FROM The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 12 -- Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis

http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/THE-SEMINAR-OF-
JACQUES-LACAN-Updated-4-Feb-20112.pdf

Note that there are portions of the seminar in which Lacan calls on other people to speak. The
following is Octave Mannoni, who is most famous for the formulation of disavowal: “I know
very well. . . but just the same.” I have only included the relevant long passage on names below.:

. . .I will therefore abstain, at least until my conclusion, when I will come back to the question, I
will then abstain with the certain hope that this problem is going to be taken up again, it has
already happened, moreover, in a less succinct manner and I am going to take a path that is quite
different by turning very freely, too freely around the question of the proper name, a little bit at
random with the idea of (18) encountering one or other remark which very indirectly may refer
to what Leclaire presented to us.

I believe we have nothing to expect from sociology or from ethnology, except occasionally some
convenient examples. The proper name, as it interests us is just as much Toto as Gaetan de
Romorantin, what in our society is called the surname, it is not the name of the father, the father
of Jean Dupont is not called Dupont he is called, for example, Paul Dupont, and there are
countries like Madagascar, where at the birth of Lacoute, his father can change his name and call
himself in future the father of Lacoute. It is then “father of Lacoute” which is the name of the
father in the most simple fashion.
This systematic use of a name and a first name is a limited, recent, historical accident and I do
not believe its study would lead us towards anything that is very interesting for us.
On what Leclaire has called the irreducibility of the proper name, I could contribute, perhaps, a
sort of indirect illumination by telling of a personal experience which has the advantage of being
entirely artificial and almost axiomatic.

(19) It is an experience that many people have had but not perhaps on such clear basis. For the
characters of a book that I was writing and which appeared in 1951, I had to invent proper
names. A proper name being only a succession of phonemes one could take a succession of
syllables in any sense whatsoever. This book was written in 1949 at a time when the Lacanian
theory of the signifier was not yet formulated.

The majority of the names in the book were constructed in that way. But not all because some of
them came to me as it were spontaneously. For the others, I have completely forgotten today the
unimportant sentences from which I drew them. This happened, it seems to me rather quickly,
and perhaps there were more complications hidden in it than I was aware of, but about that I can
say nothing.

But for one of these proper names, I remember very well the details of its construction. I took it
from what I believe to be a line in this song about Marlborough, though in fact it is an inexact
quotation. But for the use I wanted to make of it that was of no importance. And I had already
used sentences that were probably more fanciful. This incorrect line is : “ensuite venait son
page”. One could take for example te venait and by adding th to it that gives a very pretty proper
name. So pretty even that that makes one want to look up telephone (20) directories. Now
between the Thévenins and the Thévenots one finds in it for Paris alone, 38 Thévenaits. Having
discovered that, I had the impression that I was competing too much with the registry office, or
rather that the registry office was competing too much with me and I immediately gave up this
construction. I therefore took the following syllables which gave venaison. Venaison is also a
pretty name and if one looks in the telephone directory there is no trace of a Venaison. Not even
of a name which resembles it in the slightest way. It was therefore perfect. The name of
Venaison was thus adopted.
I will not question myself about the reasons which escape me for which I choose Marlborough. I
see clearly that Venaison is the only character whose death I spoke about and the only one of
whom I could say in all strictness that he had a page. But in fact it is now that I notice it.
Moreover I would have completely forgotten all of that by now if a few months later I had not
gone through a little crisis which I am going to tell you about now. The manuscript was finished
and I was going to take it to the publisher when I became suddenly aware of the existence of a
critic whose intelligence and humour I was very fond of and who signed some of his articles with
a non-de-plume which was terribly like Venaison.

Since this pseudonym is very well known and because I am saying too much to hope to hide
it now, I may as well say what the pseudonym is, it is in fact Gabriel Venaissin. When I made
this discovery I was terrified; it seemed to me that if I had called my character Dubois, all the
Dubois in the world would have nothing to say about it. But the close encounter of two names
that are more than rare, singular, not in the directories, this appeared to me to be impossible to
accept. The name Venaisson had to be changed.

I set about doing it using the same method and I remember nothing, naturally, about the
numerous substitute names that I constructed. But, and this is the obscure fact that I can only
note, I could not change the name of Venaisson. It seemed to me that he was called Venaisson
and that I, for my part, could do nothing about it and that I was not involved in it. He defended
his name like Sosie before Mercury. I knew well that it was I who had given him the name but
he answered me to say, as it were, like Sosie that he always had it. I was obliged to leave it to
him.
Since this experience has taken on the form of an anecdote I will add that Gabriel Venaissin
published an extremely laudatory critique of my book but he did not sign it Venaissin. He signed
it with his real name. At the time I was not surprised. (22) Venaissin was a pseudonym, an alias,
which could not hold up before Venaisson because, in a way, Venaisson was the real name of my
character. It is a funny story. I believe it to be instructive even though I cannot see very clearly
what it is trying to instruct us about.

The name Venaisson has obviously no meaning by itself. Has it a signified? Undoubtedly, but
on an identity card there is a photograph, fingerprints, and a description or the signature of the
bearer which is just as physiognomical in its fashion, if not, the identity card would be a visiting
card.

It also requires, and this is not negligible, a police stamp. Venaisson had nothing of all of that. I
had constructed the simplest elements of a personality, a sequence of phonemes which were not
sufficient of themselves and what was said about an imaginary person with this sequence of
phonemes, was attributed by me. The fact is that this extremely simple construction was enough
to make there appear in subjectivity, in this case, obviously in mine, a not to be neglected form
of the powerful adherence of these elements if one wants something which resembles the
irreducibility of the name. What is involved, I said, is what attaches the signifier to the signified.
Such an attachment has absolutely nothing surprising about it. It exists even for common
names, and if it surprises me in the example above it is because I believed I was the master of
nomination. In a sense I was not.

Here now is an example of the attachment of the signifier to the signified in the case of the
common name. It is the case of an Iranian who arrived in France at the age of eight or nine years
and who now as an adult, discovers quite suddenly retrospectively, the reasons why he refused
when he arrived in France, the French café au lait. It was not the coffee he was refusing, it was
the bowl. At the time he did not know. The word bol in Iranian has naturally a different
meaning. It is not simply half of the word bol-bol, which designates the nightingale, it is also the
monosyllabic word by which one designates the sexual organ of little boys.
For him with his arrival in France every word has changed with all the possibility of bilingual
puns. But there was one which stuck much more than the others which was as one could say
rooted.

It resisted, alone among all the others, in this rather simple situation of a change of tongue. I am
sure, even though obviously I cannot prove it, that he would have accepted the bowl of coffee if
he had been given a French name for his sexual organ. He found the translation too partial or too
biased. In the change of tongue (24) he was losing something.
I do not know anything about what might have been involved in the George, Lili encounter
marked in the fundamental phantasy, but the fact that it is a boy's name and a girl's name has
perhaps something to do with its irreducibility.

Proper names change under certain conditions. For example, among the nobility, by the death of
an ancestor, among women by marriage or indeed by going into religion, etc. These changes are
institutionalised. Outside any institution hysterics sometimes give themselves first names which
do not belong to them. ............... the spelling of the one they have.

Casanova who gave himself the name Stengal was questioned by the police authorities about the
reason why he took on a name which was not his own; he replied with indignation that no name
could more legitimately belong to him because he was the one who had invented it. A bad
reason but one which makes him a little like Venaisson. What is interesting is to compare the
police authorities and Casanova from the point of view of their spontaneous linguistic attitude.
For the police, Stengal is an alias, which has as a signified Casanova. The argumentation is :

1) Stengal is Casanova,
2) Casanova is not Stengal.

On both sides there is a mistake. For Casanova the formula is less clear but more simple. It
is formulated as follows: Stengal is me. The signifier Casanova can disappear.

One cannot imagine, without a sort of vertigo, what would happen precisely to the ego, the “It‟s
me” if one gave the same first name to two identical twins who even their parents could neither
call individually or recognise. Nevertheless homonymy of itself is tolerable. There can be, this
happens, two Jean Duponts in the same family. It is a homonymy like many others which may
cause mistakes and misunderstandings like the others.

After all we are much less troubled by meeting a homonym than by meeting a double. The
speaking subject who knows he is such a person by his proper name, recognises himself also in
another way. He has at his disposition to speak, the first person singular. His name draws him
towards the third person. There are cases of telescoping between these two people. Is the slang
signifier bibilolo a proper name or a personal pronoun? Try to put it in the vocative to see. This
is perhaps of no interest, a purely grammatical problem bibilolo being a ...... which designates a
subject but imposes a verb on the third person. I am, therefore bibilolo is but it would be
very remarkable if this was only a grammatical curiosity and that this manner of speaking did not
have subjective implications.
I am skipping over a little of it because ...

So - this is a little bit improvised - the proper name is far from being established in a nuclear
fashion in a subjectivity as if one was trying to point to a subject in the way in which Descartes
situated himself.

It is certainly the name which marks the subject. It acts on him like a provocation. It makes him
become ......... but at the same time it denounces him, objectivises him, transforms the speaking
subject into an object which is spoken about and the “I am so- and-so” is confronted with the “I
am me” and is distinguished from it. This “I am so- and-so” only brings to the “what am I?” a
reply that is experienced as insufficient. Hence the obligation, as they say, to make one‟s name,
an obligation for all and not simply for the ambitious. The obligation that everyone fulfils with
the help of all, and even of the police, to assure themselves that their name has a signified
something that is always more or less badly assured.

Like the young Iranian was not assured of the signified of bowl, which was like a partial proper
name, and like Venaisson which became a name in the measure that I was speaking about him. I
constituted him in that way, and only his proper name (27) could have the sort of signified for
his very particular case as a literary character.

Again with the idea of contributing to the questions raised by Leclaire a distant and very indirect
illumination, so indirect that we cannot easily be assured that we are speaking about the same
thing, I would like to contribute very briefly a fragment of an observation which bears upon the
operation of phonematic elements of proper names in an obsessional.