NFF Spring/Fall 1992, Volume 6, Numbers 1 & 2

Jacques-Alain Miller
Duty and the Drives
Do we ever speak the same "tongue"? We may well construct something we call the structure of
language as valid for every spoken tongue. But language is not a tongue. Language is the univer-
sal structure of tongues. There is no universal tongue. Why are there many tongues spoken by
man, and not one? We may dream of a single tongue for the human species, and as a matter of
fact it has been dreamt of many times; but precisely as a lost tongue. One might wonder if sci-
ence is a universal tongue. It is universal all right, but is it a tongue? What tongue would it be?
We could answer: mathematics. But mathematics is not a tongue. Its core is written language.
We are generally born native speakers of the same maternal tongue. I say generally, because
some of us will never speak it or any other tongue--some of us who are autistic, for instance. But
even those of us who are native speakers of the same tongue: do we speak the same tongue?
Obviously the analyst speaks the same tongue as the analysand (or the analysand speaks
the same tongue as the analyst). If someone speaks only Spanish, and you don't, there will never
be a psychoanalytic relationship between the two of you. So only two persons who speak the
same tongue can be analyst and analysand. But do they speak the same tongue? As a matter of
fact, the analytic attitude is just this: never, never suppose you speak the same tongue as your
analysand. Never suppose you know what he means when he says anything: that is, the analyst
must suspend the common sense of the tongue. And I believe it's clear that there is no common
sense in psychoanalysis. There is only particular, peculiar sense. Besides common sense, both
analyst and analysand aim at the most particular sense valid for this subject, and not for any
other. You really don't know what the analysand means when he speaks. But he came to analysis
precisely because he himself

suspected he didn't know what he meant when he spoke. And that is why he offered himself up
to interpretation.
Some people use Lacan to say that the analysand speaks in reference to a subject-sup-
posed-to-know what it all means. As an analyst you know nothing about the particular tongue of
your analysand. You know nothing more than this: that what he means is what he enjoys. Per-
haps I can introduce the notion of the fundamental fantasy here. Why fundamental? Because the
word fantasy refers primarily to conscious fantasies which are numerous. That is, the word fant-
asy refers primarily to daydreaming, to the daydreams a subject entertains and thus enjoys. From
there we can go on to the idea of supposedly unconscious fantasies. These, as a matter of fact,
are nothing more than our own constructions. And from there we go to the structure of all the
fantasies of a given subject. That is what we call the fundamental fantasy.
Perhaps we could give this definition of the fundamental fantasy: It is the structure from
which everything makes sense for a particular subject. This universality of his fantasy is, as a
rule, unknown to him precisely because the subject is inside it. Thus, to perceive one's funda-
mental fantasy, one must have a]ready gained a measure of separation from it. That is, one has to
disassociate from the fundamental fantasy in order to distance oneself from it. When the struc-
ture of the fantasy manifests itself with some clarity, in some nakedness, we may suspect that the
subject has already gone through it. That is, for example, what Lacan says about Sade; that Sade
was not fooled by his fantasy. He was not duped by it.
 NFF Spring/Fall 1992, Volume 6, Numbers 1 & 2

I believe the concept of the fundamental fantasy may be difficult to understand for aca-
demics insofar as you are taught--and you practice--the relativity of meaning. You know that the
experience or sense of any signifier [S1], of any expression, any word, any piece of discourse,
6 S2] We
depends on another one. This sense is retroactively determined by the other one [the
usually write this in Lacanian terms, with the small s that stands for the signified: 1 ‰ Ö2 .
According to the S2 you choose, the small s of the signified undergoes a variation such that the
ultimate meaning of the signified appears to be this: that there is no ultimate meaning. And by
following the sequence, by displacing the S2, you will always obtain a different sense. So interp-
retation continues.
From the analytic point of view, as distinct from the academic one, the meanings which
appear progressively for a particular subject seem to be determined according to an invariable
rule: i.e., S2 is not displaceable, not arbitrary. In some ways, the non-

displaceable character of S2 is what defines the unconscious as dependent on a primary repres-

sion. If the fundamental S2 is not displaceable in analysis, that is because it is considered as in-
variably and definitely impressed. It is the primary repressed. The S2 is the consequence of pri-
mary repression. That is, alongside the relative meanings--clues that appear and disappear and
which even the subject does not have the logic to remember--absolute meaning exists. This abso-

Let us write this absolute meaning like this: Õ ‰ (Í). Every subject, in spite of all the
lute meaning is precisely what we refer to when we speak of the fundamental fantasy.

experience he may engage in displacing the second signifier--even the deconstructionist--is

subject to an absolute meaning. So the view you get from within the analytic experience is that
the fundamental fantasy is a prison for everyone, an invisible prison if you will. And you see
that, in fact, no one will ever speak the same tongue as anyone else. Perhaps you will speak this
tongue with your analyst because you will learn the tongue you are speaking during your anal-
ysis. And you will make your analyst learn your tongue as well. But when he has learned it, and
thus when you have learned it yourself, the paradoxical result is that you don't stay with him in
order to enjoy that understanding. On the contrary, when it is done, when you have learned your
unconscious tongue, you quit. You leave with the newly acquired knowledge along with you.
You leave the only other person who has, perhaps, understood the tongue you are speaking.
Here we can introduce the problem of politics for psychoanalysis. Just a few minutes ago,
I said a word concerning science. Science is the dream of a tongue that everyone could share,
i.e., everyone who has desisted from his own fantasy. Lacan could say that the creators of mod-
ern science in the seventeenth century, the century of the application of mathematics to physical
reality, were all of them, in their own way, analysands. Their endeavor was to go through their
fantasy, and divest themselves from the fetters of the fundamental fantasy. The problem of pol-
itics for psychoanalysis is this: considering that everyone speaks his own tongue, responds to his
own fundamental fantasy, how can the many be made to move as one? That is a political prob-
lem, and it is also a logical problem at the same time. How can the many be made to move as
one: that is, to speak as one, to hope as one, to feel as one, to respond as one, to act as one? How
can a multitude of individual subjects, in the solitary confinement of each one in his fundamental
fantasy, be taken as one, i.e., "massified"? That is precisely the problem tackled by
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 NFF Spring/Fall 1992, Volume 6, Numbers 1 & 2

Freud in his essay on "Massenpsychologie und Ichanalyse" (Group Psychology and the Analysis
of the Ego).1
Why would we share the political stand of Freud? Freud is very far from us. Why would
we share the hopes and prejudices of an Austrian Jewish bourgeois who was in favor of the Cen-
tral Empire during World War I? But at the same time, he gave the psychoanalytic formula of the
massification of the subject, and he gave it just before totalitarian movements engulfed the whole
of Europe. In a sense politics is ethics, insofar as the political question concerns the ultimate val-
ues of human activity. But politics is distinct from ethics, in that it presents us with the strange
fact of values and emotions and acts shared in common by the many. What is specific to the poli-
tical question, from the analytic point of view, in contradistinction from ethics, is the collective
dimension: the very existence of the social bond of the individual.
How does a psychoanalyst have anything to say on these topics? It is a question you are
obliged to ask yourself. You must ask yourself if it's not an abuse to speak of politics from the
analytic point of view, because it is a highly individual act to enter analysis. We might say that
the subject requesting an analysis is already demassified. Evidence of this is found in the fact
that totalitarian régimes forbid the practice of psychoanalysis, as was the case under Stalin. The
psychoanalytic relationship appears to function as a limit for totalitarian power. It is not an acci-
dent that, in Moscow and Leningrad, 300 people came recently to hear some of my colleagues
speak about Lacan and psychoanalysis.
I spoke of the subject as residing in the cell of his fundamental fantasy But the subject
undergoing analysis is not a solitary wanderer. He is not the solitary bachelor described by
Rousseau in the first part of his "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men." An analy-
sand is not a solitary wanderer, and that makes it difficult to undergo analysis when you are an
American academic who has not yet been awarded tenure, because to undergo analysis you have
to remain in the same place.
The analysand, then, is linked to another, to the analyst. We might say that we already
have a social bond in analysis, what we could call the minimum social bond. Freud's groundwork
was to show that the analytic relationship gives the nucleus of the social bond. And that is why
he gives authorization to our thought regarding the political sphere. What, then, is Freud's answer
to the question of the massification of the subject (i.e., how the subject gets into the group or the
mass)? Freud's answer is his theory of

identification that he bases on the analysis of being in love, i. e., on analytic transference. But
how does he describe this being in love? Not only in one way, but in two: being in love is a state
of dependence on another. Thus, Freud structures the love relationship as a relationship of
power, of mastery.
Freud's depiction of the love relationship as a relationship of power is not quite the same
as when he describes love as narcissism. Certainly, it is tempting to describe love only as narcis-
sism. It is a way of explaining how one can grow to feel the same as another. And this is the fun-
damental problem of politics: how, in spite of the difference of each person's fundamental fant-
asy, can one grow to feel the same as another ("all American," or "all Frenchmen")? If you struc-
ture the political field from that, you could say that the sociopolitical field is structured according
to the mirror stage, which is fundamentally recognizing the other as being the same as oneself.
Thus the political sphere would be composed of ego1 = ego2, etc. At the imaginary level, where
 NFF Spring/Fall 1992, Volume 6, Numbers 1 & 2

love is narcissism, you could say that the social bond is built on loving oneself in the other. We
might state this in the terms of libido theory: that would be the definition of the political field at
the stage of narcissism. That is, we suppose a fixed, unknown quantity of something distributed
between ego and object. And we define narcissism as occurring when this unknown quantity--the
libido--is condensed on the side of the ego. Thus, we have to suppose that if there is a bond be-
tween ego and object, this is because the object is taken to be the same as the ego This, then,
would define the political field at the level of imaginary identification, a definition grounded on
the fundamental Freudian thesis that love is narcissism.
But "being in love" implies something else for Freud. It implies a libidinal investment in
objects, that runs contrary to the notion of narcissism, where the libidinal investment is in the
ego. It supposes, on the contrary, a libidinal investment in the object that is detrimental to the
libidinal investment in the ego. This is a very surprising, but very precise and frequent descrip-
tion that Freud gives of being in love, wherein love is an impoverishment of the libidinal invest-
ment in one's own ego. The ego that is in love feels criticized by its object, wants to be approved
by its object, and remains in a state of abject submission to this object. He can love himself only
insofar as he is loved by this object. This is a way of saying that in the case of love, the object
occupies the place of the ideal.

On the basis of this analysis, and given the two different versions of love, Lacan is
justified in distinguishing the object-as-the-same from the object-as-something-Other, which we
can write with a capital letter. Between the version of love as narcissism, and love as abject sub-
mission to the object, we clearly have two different aspects of the object: one where it is recip-
rocal to the ego, and another where the object is much more important. Insofar as the object of
being in love has the function of guaranteeing the very identity of the ego--that is, it operates a
superior function upon him, giving the criteria of the true and the false behind what is good and
the true for the ego--Lacan has simplified Freud's analysis by giving a symbolic function to the
ideal, as opposed to its imaginary function. We can write that this way: : a capital O, with a
capital I for the ideal, with e underneath. The ego which may be ideal for itself approves and
loves the ego ideal.
And from this very simple structure, Freud deduces that many egos can introject the same
ideal, so that the whole series of these egos can feel equal and the same. The question is, what
exactly do they introject when we say they have the same ideal? Because he makes a symbolic
function of this ideal, Lacan has only one answer: fundamentally, they introject the same signi-
fier, a master signifier. The master signifier is in the place of the ideal, functioning as a common
denominator:

S1
I

ego ego ideal ego

You will discern two directions of identification here: a horizontal one, the reciprocal identifi-
cation of the same, and a vertical one, the identification with the Other. Freud clearly favors the
 NFF Spring/Fall 1992, Volume 6, Numbers 1 & 2

importance of the vertical identification. There is a striking passage in Civilization and its Dis-
contents where Freud refers explicitly to the mixing of these two forms of identification in the
formation of groups. He speaks of the danger of the psychological polity as being most threat-
ening "where the bonds of a society are deeply constituted by the identifications of its members
with one another [this is the horizontal identification], while individuals of the leader type do not
acquire the importance that should fall to them in the formation of the group. The present cult-
ural state of America would give us a good opportunity for studying the damage to civilization
which is

10

thus to be feared. But I shall avoid the temptation of entering upon a critique of American civili-
zation."2
I quote this not only because we are here in America. The question is why did Freud
write this? Why was he in favor of the importance of vertical identification--i. e. of identification
grounded in the category of an Other--rather than identification grounded in the category of the
same? Clearly he was speaking of himself. And we must remember that Freud very much reg-
retted having failed to make his American pupils accept as analysts those who were not medical
doctors. So when he says that leaders are not accorded their place in the formation of the group
in America, he was clearly thinking of himself and of his difficulty with the American psycho-
analytic community. But there was something more than this to his anecdote. He was thinking of
groups where sameness expelled Otherness, and with a very precise consequence: the pressure to
conform, the conformist terror, all the same.
What is the great Other(ness)? The great Otherness is the Other sex. Freud saw that him-
self when he spoke of woman in "The Taboo of Virginity"; that woman is the Other sex not only
in the sense that she is an other sex than the masculine, but in the very sense that she is Other.3
And, as a matter of fact, there has been (and still is) a political problem regarding the existence
of women. The political integration of women has been problematic because everyone--men and
women alike--are unsure of whether women belong to the order of the same, or not. If we con-
sider communication and love as the makers of groups we encounter a parallel: perfect love is
the perfect bond between humans. And Freud insisted on this: that "woman's work" for civili-
zation promoted love. But at the same time--and he was a bit prejudiced, of course--Freud situ-
ates women as enemies of civilization. Insofar as women are promoters of sexual life, love and
family, they appeared to Freud as never really civilized, as fundamentally untamed.
"Women represent the interests of the family and sexual life. The work of civilization has
become increasingly the business of men. It confronts them with ever more difficult tasks and
compels them to carry out instinctual sublimation of which women are the center. Since the man
does not have unlimited quantities of psychical energy at his disposal, he has to accomplish his
task by making an expedient distribution of his libido."4 But besides Freud's prejudice, what he is
saying is: I'm not unaware of the fundamental homosexual bond of society--society as a society
of men. The order of the same is a camp of men. We could say that man is the same as

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 NFF Spring/Fall 1992, Volume 6, Numbers 1 & 2

woman is the Other. I would say that the paradox of feminism as a political movement is
grounded here. Perhaps the last of the feminists we are going to see will be men, men identifying
themselves as and with women.
If we admit the idea of the order of the same, we can understand that the social bond is
under the spell of the phallus; that is, the social bond as the order of the same is under the spell of
the phallus. Put another way, all those equal egos are basically subject to castration. And so the
Other can only be equated with not being subject to castration. If we write the formula for being
subjected to castration like this-- -dd --that is, with the phallic function, we are obliged to write
the formula for vertical identification like this: ex. We are obliged to write the ideal point as not
being subjected to castration. And the group, the order of the same, would be here: Žx, fx, ’x,
ex. Everyone is subjected to castration. And there is at least one who is not subjected to cast-
ration. The position of exception is occupied, for instance, by the father: better dead, even mur-
dered, as long as he remains uncastratable. And the signifier for Woman may occupy the place of
the father--exception to the rule of castration--because she is as uncastrated as he is.
That is why Lacan says that, logically, Woman is one of the Names-of-the-Father. You
can get an image of what this means if you think of the spell cast on the English people by their
great Queen. You know the French version of this phenomenon: killing the king. But, in spite of
this particular verification of the uncastrated father, the French cannot manage to recover the
meaning of the origin of the very society they inhabit, in this year of the bicentennial of the
French Revolution [1989]. I could also give an image of this phenomenon in terms of courtly
love where the place of the ideal is occupied by the untouchable woman. I could give another
illustration of it by referring to Freud as himself playing the part of the dead father for the ana-
lytical movement, thereby sustaining the International Psychoanalytic Association. And that is
why Lacan returned to Freud, a return which is actually equivalent to the death and burial of
Freud. He returned in order to see how to play the role of ghost to the psychoanalytic movement.
This idea would open the chapter of psychoanalysis in politics, because whatever freedom is
given to society, the motto remains: "Do not touch the mother." And even Sade stopped there,
according to Lacan. Sade remained governed by the fear of Otherness. In spite of Sade's preach-
ing that one should enjoy any part of the body, normal ways of making love seem underprivi-
leged to him. And in

12

this sense Sade remained under the Name-of-the Father, in spite of his apparent radical subver-
sion.
Let us summarize. We depicted identification as imaginary, i.e., the order of the same.
We also looked at identification as symbolic: the vertical dependence on the ideal, with cast-
ration being the secret of the ideal. Insofar as the ideal escapes castration, we see why sameness
is grounded in castration. Now perhaps we are ready to say something about identification on the
level of the real. Castration seems to imply that the ideal says no to sexual enjoyment, says what
you shall do and what you shall not do. All the shalls and shall nots can be summed up as: "You
shall not really enjoy yourself". That's what is meant by: "Respect your mother and father". If
you give an Oedipal meaning to this law, it means that you shall not copulate with the true and
primary object of your desire. That is what leads Lacan to consider law and desire as two aspects
of the same. That is, law is the inverse of desire, and vice versa, in that law and desire are the
 NFF Spring/Fall 1992, Volume 6, Numbers 1 & 2

same. I don't want to expand on that now, but to translate it at the level of the real. That is why I
speak of duty and the drives. What we call duty--moral duty--is connected to the drives, to libid-
inal enjoyment. And it is because we believe in the nullification of this libidinal enjoyment that
we think pure duty exists.
In fact, there is no nullification of the libido. Castration does not mean nullification of the
libido, which it is impossible to nullify. And if for the sake of civilization, for the making of
groups, there is a sacrifice of the libido, we may ask the question Freud asks concerning every
political regime: where does the surplus value go if the libido is sacrificed? Does the dead father
not want anything? He wants you to sacrifice your jouissance, your libido. Since he enjoyed the
mother as an Oedipal father, and enjoyed all women as the father in Totem and Taboo, could we
not suspect that the very place where duty is enunciated is the same place where jouissance is
accumulated? This theme of jouissance being dropped justifies all social protest against the
deprivation of jouissance. Apparently, jouissance is nullified. But in reality it is concentrated in
what you call ideals. And you can write it like this: . And this is not the ideal of the ego.
Rather, it could be the formula of the superego which requires the renunciation of jouissance that
Freud named Triebverzicht. And that, precisely, is the renunciation of the drives. But I would say
that jouissance is not lost for everyone. Jouissance accumulates in the very place from which the
sacrifice is required. That is why the stricter the voice of duty, the greater the corruption.

13

Freud says this explicitly. The authority of duty derives from the libidinal energy of the
drive, and it is the same thing. That is also what Lacan decided to dramatize in "Kant with Sade."
In his text "The Economic Problem of Masochism," Freud himself refers to Kant and Sade.5 He
says of Kant the same thing he says of the superego. that "Kant's categorical imperative is . . . the
direct heir of the Oedipus complex" (167). That is a quotation. But it is common that this parody
of moral duty is, at the same time, sadism. And Freud speaks explicitly of the sadism of the sup-
erego. So when Lacan speaks of Kant with Sade, he is only dramatizing the economic problem of
masochism, i.e., that the superego is never satisfied. Why does the superego always ask for
more?
It does so because it feeds on the libido sacrificed to the dead father retained as the mon-
arch. That is what is veiled by love in the Christian ethic. Christianity veils the fact that the real
God, the God to whom you sacrifice your enjoyment, may be evil. If Christianity depicts a God
who calls himself love, it is in order not to consider what Lacan calls the jouissance of God: that
perhaps God requires your sacrifice, enjoys your sacrifice, with all the sadistic overtones here.
So Christianity is not the way of the law for the law, which Freud called discontent in Civili-
zation and Its Discontents. It is the law for the libido. That is why Lacan said that the myth of
Abraham has not yet revealed its secret, its secret being that God ordered the subject to sacrifice
the most precious of what he had (Isaac). You prefer to believe that the Other wills your good,
when the Other is animated by a will to enjoy at your expense.
Now I wanted to develop (I won't do it) exactly what the dynamics of the superego are in
Freud. And I wanted to say how the symptom takes the place, quoting Freud, of the "satisfaction
of the drive," a satisfaction which has not occurred. As a matter of fact, the interdiction itself can
take on the meaning of a satisfaction. I shall end by considering the clinical and political impli-
cations of what I have just said. The clinical implication is that you have to refer yourself, not
only to what the Other desires to mean, to signify, but you also have to refer to the Other's will to
 NFF Spring/Fall 1992, Volume 6, Numbers 1 & 2

enjoy. The Other's will to enjoy is clear in neurotics, in this particular énoncé: the neurotic ima-
gines that the Other asks for his castration. That is the version the neurotic gives of his or her
volonté de jouissance, of his or her will to enjoy. And the neurotic refuses to sacrifice his symp-
tomatic jouissance, because he fears the Other would enjoy it. In psychosis, the Other clearly
wants to enjoy the subject's mind and body, not at the symbolic level, but really. One sees this in
the

14

Schreber case where God clearly makes him into the Woman. Psychosis always has at its core a
"womanization" of the subject. In perversion, as Sade's case shows, it is the Other who does not
know how to enjoy. And the subject devotes himself to making the Other enjoy. He makes him-
self an instrument of his jouissance, thus denying his own quality as subject.
Now the political consequences which I will try to show you are these. First, you always
have the right to rebel. You always have good reason to rebel, but you also have to know that no
rebellion will ever make the superego disappear. In fact, revolution translates into a reinforce-
ment of its demands. Second, you have to know that the superego is the name we give to what,
according to Freudian logic, makes you renounce your desire. And it repays you with a height-
ened sense of guilt, and not of innocence. That is what Lacan translates when he says in The
Ethics of Psychoanalysis that the only thing of which one is guilty, in the light of psychoanalysis,
is to have renounced desire.6 This is an exact translation of the Freudian thesis in Civilization
and Its Discontents. The third and last consequence that I will mention now is this truth: that
jouissance has already been renounced. The truth is that you could not experience it anyway, but
what is up to you is this: do not abdicate the poor remainder you have not discarded. Do not
abdicate this poor remainder to the Other. That is, never allow anyone else to occupy this place
for you.
Text established by
Mark Bracher,
John Holland
and Ellie Ragland

Notes
1. Sigmund Freud, "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921)," SE 18: 67-
143.
2. Sigmund Freud, "Civilization and its Discontents (1930 [1929])," SE 21: 59-145:116.
3. Sigmund Freud, "The Taboo of Virginity (Psycho1ogy of Love, III) (1918 [1917])," SE
11:193-208.
4. Sigmund Freud, "Civilization and its Discontents," 103.
5. Sigmund Freud, "The Economic Problem of Masochism (1924)," SE 19:157-170.
6. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis
(1959-1960), text established by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Dennis Porter (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1992).

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