You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Psychotic discourse, I wrote in my introduction, confronts others with the nonevidence of the evident: it is rarely forgiven for doing so. It also confronts the category of power: the power of discourse, the power of reality, the power of the psyche, the power of violence in the social field.
The power of discourse is manifested in the abuse that often accompanies it, an abuse that, while claiming to be in the service of a superior knowledge, manages to dispossess those against whom it is directed of any possibility of recognising the violence to which they have been subjected and to transform their most legitimate right of defence into feelings of guilt.
The power of a reality in which the I continues to seek the verification par excellence of its statements and of which it can never know more than the discourse in which it is couched. A reality that it thinks it can objectify, place before it, make it a neutral object of one's reflection, whereas what comes back from it is a representation of one's own relation to the object, and to the objects in the world, a presentation of itself that will force it to reverify its own identificatory markers and impose on it a quest that can have no end.
Finally, the power of the psyche to defend itself against a desire for death that it carries within it and against a desire for death present in others and from which they protect themselves by offering one of their number as object.
Of these three powers psychosis offers us the most extreme form—and the most extreme struggle that they are capable of waging. In this second part, I have paid special attention to the analysis of what relates to the work of the I, to its creation and to its mode of response. I shall conclude by showing that the psychotic response and the delusion by which the I defends its ability to exist are the culmination of three conditions that become operant only because of their repetition during the three encounters that initiate the three forms by which the p