“We’ve learned to conceive that the ‘signifier’ just stands in a shift comparable to that of the bright advertisements or of the memories of our rotary-machines-to-think-like-men, and this due to its alternating operation which is its very principle, demanding that it leaves its place to return circularly to it. That is exactly what happens in the repeater automatism.”[1]

“The details of the process by which removal changes a possibility of pleasure into a source of displeasure have not yet well understood, or in any case they cannot yet be clearly illustrated; but it is sure that every neurotic displeasure has this very nature : it is a pleasure which cannot be felt as such.”[2]

No automatism rules the principle of pleasure – to which also the displeasure up to pain conforms - remaining law, i.e. right and individual competence, which doesn’t await authorization.[3]

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – August 14, 2023

[1] ‘Il seminario su La lettera rubata’, in ‘Jacques Lacan. Scritti’, at care and translated by Giacomo B. Contri  - Vol. I Giulio Einaudi editore Spa (1974 e 2002) pg.24/  Original title: ‘Écrits’, Jacques Lacan – Éditions du Seuil, Paris (1966).

[2] ‘Al di là del principio di piacere’, S. Freud (1920) in OSF Bollati Boringhieri (2020) Vol. 9, pg.197

[3] “The freedom of active thinking, and taking cares of the law of one’s body (‘cogitans legem corporis’) is not contradicted by being preceded by the fact that the first law of motion of the body has already happened before our thinking thinks it. It is the law of motion for satisfaction by means of the relationship of the subject with the other ( ‘drive’ is a tentative name of this law). The occurrence of this law makes itself memory before any intervention of our thinking when making law (I) and of our conscience too. So it is introduced a first distinction between ‘I’ and ‘conscience’)”, cited from : ‘Il pensiero di natura. Dalla psicoanalisi al pensiero giuridico’, Giacomo B. Contri SIC Edizioni (1998), pg.107 in ‘Legge, pensiero’.