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Page 107
Case 6 is also the one of the patient emitting an involuntary slip of the tongue during a conversation with his psychoanalyst, who understands the sign and recognizes that it was not intentionally emitted.
Cases 7 and 8 are variations of cases 3 and 5, with a different misunderstanding strategy.
In fact, one can get from this matrix all the basic plots of Western comedy and tragedy, from Menander to Pirandello, or from Chaplin to Antonioni. But the matrix could be further complicated by adding to it a fourth item, that is, the intention that the emitter wishes that the addressee attribute to him. I tell you p so that you believe that I am lying and that, in fact, I meant q while p is really the case. Remember the Jewish story reported by Lacan: Why are you telling me that you are going to Krakow so that I believe that you are going to Lenberg, while as a matter of fact you are really going to Krakow and, by telling it explicitly, you are trying to conceal it? The new matrix would have sixteen rows. Paola Pugliatti (1976) has applied this matrix to the well-known nothing uttered by Cordelia, examining the different interplay of interpretations and misunderstandings taking place between Cordelia and King Lear, Cordelia and France, King Lear and Kent and so on. But Paolo Valesio (1980) has further complicated this analysis by interpreting the nothing of Cordelia as a witty rhetorical device aiming not to convince Lear but rather to inform France about her mental disposition and rhetorical ability.
Coming back to our poor tipsy guinea pig (who, I believe, is rather tired from having been kept standing on his platform for an untenable amount of time): his presence could be reconsidered in the light of the matrix above. In any case, we could concentrate in this bare presence the whole set of problems discussed by Austin and Searle apropos of speech acts, and all the questions raised by the logic of natural languages or epistemic and doxastic logic apropos of all those expressions such as "I want you to believe," "I believe that you believe," "I am asserting that," "I am promising that," ''I am announcing that," and so on. In the very presence of that drunken man, we are witnessing the crucial antinomy that has haunted the history of Western thought for two thousand years, that is, the "liar paradox": Everything I am saying is false.
In the same way, should the drunken man open his devastated mouth and utter something like I love liquor or Don't trust alcohol. . . . Well, we ought to face at that precise moment the linguistic and logical set of problems concerning the difference between the sujet de

 
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