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From Psychoanalytical Notebooks 3, 1999 : Love FROM
THE SIGNIFIER TO LOVE Bogdan
Wolf The
signifier and the letter In chapter 3 of Seminar
XX, Lacan speaks about reading: a letter is read. But to read a letter
and to read letters the way one reads a text, are not the same thing. If
the unconscious is what is read, it is read not as a letter but as the
subject’s speech. For the subject, speaking is a way of reading the
letter of the unconscious. There is an interplay between the letter and
the signifier, the interplay which is played out in relation to the
unreadable. Writing
is therefore introduced by way of writing a signifier. Each signifier can
be written down by a letter, and what distinguishes the latter from the
former is that the letter is self-identical.1 In other words,
the letter is an effect of discourse. The writing of a matheme is always
introduced via something else. For example, the writing of a letter A is
introduced via the writing of a letter S. This shows an important function
of redoubling which involves a loss or a fault, marked as a. In short, the writing of a matheme, which is after all made of
letters, and therefore places or loci,
involves an introduction of another term that can in turn appear only
because of a hole or gap in language. For Lacan this term is the signifier
as such, the phallus, the term which is excluded, although its exclusion
is what is included in writing. This is how, succinctly speaking, the
writing of a discourse is done. It takes place at a certain expense.
On a completely
different pole, and in distinction to this, there is logic or, to be more
precise, a notation of logic. There is no such thing as a discourse of
logic but only a notation of logic. Although this seems rather obvious to
me, let’s put it into a test. The
notation of logic has nothing to do with analytical discourse because the
analytical discourse, of which the letter is an effect, is constituted by
the subject of the signifier. This is how Lacan stresses the primacy of
the signifier. For Freud, the primacy of the signifier is rooted in the
unconscious to the extent that the acoustic element which constitutes the
signifier is linked to object-presentations, and therefore to the absence
of the phallus, which is present in them. Only by means of such a
connection does it provide us with the further link to what is called
reading, which involves visual images, and to what Freud thought to be a
relatively simple process, namely writing. There
is, however, another side to writing, as Freud defined it in 1891, to
which I will point by saying that, in so far as the status of the Other in
the discourse of the unconscious is that of the Other sex, writing is
introduced via an impossibility of the sexual relation. Since the sexual
relation cannot be written as such, and since jouissance
of the One cannot be written, writing takes place in lieu
of nonrelation. Lacan introduces the impossibility of nonrelation further
to the function of the signifier. The function of the signifier is based
on the lack. This implies that the function of the signifier rests on the
signifier of the lack, which Lacan wrote as -j. The
statement ‘there is no such thing as a discourse of logic’ seems to me
to be correlative to what Lacan never refrained from reiterating when he
said that there is no Other of the Other or, what amounts to the same
thing, that there is no metalanguage. The signifier is not only blind, it
is also stupid. It will thus not fall on the deaf ears that a statement is
linked to an enunciation, that is to say involves the subject’s desire.
In other words, a statement or what is represented, no matter how
contentious it may seem — and in the final analysis none proves to be
more so than fireworks in the daylight — is underplayed by an
enunciation or representation. Given that what I am aiming at in this
presentation is love, and given that there is no such thing as a discourse
of logic, we could ask ourselves if there is such a thing as a discourse
of love. On
the one hand then, the signifier of the lack, the phallus, is in play for
the speaking subject as barred, and, on the other, the sexual nonrelation
is the condition of writing. These two impossibilities reflect the sexual
status of the unconscious. The
unconscious is founded on a gap, on the lack in the Other. This could be
demonstrated in the way in which a musical score is structured. Take any
musical score and any two notes, no matter how infinitesimal their value,
and there will always be a gap between them. And yet, although this
infinite discontinuity is underscored by the case of music, it will have
an effect, an effect of jouissance. Two
formulations of the signifier There are at
least two formulations of the signifier in Lacan’s teaching. The first
formulation pivots on the nothing. It is in relation to the first
formulation of the signifier that Lacan will develop his idea of creation ex
nihilo or creationism as opposed to evolutionism. It is also in this
first formulation that Lacan will speak of the signifier solely in
acoustic terms, that is to say in the terms of hearing and not in the
terms of understanding which is on the side of meaning. Hearing is thus
what divides meaning, what culls meaning.
In Seminar VII, Lacan
sets out to give a formulation of the signifier as pivoting on the nothing
by taking up a fragment from Heidegger.2 This attempt is not
without links to what in fact constitutes the major part of this seminar
around which it circulates. The
problem Heidegger’s meditation on das
Ding poses, using a vase as an example, is taken up by Lacan by means
of a certain logic. This logic owes its uncertain character to what
already appears in Zen philosophy under the name of koan. What is a koan?
It is a riddle, a conundrum, the answer to which is perhaps the most
obvious of solutions, although it does not follow what could be called the
common logic or the ego logic, whereby the dialectic of questions and
answers follows what Lacan termed as empty speech.
If to a question ‘what is the most important part of a soup
bowl?’ you were to reply ‘the material from which it is made’ you
would no doubt fall prey to such an empty logic which Lacan opposes to the
logic of the nothing.
Let’s ask then what the signifier is made of, as if this was the
question to ask, based on, and resulting from, the previous statement. If
Lacan distinguishes it, I mean the signifier, from meaning, it is because
meaning does not belong, properly speaking, to the order of the signifier.
This also seems rather obvious. In analysis something falls, in every
session something falls. What falls is the attachment, the attachment of
meaning, the metaphor of the sexual relation. What remains is the
signifier with which things are made. This is what Lacan called creation ex
nihilo. When
Heidegger gives the same status to what is present and what is absent in a
vase, he attaches a meaning to the void of which the signifier ‘vase’
is made. Thus being and void seem to cohabit the space of what is
designated by the signifier. Furthermore, they occupy this space between
earth and sky, which is where Heidegger, in relation to the function of
the vase as a receptacle which first collects water from above and then
distributes it below, places it.
So much for the particularity of the signifier, which for Heidegger
has emerged as attached to the signified, and which is perhaps
Heidegger’s metaphor of the sexual relation — a relation in which he
doubtless believed. But one does not have to move heaven and earth in
order to bring out the way in which Lacan follows Heidegger when he, that
is Lacan, hollows out the signifying function of the signifier from a
meaning assumed by the subject. But in doing so, that is to say, in
demonstrating what this ‘nothing in particular’ consists in, Lacan
distinguishes the void from the nothing.
The second formulation of the signifier is developed by Lacan in
his later work. He speaks about it in Encore
and returns to it in R.S.I. He
calls it ‘the One of the signifier’.3 The One of the
signifier is not to be confounded with unity promised by love under the
wings of Eros. The One is rather to be thought in terms of set theory or
in terms of the One of the element which has the same value as any other
element. The One of the signifier is thus the same
of the absolute difference. Love
and meaning It is at this
moment that I propose to speak about love. It is also now that we can
pursue the theme of love on the basis of the formulations of the signifier
which are two formulations of the phallus. Many
things can be said about love, and not one can withstand the others. This
is perhaps what, as one says, ‘love is all about’, it means many
different things to different subjects, that is to say it is situated at
the level of meaning. What upholds the relation between love and meaning
is this ‘not-one’. The ‘not-one’ is related to ‘not-all’ which
is what both men and women have interest in when they speak about the
Woman. The not-all of the Woman points, however, beyond the jouissance
called phallic. Further, this ‘not-one’, which Lacan attributed to the
Woman which does not exist, echoes the conception of being as one, of
which Lacan cannot but be ironic. What could the effect of taking up 2,500
years of metaphysics be if not a whiff of irony? When Heraclitus says that
‘All is One’, this statement is presentified as a not all of
statements. Like the Woman, it is an empty set. And
yet there is a relation between being and being in love, which Lacan
articulates in Seminar I.4
Being in love aspires to what it thinks being already is. Being, the body
of being, as Lacan calls it, is a unity that resonates with jouissance.
No discourse without jouissance
signifies no discourse without rhythm. We could say that the rhythm of jouissance
is desire’s satisfaction. But love aims at the one of being and
therefore beyond satisfaction. Desire wants to contain the loved object,
to include it in its domain, that is to say it wants to include meaning
into the signifier of desire. It says what in this wanting-to-say, which
is another way of meaning-to-say what remains unsaid. In 1988, J.-A.
Miller devoted an article to what the philosopher of being in question
labours not to say when speaking of a promised land of unity, the anchor
of oneness to be refound en-corps.5
The subject desires an imaginary marriage between the signifier and
meaning. In this sense we could say, following Lacan, that the phallus is
an uncoupled signifier, a solitary signifier or even, in a somewhat
amusing way, that it is a bachelor who cannot be married. And who
expresses it better than an obsessional who wants to marry his jouissance
and live happily ever after? Lacan
is ironic when he speaks of the signifier as a being. He is ironic
especially in view of his own demolition of the Saussurian sign as a unity
of the signifier and meaning. From that moment on we can speak of a
certain fall, a fall of the signified, just as one speaks of a falling
star. But
can love do without meaning? When a woman asks a man in the most disarming
of fashions: ‘tell me that you love me even if you don’t mean it’,
she no doubt senses the attraction of words she desires to enjoy. But when
he, loving her as he does, gladly replies in the affirmative to her
demand, she already has another question up her sleeve to surprise him:
‘do you really mean it?’ Well,
does he really mean it? What does he mean when he says he loves her which
is what she wants to hear? Does he give her access to the ideal by
sacrificing his own ego — which is where narcissistic love leads
according to Freud — in the act that amounts to idealisation, namely to
an overvaluation of the drive-object? Does he give her access to the
phallus, incomprehensible to him but priceless to her, by making up words
of love from the provocations her semblant evokes? This specular dialectic
of love, which cannot do without the signifier of desire, will no doubt
stir the real of jouissance to
the point where the question of its meaning, its wanting-to-say, and with
it the question of desire to know will arise. But
you have already noticed that it is not the question of what a man means,
when he replies to her lack with love, that a woman desires. Her desire,
in so far as it seeks out the meaning of desire by means of the absent
signifier, aims at the phallus. Such is the desire for absolute love or
the neurotic desire for the absolute. It is not what he means, but that he
means what he says, the sign of phallic seal, that a woman wants from her
lover. That these words be voiced, and not merely thought, is a
prerequisite for her. Such is the condition of the mirage of unity, that
it inject the meaning of jouissance
into the golden number called the phallus. Such is the wanting of the
imaginary unity which would bring the lovers to what makes it speak, the
absence of the phallus, provided he is not short of words even if, and
especially when, they leave much do be desired. Love
and knowledge A man will no
doubt confuse his erect penis, when she substitutes it for the phallus,
with the precious possession and vain prowess he thinks she bestows on
him. But she too will confuse the organ with the symbol enjoying, as she
does, two as one. The phallus, as an uncoupled, always missing referent of
the unconscious, ungraspable in the way jouissance
points to it, will thus elude them both in so far as they are speaking
beings. But as a heterogeneous element of the unconscious, it will grant
man’s wish in absentia as the object of his fantasy, which draws on the drive
parading under the cloak of her masquerade. Being
in love has to be situated at the very level of the bar cutting between
the phallus and jouissance. This bar could be read as a minus. At
the heart of love dwells nothing. But love also wants to be one. That is
why Lacan situates it as one of the three passions in the lovers’
discourse at the junction of the imaginary and the symbolic. Since the
signifier pivots on the nothing, desire carries love beyond satisfaction.
Love, to the extent that it rests on the lack of the signifier, cannot be
carried beyond satisfaction without desire which, being the desire of the
Other, that is to say what Lacan called ‘desire of the second degree’,
wants to know about love. Saint
Augustine believed that one cannot love what is not known. Hearing the
word ‘love’, the lover — for Augustine the lover of knowledge —
wants to know what it signifies. Augustine already knew that a word is not
merely a word, namely a closed unity of sound and meaning, but that it
signifies something for the subject. To inquire about meaning, to desire
to know the meaning of the signifier, is for Augustine already a sign of
love, as the subject cannot love what is unknown.6 It will thus
not escape our notice that meaning is linked to interpretation in the
sense of such phallic signification that slides along the chain of
substitutions.
But the supposition of
knowledge, to return to the second formulation of the signifier, is based
not only on phallic signification. It is also based on the supposition of
the One. Let’s reiterate that for Lacan the One of the signifier does
not lie on the trajectory of satisfaction of desire for unity. The One is
the real, that is to say, it goes beyond phallic jouissance
to the extent that it is, as the One of the element, an effect of an
encounter with the castration of the Other. The One of the signifier is,
to use Lacan’s formulation, one of the entries to the Other.7 He
therefore distinguishes the One from the Other by way of subtraction. The
Other is one-less.8
It is not that two can constitute one but that there is One out of nothing
and that each and every signifier is primarily One. It is the One of
science, the One of theory, that Lacan speaks about, not the one of unity. If
being in love obeys the principle of complementarity, which Heidegger
endorses as i(a), being-one-with-the-other, for Augustine love is the love
of meaning. This love of meaning is also the love of the One in so far as
for him God is the only One. On the one hand, then, love of meaning is on
the side of interpretation, and, on the other, it takes its stronghold
from the One of the signifier. For Augustine, wanting-to-know, which is
wanting-to-say, pivots on the voice, and there is no doubt that he
contributes a great deal to the linguistic theory of the grammarians of
the Middle Ages. From the phenomenological point of view, the voice is
neither a sound nor a meaning. But it is not the subject either. That is
why Lacan speaks of the voice as the object that veils the lack of the
Other’s desire. But it is in the voice that Augustine recognised an
access to the meaning of the Other’s desire when he formulated it as a
love of what cannot be said because it concerns unconscious knowledge. It
is the expression ‘being in love’ that Freud insists on in his remarks
on its hypnotic effects in Group
Psychology in 1921, where he returns to his earlier elaborations in
the paper on Narcissism. Being in love tends to work in the direction of the
overvaluation of the object of the drive. Freud calls this process
idealisation. In idealisation the drive-object is treated as the subject
treats the ego, he aggrandises it under the mask of fantasy. It is then,
Freud tells us, as an effect of being in love, that the aggrandisement of
the drive-object collapses, and renunciation and sacrifice follow. The
fall of narcissism, the fall of jouissance,
gives rise to an imaginary integration of the ego into the object. The
less one enjoys being in love, Freud says, the more aggrandised the object
becomes. And, the more ideal the object the less use the critical function
of the superego has for the subject. Freud
goes on to explain being in love by showing the proximity between it and
the hypnotist who occupies the position of the ego-ideal. The voice of the
Other, which covers up that lack, orders the jouissance
of the body without the fantasy mediating between the subject of the
signifier and the Other sex (Freudian object). The effect of being in love
becomes a basic cell in the formation of a complex organism called group. The
aim of love Jouissance
of the Other, of the body of the Other, Lacan says, is not a sign of love.
What is actually in question here? Jouissance
is the effect of the signifier. There cannot be a consummation of sexual
love without jouissance, and yet
it is not jouissance of the
Other that conditions love. If it is not a sign of love, it is because it
cannot be spoken or written, whereas love demands more love. That is to
say, love wants to make sexual relation exist. But how can it make sexual
relation exist if it cannot do without the Other? If
jouissance of the Other is not a
sign of love, it is because jouissance is an effect of the signifier. That is why Lacan says
that the Other is one-less. In other words, the One is not tied up to the
Other sex but renders the Other, as one-less barred. Hence the formulation
S ( It
is to the extent that the Other is lacking that love is only for those who
speak, who lack in their desire, and sometimes for those who write if we
include love of God in this domain. For if for a man, jouissance
does not go beyond the enjoyment of the organ, if it does not go
beyond phallic jouissance —
for which Lacan’s formula,"x Fx, inscribes him solely in the domain of
fantasy $
®
a — it also does not go where
a woman is supposed to enjoy, provided She is barred as not-all. But is
this not to say that to the extent that the woman is related to the Other
as barred, she is related to the One of the signifier? Being related to
the Other means that the Other she is related to, is the Other as one-less
or the Other of Nothing. The Other of Nothing has a place in Lacan’s
formulation, But
having given us this formula, Lacan does not really tell us about feminine
jouissance. He says a little but
only by way of inference. We recall a passage in Encore,
where he says he implores women psychoanalysts to tell him something about
it but they can’t. They tell him nothing, which is what he tells us,
nothing, as if this nothing was what lies at the heart of woman’s jouissance.
From desire to be one to the nothing of woman’s jouissance. It is this nothing that we find in the heart of love,
nothing in love, S ( If
love is only for those who speak, or exceptionally write, one can only
speak of love from the place of the lack. It is in this sense that a woman
in love attempts to access the phallus. What does this mean? If a woman,
the phallic woman, as she is called, can conceal her lack by means of
putting on a semblant, provided she has it from him, to cover what she
does not have, the phallus, then her love for him runs the risk of making
him lazy. But if it is the other way round, if what she wants is to bring
out the lack in a man, then it is certainly not revolutionary for him, as
he does not go beyond the phallic jouissance.
In
romantic love, a man always tried to realise the words of woman’s
desire. He would make the shimmering moon bend down to her, and he would
make a warm sand that touched her skin, fold into a rose. There never was
a need to limit or restrain this romantic love which stretched the
function of the ideal and the sensual. These
then were the two frontiers of romantic love. On the one hand the
inheritance of the Middle Ages with sublimations of courtly love that
verged on the perverse, as Lacan reminds us in Seminar
VII, on the other, the sensual, the body of jouissance
without which love could not be, to use this ugly term, consummated but
which is not a sign of love. This
would allow us to say, not only about what is called romantic love, that
love could not care less about reality. It does not care about reality
but, without doubt, it is concerned with certainty. But if it does so, it
is for the subject to say so. Love does not go without saying. The drive
does not care about the object because it is blind in obtaining
satisfaction. But love is not without an object. Notice that when Lacan
says about anguish that it does not lie, he does not say that it tells the
truth. If anguish does not lie it does not imply that it tells the truth.
To tell the truth means that one lies about it. In this sense, there is
always some truth in love because one always tells little lies about it. In
other words, contrary to the drive, love is object oriented. The aim of
the drive is satisfaction. This means that the satisfaction-seeking drive
does not end up embracing its object as would be the case with the lips
kissing themselves. The aim of the drive is satisfaction but jouissance
is not a sign of love. The aim of love does not fall on satisfaction. Love
aims at the subject.9 This is how Lacan makes the phallus what
in love is most near and yet most distant, to the extent that it is the
other jouissance, the jouissance
of speaking given that it only speaks the truth in halves. And this
could be linked to the subject in its destitution, the subject as it lacks
in being, the subject as it lacks in being one. How then does one love the
subject? How to love the subject of the unconscious or how does love aim
at the subject of the unconscious? ‘Love
your neighbour as yourself’ That ‘the aim
of love is the subject’ does not signify here that one loves the
subject. It is not that the subject becomes the object of love. To love
the subject is rather to interrogate it, to put it into question, to
decipher it as a symptom. We could articulate it in relation to the
universalised love called love of the neighbour. What
is striking in the new law of ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ is
above all the fact that it is a commandment. As a commandment, ‘love the
other as yourself’ is placed on the side of the universal, and therefore
has a character of an imperative of obligation, but concerns the subject,
and is therefore on the side of duty. Its universal value is thus contrary
to what ‘enjoy loving the other’ would add to it or rather subtract
from it. The fact that not all enjoy it to the same degree, gives it a
value of the particular, and is one of the reasons why it terrified Freud.10
What
worried Freud in ‘love your neighbour as you love yourself’ is this as. It introduces the order of resemblance which, at the same time,
stands as a point of difference. To love another implies an internal
distance, so familiar to Hegel in his concept of the subject, a distance
in which I and me are distinguished. To approach another with love, as
Lacan points out, is in the first place to approach what dwells at the
heart of my love, ‘the unfathomable aggressivity’ which I dare not
cross, as it touches on the limit-point of das
Ding.11 Lacan tells us that to love one’s jouissance
is to suffer; it is to make its place full. The image of the ego, to the
extent that it serves to cover up jouissance,
is thus brought to service as a means of respect. But
let’s state at this point that this image in which I am obligated to
love the other, is nothing else but the very same image of God in which I
am made. Love of the similar stems from the fact that man who loves God
has been made in God’s image. We thus touch here upon as yet another
mode of the myth of unity, which is in a fact a mode of jouissance.
It is in this sense that Lacan speaks of the death of God as a lack of
guarantee. From then on, the commandments, as we know them, can only be
substituted by the sole law of love which is the law of the lack in the
Other. It
is also in this sense that ‘jouissance
is not a sign of love’ takes on its significance. This so called jouissance of the Other is nothing else but a hole in the Other to
which the phallic veil is the first witness. But this, Lacan says, this
testimony in the face of the death of God, does not make jouissance less evil, nor does it make it less reliant on the good.
The altruism of doing good, from which sprouts ‘love your neighbour’,
is designed to preserve my own image, provided it does not touch on what
this image veils. What
the subject is left with is the duty to truth, which is particular because
it concerns its mode of jouissance.
Thus ‘to love the other unlike yourself’ would be a true testimony not
to love but to desire, as it would remind us that jouissance
is forbidden for him who speaks. To
allow ourselves a little variation, a little variation of truth, we could
easily be led to form another precept of ‘love your neighbour as your
object’, which would doubtless plunge us, with all due seriousness, into
further confusions, partly because it would in some sense contradict the
commandment ‘thou shall not covet thy neighbour’s wife’, and not
only because she, too, lives in the neighbourhood. After all, this would
amount to confusing love with desire, and therefore confusing an act with
poetry or poiesis, in the Greek
sense of the word, or in the Lacanian sense of mortifying signifier. Is
this why Lacan’s articulation of ‘love your neighbour’ takes him to
affirm that this new law erases, in the face of the death of God, the
previous commandments? If so, it is because it not only echoes them but
also silences them. No
doubt this little Sadean variation, ‘love your neighbour as your
object’, would retain the full impact of a universal imperative worthy
of its name. It would, by this virtue, give a tremendous boost to all
those ecological movements whose supporters, in so far as the law supports
them, express today their concerns about the endangered species. Luckily
for them, I mean for those supporters, most of the representatives of
these endangered species already carry a hi-tech chip under their skin.
This might not have been a concern in Freud’s time but he already
recognised in the new law the trace of evil of jouissance
which rises at the sight of the image in which man is made. He
nevertheless proposed to approach the problem of neighbourly love with a
certain naiveté. This naiveté does not signify caution. He is bewildered
by the commandment in question and asks why? Why to give love away to
someone who might not deserve it, who is not worthy of it? Why to squander
it on those who never ask for it or on those who are complete strangers to
me or on those who are my enemies? Why
to turn the other cheek to those who hate me?
What Freud seems to be questioning here is not even the element of
hatred which for him is indissociable from love. Something remains
unformulated in the generalised formulation of love but what remains
unformulated, what goes beyond pleasure principle in traditional morality,
what is missing, is precisely what keeps a firm hold on the
Christianity’s fundamental precept. How can I enjoy loving my neighbour
after all, if he enjoys with all his heart hating me? How can I enjoy
loving the other as myself if, in the first place, I have to enjoy being
the object of the Other’s demand? It is the problem of masochism that
Freud touches on here recognising that jouissance
is always narcissistic. Freud then had no doubt that it is jouissance that makes each and everyone particular. No universal love, no postulate or imperative of virtuous love has ever taken this into account. What essentially is only particular becomes symptomatised into the universal. Universal love is therefore a symptom.
1.
J. Lacan, Le Séminaire
XXII, R.S.I. in Ornicar?
No 2, 21 January 75. 2.
J. Lacan, Seminar VII,
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Potter, Routledge, 1992, p.
120. 3.
J. Lacan, Le Séminaire
XXII, R.S.I. op.cit. 4.
J. Lacan, Seminar I,
Freud’s Papers on Technique, trans. J. Forrester, C.U.P. 1988,
p.276. 5.
J.-A. Miller, Sur Schuldigsein
in Quarto No 32/33,
Brussels, 1988. 6.
Augustine, The Trinity,
trans. S. McKenna, The Catholic University of America Press, 1970, p.
292-3. 7.
J. Lacan, Le Séminaire
XXII, R.S.I. op.cit. 8.
J. Lacan, Seminar XX,
Encore, trans. B. Fink, Norton, 1998, p.129. 9.
Ibid.,.
p.50. 10.
S. Freud, Civilisation and
its Discontents, 1930, SE XXI. 11.
J. Lacan, Seminar VII, op.cit.,
p.184-6. Copyright © Bogdan Wolf 2003. This text from the website of the London Society of the NLS, at http://www.londonsociety-nls.org.uk. Permission to use material from this site must be sought from the LS-NLS. All rights reserved. Please include this portion of the text in any printed version of this paper. |
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