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The Work of Pierre Soury: On Cartels and Speech Unpublished seminars- 1979; Translation by B.B. The work of P. Soury is little recognized in the anglo-phile accounts of Lacanian analysis. The following pages begin to form an introduction long overdue. Small Groups and the Large Groups I am interested in the practice of small groups and have little interest in the reality of the large group. In particular, I have little interest in the operation or in the institution concerning a large number of people. As for this opposition between small and large groups, my criteria is ternary: the one, the small number, the large number. I elaborate no more. After riding myself of these problems of the large group, I arrive at problems of the practice and experience of the small group. References -- There is the term “cartel” given by Lacan, with some indications. -- There is analysis, that I can compare, in a certain manner, to the practice of the small group. -- There is group activity, psychodrama, brainstorming… a lot of small and medium group activity. -- I refer to the comparison given by Lacan between small groups and Borromean links. I am able to derive from these consequences the singularity of each one in a small group. I elaborate no more. Poor Conceptions Concerning the term “Cartel” In the EFP, the term “cartel” was used as an equivalent for “university seminar.” That’s to say, in order to designate places partially open and partially closed, where the alternative between closed and non-closed was entirely open, the middle space between teaching and activity. The term “cartel” has also been used as a military conception for the decomposition of large groups into small. For example, the assistants of a “seminar” are divided into small groups. Against these trends, I claim that: -- Small group practice is firstly an imprisonment, a confinement, a closing. It’s artificial. And perhaps because it is artificial it can be productive. -- Small group practice and the stability of its individuals go hand in hand. It’s like a marriage, the association of individuals are ever the same. One does not enter, one does not leave a small group. The group is born and dies, but one does not get into it and one does not get out of it. Towards this subject, there’s the ideal of a Borromean small group that arises out of the comparison between small groups and Borromean links. -- Small group practice is not an under-group. A small group is an autonomous and independent encounter. A small group refers only to itself, a small group has no function, no role or responsibility to that which may be exterior to it, for example, a larger group or institution. A small group is not a smart part of a larger machine. -- By way of exaggeration, a small group is an interiority without exteriority. It’s without responsibility, unmotivated, independent, experimental. There are no stakes in reality for a small group. The small group is about playing, it’s about experience. -- Put more moderately, I stated that only an advanced small group can take on a bit of the stakes of reality. That’s to say that an advanced small group, a small group which has already devised, calibrated, broken in its practice of interiority, its internal functioning, and has become conscious of its practice, only then can a small group estimate that which it can support and bear of reality’s stakes. -- Oppositely put, a group which defines itself through reality’s stakes, usually a militant group, always organizes itself so that the stakes or exigency censure and repress the group’s autonomy that I’ll characterize as the gathering for the sake of gathering, speaking in order to speak, experience for experience’s sake. -- This could be construed as a psychotic group our an experimental group, it’s not a group militant or accountable. OBJECTION: Taken for the “double commission of the pass” the term “cartel” is incompatible with the preceding point of view. My Current Problem Regarding Small Group Practice I can resume with the following two inclinations: (psychoanalysis, small group, sociability) and (the well spoken, artificial speech, intelligent conversation). Given that some people congregate regularly, what do they do? What have they created as a practice? Which deployment of speech do they use? I had noted two trends: one purely mundane which is fine with “intelligent conversation,” that is to say, which doesn’t suspect that a small group is able to create any other use of speech than one regulated by the constraints of sociability. – And a scholarly inclination which valorizes boredom, forcing it to a scholarly mode. I tend towards an “artificial speech,” inspired by the artifices of the group’s animations and projective play. In order to make a cartel, the prerequisite demand that I articulate to its participants is: what do you know how to do besides have an “intelligent conversation” or make yourself shit? This is articulated aggressively, but I’m more afraid of the normal incapacity of normative sociability to mediate a practice of speech. Why is our speech so stuffy, aggravated, inhibited, stung-up, full of worthiness? Does it concern personal inhibitions? I have reasons for not believing this. Does it concern inhibitions internal to the cartel? Perhaps, there it’s difficult. Does it concern inhibitions linked to a modality in large assemblies of disciples, linked to the pedantry of the modality itself? It must be something like that, and there above, in the small group, one may rush things. Does it concern inhibitions linked to speech itself? Surely. Will this critique be supportable? I believe so. Is this critique the right method? I hesitate. I waver between two inclinations. Firstly, the adherence, deviations, compromises, unremitting critique – the very talk of disciples, stilted and cultured, that is the generator of deviation and compromise. Secondly, the well-spoken and the considerations owed to repression. What are the considerations owed to repression in a cartel? What are the considerations owed to repression, when there is a large number of people, or when there is a small number, or when there are two? The Topological Dénouement of the Cure 
Historical Background If Jacques Lacan had been interrogating the limits of Freudian psychoanalysis from the beginning, it was not until 1956 with D'une question préliminaire a' tout traitement possible de la psychose ( Of A Preliminary Question To Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis) that he showed the necessity of reformulating the problem in a topological presentation that went beyond an "abstract theory of the faculties of the subject"1. Although Lacan continued to purify what he called the "ideology of psychoanalysis" through a topology of surfaces, it was not until February 9th 1972, in his seminar Ou Pire, that he changes to a theory of knots and announces his discovery of the Borromean Rings. What remains invariant in this transformation is the insistence that the use of such topological structures consists not in illustrating the theory of psychoanalysis, but of initiating a practice of psychoanalysis itself: For is not structuralism what permits us to pose our experience as the field where it speaks? If yes, "the distance to experience" of structure disappears since it [the structure] operates not as a theoretical model, but as the original machine which puts in scene the subject. (Remarques Sur La Rapport De Daniel Lagache, Lacan, 1958-60) By the time of R.S.I., Lacan corresponds the three closed chords of the Borromean Lock to the Real, Symbolic, and the Imaginary, while noting this tertiary grouping of rings was only a minimum and required a fourth ring that was only implicitly indicated in Freud's use of the term psychic reality. Further still, by explicitly equating this fourth ring with the Nom-du-Pere and the Oedipus complex Lacan isolates it as what analysis comes to operate on: "To be knotted otherwise, this is what is essential to the Oedipus Complex and it is precisely on what analysis operates." (R.S.I., January 14th 1975) Dénouement of the Sinthome A Space Of Which One Has No Idea
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