Jacques Lacan: Seminaire XXXXIII: La intériorité

Ladies and gentlemen, we are here today to discuss interiority. Not interiority, as such, but interiority - as such, as it were. Now what is meant by interiority? Nothing but if not precisely what it appears to sound like: that is, the structural amplitude and recursive connotation of any given phenomenal occurrence, corporeal or otherwise. Now take, for example, the Borromean structure of this crepe I was eating yesterday: does it not allow us to glean a certain impulse, a certain tête-à-tête glimpse, if you will, into the truly manipulative Otherness of the interiority of desire? For desire is - as you well know - not certainly a drive to the core, to the kernel, in a manner of speaking, but rather, and it is not without hesitation that I am saying this, the opposite - that is, a drive from the core. It begins in interiority, and can only emerge, as it were, after a certain exteriority has penetrated, as it were, in our little homellete. From whence the lamella, as it were, emerges, and from which we can at once extrapolate toward the structure of interiority itself: we see that it is at once not only the given interior of any given structure, but also not the Otherness of our little man here. For it is man, if you will remember, that betrays the given gap, or inachèvement, that is at once present in any given structural formation. It is man himself that betrays all this to us, and more: is it not man, as well, who represents this gap, this incompletitude, if you will, as it were - if you will, himself? That is, not an observer of the gap, not a watcher, he does not "mind the gap", as it were, does not represent the gap, but at once is the gap. And that brings us back to interiority - and ladies and gentlemen, I'd prefer to leave the rest to you at this point, for have I not said enough?