affect of Hilflosigkeit, be it of pleasure or pain, this
phrase does not spare a moment in linking itself to another phrase. Its sole
time is now. Returning to the store, little Emma (if I suppose her “childhood”
to be pure) did not ask for the excitation again. Let us say, after Freud, that
her affect repeats (itself). But, as a (supposedly) pure presence at each occa-
sion, the occasion is only an event which happens now, and this event is the
phrase-affect itself.
In saying this, I have already touched upon its initial lack of referentiality. We
understand that the affect “speaks of” nothing. Here I move from the situation
of the object, in the sense of an objectival relation (in effect, a demand placed on
you to respond to me), to its situation of referential objectivity and therefore
from its instantiation in the second person to its positioning in the third.
These passages are all of the greatest importance and merit a detailed anal-
ysis. Freud offers examples in several texts, particularly in the Vemeinung. He
formulates the result of these passages under the name “polymorphic perver-
sity.” This name, a typically adult metaphor, signifies how every “object” pro-
vides an opportunity for the pleasure or displeasure of childhood (“pure”)
phrase-affects. The object is ignored both as a referential objectivity and as an
objectality of addressing (of which egoism is only a special case).
As its name indicates, the turn that the occasion (the “fiddling about” of the

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storekeeper, for example) takes singularizes the case of the phrase-affect. The
seduction, in the current sense, the one Freud initially gives, is not necessary.
In chronological or phenomenological terms, a “constant” susceptibility or
excitability is necessary. Seduction is necessary only when it is necessary that
this excitability be excited.10

V. Untranslatable
By itself, the childhood phrase-affect brings no guarantee of personal identity
through time. As a stranger to physical or phenomenological diachrony, it rather
imposes upon the supposed identity a denial that is at least always possible. If it
belies the person, this is because the latter can be a lie in the face of the “pres-
ence” that is the phrase-affect. What is pseudos here is the articulation, which I
reduce, for convenience, to the triple instantiation of the pronominal persons,
when it applies itself to “presence.” The “excitation” is nothing but the affect,
and if it is disturbing, that is because it dissipates (to what degree it does not
matter) the triple disposition which is the guarantee of identity.
Insofar as the adult state minimally determines itself predominately
through an articulated phrase, and as articulation is indispensable to the link-
ing of this phrase to another, the (physical) time of succession and the
(phenomenological) temporality of the “ek-stases” past/present/future, which
together form what one could call adult time, are dependent upon pronominal
articulation (or its equivalent in other languages). This is why the phrase-affect
(or “excitation”) occurs only as lost time. This dead time can be named (by
anti-phrase?): reflection (in Kant’s sense); dream, amnesia, vague repetition
(situated in adult time, the affect re-presents [itself] because it represents
nothing); that intuitive night in which all cows are black; loss of control, of
finality; the deflection of desire and of understanding; relinquishment, aban-
donment, childish behavior.
These designations express the resistance of identity to the affect. The
affect necessarily inscribes itself in an order of its own as the event of an
expropriation. A case in point is the feeling of the beautiful or that of the sub-
lime, which, in my approach, necessitates a “before” and an “after,” or in any
case an “outside” of the articulated phrase.
Emma suffers from a lack of confidence in articulated language, attributed by
Freud to an “overload” of affect. The “lost times” happen “too” frequently in
Emma’s diachrony, up to the point where she must ask who she is. Personal
identity cannot constitute itself apart from the sole instance of the “I.” Descartes
involuntarily gave this its best proof: “this proposition: I am, I exist is necessar-
ily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it. . . . that is
certain. But how often? Just when I think; for it might possibly be the case if I
ceased entirely to think, that I should likewise cease altogether to exist.” 11
The ego cogito does not have the means to resist a pure interruption. Yet it
believes it can resist the “evil genius,” the proton pseudos par excellence:
“there is not then any doubt that I am if I am deceived.” Descartes introduces
evidence of another person in the same way. At first treacherous (the evil
genius), this person is transformed into a witness of pure good faith, namely
God, but always in the same place. In both cases, the ego makes itself either the

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partner of another I, as a “you,” or its referential object, its third person. The
hypothesis of the evil genius or the thesis of God presupposes the commutability
of these positions with respect to personal instantiation, since there the witness
is the speaker. One concludes that personal identity requires the synthesis of
three pronominal persons in a single entity.
Again, we are on the spinning wheel of linking. In a phrase Tn, this entity is
in the position of “I”; in Tn+1, that of “he or “she” ; in Tn+2, that of “you.” It is
necessary to prove that this is the same entity in the three phases. This is the
case with Emma. She says “I” (to Freud) while she is associating; she is
Freud’s addressee when he questions her or points something out to her; she is
also the shopkeeper’s partner when he seduced her; and she is in the position
of referent in the account Freud gives of the analysis.
A word on this point. It would be interesting to distinguish this purely objec-
tified third person— “she returns to the store”— from that of the improper third
person— “No, she did not return to the store”— which is used freely in the indi-
rect discourse of literature, where the “spoken” and the “speaking” are con-
densed into the same mark, be it the mark of referring or that of addressing. The
result, interestingly enough, concerns an infringement of the principle of articu-
lation. Certainly, this is somewhat confusing. Like the modesty of Flaubertian
“realism” staging the other Emma, it seems analogous to the occurrence of an
affect, oblivious to distinctions of the person. Literature, dedicated to writing
what cannot write itself, requires all kinds of infringements of this sort.
Henceforth, the faith that the psychoanalyst and, under another title, the phi-
losopher, accords to the literary text is legitimized.
The question of Emma’s identity through the scenes arises with particular
acuteness. Although identity is usually the synthesis of personal instances in
articulated phrases, this becomes complicated by the fact that Emma suffers
serious interruptions in the continuity of her adulthood. She “forgets herself”
in the phobic episodes. Freud records this “forgetting” under the rubric of
alteration. By attributing it to puberty, he once again encounters the question
of time— in this case, with respect to affective “prematurity.” What is gained in
pushing back toward the beginning of the story, in the name of Vorzeitigkeit,
the role of confusion affecting Emma’s identity?
Before attempting to demonstrate this difficulty’s complexity, I wish to re-
turn quickly to the simpler question of identity in the articulated phrase that
gathers an entity (now an addressor, now an addressee) under the same name.
In saying “under the same name,” one has said almost everything. Emma is
the same in all the instances of address and of reference presented by the
adult phrases that concern her, simply because she always and everywhere
names herself or is named “Emma.”
I will not develop this point here, as it leads into the theory of the proper
name as “rigid designator” which Kripke has proposed and which I have
repeated and revised in The Differend.12 The proper name, that of “Emma,”
has an identificatory value because it is placed in an identifiable way into a
system of names: of the calendar, of the geographical map, of measures (which,
as Kripke shows, are proper names) of time, of space, of weight, etc., systems
of relationship. Each of these systems form a world of names where the exclu-
sive localization of a name is always available because all the relations between
the names of this world are always the same. Emma is the name of an entity

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locatable through names of places, dates, pronouns, and names of family,

friends, even colors (eyes, hair), etc. In relating to this world, as implied in the
naming of Emma, those who discuss the meaning of an entity (valued then as
referent for their discussion)— i.e., those who discuss, as we do, what she,
Emma, is— are certain that they are actually speaking of the same entity. But
their agreement on the name given to the referent obviously does not guaran-
tee that they attribute the same signification to it.
One can even imagine that a rupture of signification, a strong “alteration” (to
recapture the word with which Freud designates the episode of puberty), could
require a change of name. The disturbance can disturb the name, as when
Abram became Abraham just after Yahweh addressed him. Was it necessary for
Emma to change her name after genitality addressed itself to her? As with many
traditions, a woman’s adoption of her husband’s name speaks in favor of this
hypothesis. However, the alteration at the age of puberty is not an event as was
the voice that addressed Abraham. If a trauma in Emma’s life must be compared
to the “shock” which hit Abraham, it could only be that of the assault in the
boutique. I do not confuse God with the shopkeeper. But I say that the Law
bursts into pagan affectivity with the same violence as sex (genitality) attacks
childhood affectivity.
The reason for this is simple. Like Abraham, the child Emma is affectable or
susceptible. But, no more than he, she is “addressable.” Yahweh demands
Abram listen to him, that is, to place himself in the position of the addressee of
his voice, in the position of a “you.” I do not want, and no doubt would be
unable, to pursue the parallel. But to me it seems to have been established that
what breaks into Emma’s affective phase at the time of scene 2 is that the
shopkeeper addressed himself to her as a “you [toi], a woman.” His gesture
“says” : listen to the difference of the sexes, i.e., to genitality. He places the
child all at once in the position of a “you” in an exchange she doesn’t under-
stand, as well as in the position of a woman in a sexual division which she also
doesn’t comprehend.
One will say that she was not ignorant of these matters when she was eight
years old. I admit this, although it is not essential to either the philosophical or
psychoanalytic idea I pursue. Under the name of the shopkeeper, I accredit all
“seductors” and “seductresses” (the mother included). For me, it is enough to
accept that the “stimulant” is always an affective phrase of the adult type, one
that conveys the articulation of a universe in persons and in sexed persons.
In short, one should not confuse “to be affected,” with affectedness, and “to
be addressed” with addressedness. A comparison derived from language, al-
though deceptive, can at least give a measure of this difference. One can imag-
ine that the child Emma speaks a given language (of pleasure and pain), and
that the shopkeeper addressed her in a strange language, one unknown to her
but of the same (affective) register. When we find ourselves in an analogous sit-
uation, as when a speaker addresses us in an unknown language, we do not
feel that what is said to us is absurd. Rather, we postulate that his phrases in
general are meaningful (since, as I have pointed out, the articulation of uni-
verses of phrases is a priori), but are devoid of sense for us because we do not
know how to translate them into our language in an articulated way and
respond with an appropriate linking. The speaker addresses us, but we are

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only affected by this “address” and not properly addressed. In this way, Emma
would be affected by the phrase given in the gesture of the shopkeeper despite
being unable to be “addressed” by him.
Here the pedagogical import of the comparison, if held erroneously to its
principle, ceases. To follow it further would suggest that the adult “language” of
pleasure (and of pain) is translatable into that of the child and that Emma’s fail-
ure to understand is, as with a foreign language, only a matter of learning or of
maturation (as is assumed, for example, in so-called “sexual education”). But
such is not the case. One cannot speak of a childhood affective “language,” since
the pure phrase-affect I invoked under the name of childhood is lacking the
articulations indispensable to all translation. Again, I considered only the most
elementary of these articulations, i.e., those of referentiality and the addressing.
Lacking instances supported by these, one cannot see how an phrase-affect
could be “translated” into an articulated phrase. Here, one can never find any-
thing other than equivalents which are too univocal (as what just happened with
my comparison).
In truth, the silent “presence” of the affect, a sigh, demands of articulated
language an endless series of stagings, novels, tragedies, epics, an accumulation
and linking of articulated phrases which are contradictory, undecidable, very
numerous, or, at least, very “fair.” In short, a “fortuitous” writing, one which
relieves adult language of the impossible task of getting even with the “nothing”
of childhood “affect.” Then again, the literary work (and the artistic work as
well, although with materials other than words and therefore under other con-
ditions) will not cease “rendering” this un-working which is “pure” affectivity. In
this, it is not without similarity to the psychoanalytic undertaking.
If one now turns to the assumed “adult” affect language, one finds it strangely
composite. The reason for this obfuscates rationalism: “we have been children
before being men.” But then, how separate is what apparently belongs to the
young from what belongs to grown-ups?
Sexuality, which I understand as an a priori partition between sexed “gen-
res,” undoubtedly makes the difference. Not that childhood affectivity knows
nothing of genitality, supposing that we may here speak of knowing. If I con-
tinue to imagine it to be pure, sexuality is not met here as the difference
between two sexes but as an occasion offered to the event of an phrase-affect.
The “polymorphic perversity” of childhood affectivity narrated by the adult is
by no means held to make even an exceptional case of the genital zone. If one
can distinguish the “stages” which would mark the evolution of this affectivity
by the successive selection of this or that erogenous zone, it is certainly
because the education that the adult imposes upon the child confronts the
child’s vague excitability, one by one, with each of them. Orality and anality,
without taking the rest into account, bear evidence that the disciplining of the
body prescribed by the adult supplies the errant affectivity of the child with an
abundance of occasions to be affected. In a vague sense, every educator is, in
principle, a seducer.
But not in the same sense as Emma’s shopkeeper, as he did not even go for
genitality. To introduce the difference of the sexes is to compel, needless to say
again, childhood affectivity to identify itself with one of the sexes, to refer to
the other as an entity, namely as an object, that it cannot embody, and to

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finally address itself to that object as its intended partner. Whether it succeeds
in assuming all this is another story. The installation of genitality (much more
than its biological maturation) keeps pace with the articulation of the phrase-
affect in a double polarity of referentiality (there is/there is not: a penis;
the binary determination of the object can undoubtedly carry with it another
property; only the “yes” or the “no” are important) and of the addressing
( “I” who does not have the penis, “you” who has it, and the one in order
fo r the other). Genitality would not give rise to a very specific “shock” if it
did not force affective childhood to assimilate, for better or worse, a set of
axioms that are initially incomprehensible to it (here is the place of Freud’s
“Verstandnis”). An object can be objectively distinguished in the position of
referent (thanks to the opposition of either having one, or not having one) for
the phrase-affect (from now on “adult”); “I” myself am likewise an object
determinable by another; the other can be in a relationship of interlocution
with me; and, finally, “it” must be for “me,” and “I” for “it,” the occasion— this
time exclusively, and, let us say, authorized by normal circumstances— for the
“production” of phrase-affects, which are from then on considered as “effects.”
In the shopkeeper’s gesture towards Emma, all of this is “said.” And to this,
Emma as a pure affectivity could neither listen nor respond. The shopkeeper-
affect is addressed to Emma and referenced to her as we have just described, but
the Emma-affectivity is aware of neither the addressing nor the reference. The
shock which results from what can very well be called a differend henceforth
remains at a standstill in Emma’s affectivity as an affect without representation.
The shopkeeper, more hardened in articulation, possessed what is required to
place the memory of the assault within a network of representations. His ges-
ture— weakness or perversion— testifies that the adult, just as with the child,
remains at the mercy of an unexpected occasion of “excitation.”
The “phraseology” just read does not bring the psychoanalyst anything
that he does not already know or that he can use. Its interest, if it has one, is
philosophical. The “pure” affectivity that I have invoked is the nonphysical
name of excitability. This is what is presupposed in the Freudian thesis of the
Urverdrangung. Anthropologically speaking, it is bound up with childhood.
Transcendentally (in the Kantian sense), it is nothing other than the faculty of
pleasure and pain, “pure” because it is derived from no other faculty.
In the “phrasistics” where I venture, it signals a susceptibility more
“archaic” than all articulation and irreducible to it. “Presence,” the pure auton-
omy of the affect, does not translate itself in either presentation or representa-
tion. Between this affectivity and its articulation, the differend is ineluctable.
One would be unable to absorb it in a dispute ( “Gome on, let’s be reason-
able . . .”), and neither would one know how to escape it. On the contrary, the
articulated adult phrase is always on the verge of awakening (exciter) suscepti-
bility. This awakening creates a stasis in the course of articulations, one that
reveals, in turn, an unpresentable “presence.” What excites is excited, the
hunter hunted.
In the perspective outlined here, the difference between the sexes is only
shocking, it only strikes a blow, in a sense secondary to the differend between
childhood and adult affect. The classical thesis is that the difference is consti-
tutive of adult affective disorders. Of course, sexual difference carries an
intrinsic aporia insofar as it is articulated as an adult phrase. The feminine is

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an object completely other than the masculine, and vice versa. And yet their
alterity is supposed to give direction to their affective addressing. Their respec-
tive objectivity is supposed to command their reciprocal objectality. From
what I have put forth, this aporia does not reside in the contradiction of alter-
ity dedicated to complementarity. Rather, it resides in the untranslatability of
childhood susceptibility into adult articulation. As for the rest, the difference
of the sexes can transcend itself only insofar as one or the other of the two
parties, or both, have recourse to this undifferentiated susceptibility. Adults
can accept their children, after all, only in love.

English translation by Michael Sanders

(with Richard Brons and Norah Martin)

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