The

Seminars of Jacques Lacan

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Table of Content

1953 – 1954, Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique ................................................................... 3
1954 – 1955, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of
Psychoanalysis ............................................................................................................................................ 4
1955 – 1956, Book III: The Psychoses .............................................................................................. 5
1956 – 1957, Livre IV: La relation d'objet et les structures freudiennes .............................. 8
The Real Phallus .................................................................................................................................... 9
The Imaginary Phallus ..................................................................................................................... 10
The Symbolic Phallus ........................................................................................................................ 10
1957 – 1958, Book V: Formations of the Unconscious ........................................................... 10
1958 – 1959, Livre VI: Le désir et son interpretation ................................................................ 12
1959 – 1960, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis ............................................................. 13
1960 – 1961, Book VIII: Transference ........................................................................................... 15
1961 – 1962, Livre IX: L'identification ............................................................................................ 17
1962 – 1963, Book X: Anxiety ............................................................................................................ 18
1964, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis ................................ 20
1964 – 1965, Livre XII: Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychoanalyse ................................... 22
1965 – 1966, Livre XIII: L'objet de la psychoanalyse ................................................................ 24
1966 – 1967, Le séminaire, Livre XIV: La logique du fantasme ............................................. 25
1967 – 1968, Livre XV: L'acte psychanalytique ........................................................................... 28
1968 – 1969, Livre XVI: D'un Autre à l'autre ................................................................................ 29
1969 – 1970, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis ................................................. 31


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1953 – 1954, Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique

Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, New York: Norton, 1988

The first seminar, open to the public, takes place at Sainte-Anne Hospital just after
the creation of the S.F.P (Société Française de Psychanalyse). Lacan cuts in the study
of Freud by dint of his theory on the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. The focal
point of the discussion is the direction of the cure. Participants are allowed to make
presentations, comments and objections. Through the case histories of Freud, Klein,
Kris and Balint, the debate elucidates on the convergence of psychoanalysis,
philosophy, theology, linguistics and game theory. In keeping with this
heterogeneous approach, Lacan will further appeal to the science of optics to
systematize his analyses of the specular relation. After his schema of the inverted
bouquet the mirror stage becomes part of the topography of the Imaginary. As to the
méconnaissance that characterizes the ego, it is associated with Verneinung
(dénégation): "...everyday speech runs against failure of recognition,
méconnaissance, which is the source of Verneinung." He closes the seminar
pondering on the role of the analyst: "...if the subject commits himself to searching
after truth as such, it is because he places himself in the dimension of ignorance,
what analysts call readiness to the transference. The analyst's ignorance is also
worth of consideration. He doesn't have to guide the subject to knowledge, but on to
the paths by which access to this knowledge is gained. Psychoanalysis is a dialectics,
an art of conversation."

In a spoken intervention (Appendix), Jean Hyppolite comments on Freud's
Verneinung and suggests its translation as dénégation instead of négation. The
question here deals with how the return of the repressed operates. According to
Freud the repressed is intellectually accepted by the subject, since it is named, and
at the same time is negated because the subject refuses to recognize it as his, refuses
to recognize him in it. Dénégation includes an assertion whose status is difficult to
define. The frontier between neurosis and psychosis is drawn here, between
repression, Verdrägung, and repudiation, Verwerfung, a term that Lacan will replace
by withdrawal, and finally by "foreclosure" (forclusion), the former being related to
neurosis, the latter to psychosis.

When answering Hyppolite in La Psychanalyse that same year, Lacan establishes two
poles of analytic experience: the imaginary ego and the symbolic speech. Lacan gives
precedence to the Symbolic over the Imaginary. The subject who must come to be is
"the subject of the unconscious" and "the unconscious is the discourse of the Other."
In analysis, he says, "the subject first talks about himself without talking to you, then
he talks to you without talking about himself. When he is able to talk to you about
himself, the analysis is over."

To this reshaping of the Imaginary by the Symbolic, he opposes the intersection of
the Symbolic and the Real without mediation of the Imaginary, which would be the
characteristic of psychosis.
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1954 – 1955, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the
Technique of Psychoanalysis
Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, New York: Norton, 1988

Lacan deliberates on the distinction made in his first seminar between discourse
analysis and the analysis of the ego, both in relation to psychoanalytical theory and
practice. He claims that "analysis deals with resistances." He reviews three works by
Freud: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, on the Death Instinct; Group Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego; and The Ego and the Id.

Consciousness is transparent to itself, whereas the I (je) is not. The I is outside the
field of consciousness and its certainties (where we represent ourselves as ego,
where something exists and is expressed by the I). But it is not enough to say that
"the I of the unconscious is not the ego" since we tend to think this I as the true ego.
Lacan proceeds to re-assert the locus of the ego and reinstate the excentricity of the
subject vis-à-vis the ego.

The ego is a particular object within the experience of the subject, with a certain
function: an imaginary one. When in the specular image the ego is recognized as
such by the subject, this image becomes self-conscious. "The mirror stage is based
on the rapport between, on one hand, a certain level of tendencies which are
experienced as disconnected and, on the other, a unity with which it is merged and
paired. In this unity the subject knows itself as unity, but as an alienated, virtual
one."

However, for a consciousness to perceive another consciousness, the symbolic order
must intervene on the system determined by the image of the ego, as a dimension of
re-connaissance.

In "The Dream of Irma's Injection" the most tragic moment occurs in the
confrontation with the Real. The ultimate Real, "something in front of which words
stop." "In the dream the unconscious is what is outside all of the subjects. The
structure of the dream shows that the unconscious is not the ego of the dreamer."
"This subject outside the subject designates the whole structure of the dream."
"What is at stake in the function of the dream is beyond the ego, what in the subject
is of the subject and not of the subject, that is the unconscious."

In his analysis of Poe's Purloined Letter, Lacan speaks of "an other beyond all
subjectivity." The question concerns the "confrontation of the subject beyond the
ego with the Id, the quod (what-is-it?) which seeks to come into being in analysis."
"The purloined letter is synonymous with the original, radical subject of the
unconscious. The symbol is being displaced in its pure state: one cannot come into
contact with without being caught in its play. There is nothing in destiny, or
casualty, which can be defined as a function of existence. When the characters get
hold of this letter, something gets hold of them and carries them along. At each stage
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of the symbolic transformation of the letter, they will be defined by their position in
relation to this radical object. This position is not fixed. As they enter into the
necessity peculiar to the letter, they each become functionally different to the
essential reality of the letter. For each of them the letter is the unconscious, with all
its consequences, namely that at each point of the symbolic circuit, each of them
becomes someone else."

When Jean Hyppolite asks: "What use does the Symbolic have?" Lacan answers:
"The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real are useful in giving its meaning to a
particularly pure symbolic experience, that of analysis." Since the symbolic
dimension is the only dimension that cures, "The symbolic order is simultaneously
non-being and insisting to be, that is what Freud has in mind when he talks about
the death instinct as being what is most fundamental: a symbolic order in travail, in
the process of coming, insisting in being realised."

The Schema L, systematized in La lettre volée (Écrits, 1966), is elaborated in this
seminar. A four-term structure maps the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic as
replacing the second Freudian topography: ego/id/superego. Two diagonals
intersect, while the imaginary rapport links a (the ego) to a' (the other), the line
going from S (the subject, the Freudian id) to A (the Other) is interrupted by the first
one. The Other is difficult to define: it is the place of language where subjectivity is
constituted; it is the place of primal speech linked to the Father; it is the place of the
absolute Other, the mother in the demand. The Other makes the subject without him
knowing it. With Lacan in Freud's Wo Es war, soll Ich werden, Es is the subject. It
knows him or doesn't. The further, more exacting insight, is It speaks or doesn't. At
the end of analysis, it is It who must be called on to speak, and to enter in relation
with real Others. Where S was, there the Ich should be.

1955 – 1956, Book III: The Psychoses

Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, New York: Norton, 1993

Psychosis is one of the three clinical structures, the one defined by foreclosure. The
other two are neurosis and perversion. By way of foreclosure of the signifier of the
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Name-of-the-Father it is possible to understand psychosis and distinguish it from
neurosis. Foreclosure corresponds to Lacan's translation of Verwerfung
(repudiation). The Name-of-the-Father is not integrated in the symbolic order of the
psychotic, it is foreclosed: a hole is left in the symbolic chain. In psychosis "the
unconscious is present but not functioning." The psychotic structure results from a
malfunction of the Oedipus complex, a lack in the paternal function: the paternal
function is reduced to the image of the father (the symbolic reduced to the
imaginary).

Two conditions are required for psychosis to emerge: the subject has a psychotic
structure (inheritance) and the Name-of-the-Father is called into symbolic
opposition to the subject. When both conditions are fulfilled, psychosis is actualized;
the latent psychosis becomes manifest in hallucinations and/or delusions. For Lacan
psychosis includes paranoia (Papin sisters), so he bases his arguments on the
Schreber case (as related by Freud). He argues that Schreber's psychosis was
activated by both his failure to produce a child and his election to an important
position in the judiciary. These experiences confronted him with the question of
paternity in the real - called the Name-of-the-Father into symbolic opposition with
the subject. The Name-of the Father is the fundamental signifier which permits
signification to proceed normally. It both confers identity on the subject (naming
and positioning it within the symbolic order) and signifies the Oedipical prohibition.
When foreclosed, it is not included in the symbolic order.

Lacan rejects the approach of limiting the analysis of psychosis to the imaginary:
"nothing is to be expected from the way psychosis is explored at the level of the
imaginary, since the imaginary mechanism is what gives psychotic alienation its
form, but not its dynamics." Only by focusing on the symbolic are we able to point to
the fundamental determining element of psychosis: the hole in the symbolic order
caused by foreclosure and the consequent imprisonment of the psychotic subject in
the imaginary. "The importance given to language phenomena in psychosis is for us
the most fruitful lesson of all."

The Saussurian opposition between signifier and signified leads to the radical
separation of the two chains, until they are tied through anchoring points, points de
capiton. These are points at which "signifier and signified are knotted together."
Despite the continual slippage of the signified under the signifier, there are
nevertheless in the neurotic subject certain points of attachment between signifier
and signified where the slippage is temporarily halted. A certain number of these
points "are necessary for a person to be called normal" and "when they are not
established or when they give way" the result is psychosis. In the psychotic
experience "the signifier and the signified present themselves in a completely
divided form." Thus the language phenomena most notable in psychosis are
disorders of language: the presence of such disorders is a necessary condition for its
diagnosis: holophrases and the extensive use of neologisms (new words or already
existing ones which the psychotic redefines). These language disorders are due to
the psychotic's lack of a sufficient number of anchoring points: the psychotic
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experience is characterized by a constant slippage of the signifier under the
signified, which is a disaster for signification. Later, Lacan will posit that there is a
continual "cascade of reshapings of the signifier from which the increasing disaster
of the imaginary proceeds, until the level is reached at which signifier and signified
are stabilized in the delusional metaphor." Thus "the nucleus of psychosis has to be
linked to a rapport between the subject and the signifier in its most formal
dimension, in its dimension as pure signifier. If the neurotic inhabits language, the
psychotic is inhabited, possessed by language.

"On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis" (Écrits: A
Selection) is a text written in 1958 and contemporary with Les formations de
l'inconscient; it is a synthesis of Les psychoses and focuses mainly on the term
foreclosure, forclusion, German Verwerfung.

In the Schema L "...the condition of the subject S (neurosis or psychosis) is
dependent on what is being unfolded in the Other O. What is being unfolded is
articulated like a discourse (the unconscious is the discourse of the Other)."

In the Schema R: "...I as the ego-ideal, M as the signifier of the primordial object, and
F as the position in O of the Name-of-the-Father. One can see how the homological
fastening of the signification of S under the signifier of the phallus may affect the
support of the field of reality delimited by the quadrangle MieI. The two other
summits, e and i, represent the two imaginary terms of the narcissistic rapport, the
ego and the specular image."

This schema articulates the imaginary triad with the symbolic triad, both of which
cut the quadrangle of reality. The term 'reality' is ambiguous in that it designates
both our rapport to the world and our rapport to the Real as inaccessible. Schema R
is elaborated in terms of a particular form of psychosis (Schreber). Later, Kant avec
Sade (1962) will develop the perverse version as Lacan is concerned with creating
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the formal bases for his theory before addressing the problems of the treatment of
psychosis.

The preliminary question seems to be the one of the Other, whose presence
commands everything else. It is the place from which the subject is confronted with
the question of its existence (sexuation and death). What is the Other? Is it the
unconscious where "it speaks?" Is it the place of memory that conditions the
indestructibility of certain desires? Is it the place where the signifier of signifiers is
the phallus? Is it the place symbolized by the Name-of-the-Father since "the Oedipus
complex is consubstantial with the unconscious? When the paternal metaphor does
not allow the subject to evoke the signification of the phallus, when the response to
the call of the Name-of-the-Father is a lack of the signifier itself, then it is a case of
psychosis.

"This applies to the metaphor of the Name-of-the-Father, that is, the metaphor that
puts this Name in the place that was first symbolized by the operation of the
mother's absence." It designates the metaphorical, substitutive, character of the
Oedipus complex.

It is the fundamental metaphor on which all signification depends: thus all
signification is phallic. If the Name-of-the-Father is foreclosed (psychosis), there can
be no paternal metaphor and no phallic signification.

1956 – 1957, Livre IV: La relation d'objet et les structures

freudiennes

Lacan confronts the theory of object relations defended by the Société
Psychanalytique de Paris: Freud did not bother about the object, he cared about "the
lack of the object." This lack has nothing to do with frustration. It is a matter of a
renunciation that involves the law of the Father: "...between the mother and the
child, Freud introduced a third and imaginary term whose signifying role is a major
one: the phallus." The study is based on the function of the object in phobia and in
fetishism (Freud's Little Hans, A Child is Being Beaten). In his analysis of Little Hans,
Lacan states that anxiety arises when the subject is poised between the imaginary
preoedipical triangle and the Oedipical quaternary: Hans' real penis makes itself felt
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in infantile masturbation. Anxiety arises since he can now measure the difference
between that for what he is loved (his position as imaginary phallus) and what he
really has to give (his insignificant real organ). The subject would have been rescued
from anxiety by the castrating intervention of the real father, but the father fails to
separate the child from the mother and thus Hans develops a phobia as a substitute
for this intervention. It is not Hans' separation from the mother which produces
anxiety, but failure to separate from her. Castration, far from being the main source
of anxiety, is what actually saves the subject from it.

We find imaginary solutions to the gap (béance) produced by the appearance of the
phallus "as that which is lacking in the mother, in the mother and the child, and
between the mother and the child," because the father alone is the bearer or
possessor of the phallus. Lacan establishes three modes of rapport to this object:
frustration (the imaginary damage done to a real object, the penis as organ),
deprivation (the real lack or hole created by the loss of a symbolic object, the phallus
as signifier), castration (the symbolic debt in the register of the law and the loss of
the phallus as imaginary object). The mother falls from "the Symbolic to the Real"
while the objects, through the mediation of the phallus, fall from "the Real to the
Symbolic." The fall of the mother leads to the structuring preference for the father.
Lacan muses about the way in which "the feminine object conceives the object
relation." Lacan talks of motherhood, love, a case of feminine homosexuality
(Freud's 1920) in which he sees a type of relation to lack and to the father.

As to the phallus and sexual difference, Lacan argues that in order to assume
castration every child must renounce the possibility of being the phallus of the
mother; this "rapport to the phallus is established without regard to the anatomical
difference of the sexes." The renunciation of identification with the imaginary
phallus paves the way for a rapport with the symbolic phallus, which is different for
the sexes: the male has the symbolic phallus, i.e. "he is not without having it" -
woman does not. Yet the male can only lay claim to the symbolic phallus if he
assumes castration, i.e. to give up being the imaginary phallus. Further, the woman's
lack of symbolic phallus is in itself a kind of possession.

The Real Phallus

Lacan uses the term penis to denote the biological organ and reserves the term
phallus to denote the imaginary and symbolic functions of this organ. However, he
does not always maintain the usage. This argues that the distinction between penis
and phallus is somewhat unstable and that "the phallus concept is the site of a
regression towards the biological organ" (David Macey). The penis has an important
role to play in the Oedipus complex. It is via this organ that the child's sexuality is
felt in masturbation. The intrusion of the real in the imaginary preoedipical triangle
transforms the triangle from something pleasurable to something which provokes
anxiety. The question posed by Oedipus is where the real phallus is located, the
answer to the riddle is that it is located in the real father.
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The Imaginary Phallus
In the distinction between penis and phallus, the latter refers to an imaginary object.
The imaginary phallus is perceived by the child as an object of the mother's desire,
as that which she desire ahead of the child, thus the child seeks to identify with this
object. The Oedipus and the castration complex imply the renunciation of the
attempt to be the imaginary phallus.

The Symbolic Phallus

The phallus which circulates between mother and child posits the first dialectic in
the child's life which, though imaginary, frames the symbolic. An imaginary element
is mobilized - the phallus becomes an imaginary signifier. The phallus is a symbolic
object; it is a signifier.

The doctrine becomes systematized in Les formations de l'inconscient. In the 1960s
the phallus is described as "the signifier of the desire of the Other" and the signifier
of jouissance. Also the notion of objet a, the cause of desire, will be added to that of
the phallus.

1957 – 1958, Book V: Formations of the Unconscious

Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, Cambridge: Polity, 2017

The formations of the unconscious are those circumstances in which the laws of the
unconscious are most discernible: the joke, the dream, the symptom, the lapsus
(parapraxis). Freud referred to the fundamental mechanisms involved in the
formations of the unconscious as condensation and displacement, which Lacan
redefines as metaphor and metonymy. With the former, the play of signifiers creates
sense in nonsense in relation to truth. The latter reveals the lack of a word, "an item
of waste sent like a ball between code and message." In this lack substitute words
appear and function like "the metonymic ruins of the object."

At the junction between psychoanalysis and linguistics, Lacan wants to formalize the
primordial laws of the unconscious that Freud had uncovered. His project is to
define a topology of the levels of functioning of the signifier in the subject by
elaborating the graphs that, under the generic name of Graph of Desire, will be at the
core of "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian
Unconscious" written in 1960 and published in 1966 in Écrits. Here the key concept
is that of desire, and Lacan's dialectic of desire is quite distinct from Hegel's. The
Graph of Desire will serve as a topology of the different steps constitutive of the
subject. "It is precisely because desire is articulated that it is not articulable" in a
signifying chain. Slavoj Zizek commenting on this formulation argues that subject is
not substance, "it has not substantial positive being in itself, being caught between
'not yet' and 'no longer'. The subject never is, it will have been - either it is not yet
here or it is no longer here, since there is only a trace of its absence."

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The subject is dependent on the recognition of the Other who embodies "the
legitimacy of the code," he alone can ratify a word as a joke, as stupidity or as
madness. With the Other, Lacan moves on to the analysis of the Oedipus complex.
Three stages structure the constitution of the subject. First, the paternal metaphor
acts intrinsically on account of the primacy given to the phallus by culture. Then, the
father intervenes as the one who deprives the mother: to her he addresses the
message "You will not reintegrate your product" - the child as phallic object. The
child receives "a message on the message," in the form of "You will not sleep with
your mother" that liberates and deprives him of the object of his desire. From the
alternative "To be or not to be the phallus," he can move to the alternative "To have
it or not to have it." The third moment - the exit out of the Oedipus complex -
requires the intervention of the permissive and generous father who, preferred over
the mother, gives birth to the idea of the ego. It is in this context that the problems of
becoming boy or girl - of the inverted Oedipus complex are raised.

Lacan plays with the term "insistence" in order to recall repetition, the
characteristic of the signifying chain in the unconscious. "The unconscious is neither
primordial nor instinctual; what it knows about the elementary is but the elements
of the signifier." In a previous writing, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious
or Reason since Freud," he defines the unconscious as a memory that can be
compared to that of modern thinking-machines where the chain that insists on
reproducing itself in the transference can be found, and which is the chain of dead
desire.

In "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian
Unconscious," written in 1960, Lacan states that "it is not the law that bars the
subject's access to jouissance but pleasure." In 1966 he will add a final sentence:
"Castration means that jouissance must be refused, so that it can be reached on the
inverted ladder (échelle inversée) of the Law of desire."

"The signification of the phallus" (Écrits: A Selection) is a lecture given at the Max
Planck Institute in Munich in 1958. All the research accomplished during La relation
d'objet and Les formations de l'inconscient culminates here, and serves as an
introduction to Le désir et son interpretation.

The alternative seems ineluctable: either the Mother or the Father. To choose the
Mother means to be condemned to the dependency of demand, while the Father
constitutes the access to desire, hence to salvation. If the Father must be preferred
to the Mother, if the Father is the origin and the representative of culture (and of the
Law), it is because he possesses the phallus that he can give or refuse. The absolute
primacy of the phallus - the single emblem of Man - has become a real doctrinal
(perhaps dogmatic) basis of Lacanian theory: "The phallus is the signifier of
signifiers, the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined
with the advent of desire," its function "touches on its most profound rapport: that
in which the Ancients embodied the Nous, the Mind, and the Logos, discourse,
reason." Why such a privilege? "This signifier is chosen as the most tangible element
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in the real of sexual copulation; it is the most symbolic in the literal sense," since "it
is equivalent to the logical copula." Moreover, "by virtue of its turgidity, it
epitomizes the image of the vital flow as it is transmitted in generation." Freud says,
there is only one libido, masculine in nature. Later, Lacan will assert that "there is no
such thing as sexual rapport," il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel, in the sense of
proportion or relation: one sex counts for both sexes. Thus the phallus can only
appear as veiled.

1958 – 1959, Livre VI: Le désir et son interpretation

Desire has to be placed at the heart of analytic theory and practice: the title of the
seminar does not indicate a mere juxtaposition of the two terms, it ties them around
the essential function of language. Desire, if the libido is its psychic energy, indicates
the subject's dependency on the signifiers, which constitute the structure proper.
This is what the cure, based on speech, must make clear beyond the analysand's
demand. Lacan even asserts that "desire is its own interpretation."

In approaching this seminar one might be aided by reading the seven lessons on
Hamlet (1959) published by Jacques-Alain Miller in Ornicar? in 1983. After Freud
Lacan offers a new interpretation. Hamlet is the tragedy of desire: this is why "we
are in the midst of clinical experience." What is this "bird-catcher net in which man's
desire is articulated according to the coordinates of Freud, Oedipus and castration?"
The structural analysis of the play, which orders not only the characters' positions
but also the succession of events, should lead us to "situate the meaning and
direction (le sens) of desire." The enigma is that of Hamlet's inability to act: he
cannot kill Claudius - his father's killer, his mother's lover, and the usurper) - he
cannot love Ophelia, "he cannot want." When, at the end, he discovers his desire - by
fighting Laertes in the hole that has been dug out to bury Ophelia - this revelation is
ineluctably linked to the death in which they all disappear. This tragedy shed light
on the masculine drama of desire and on the anxiety of "To be or not to be,"
hopeless truth of modern man.

On the Father's side, the disappointment is beyond remedy: "There is no Other of
the Other." The dead King wanders in quest of an impossible redemption. The Other,
the place of truth, does not contain the signifier that could be the guarantor of such
truth. The phallus is unavailable in the Other, which is rendered by the sign: - Φ. This
would explain the almost desperate tone in Lacan's next seminar, L'éthique.... What
if the masculine subject turns toward his mother to praise her woman's dignity?
Then he comes up against what she manifests of her desire: "not desire, but a
gluttony that is engulfing." The horror of femininity rules over the play and hits
Ophelia, the virgin fiancée, in the face. Her character is fascinating because it
embodies "the drama of the feminine object caught in the snare of masculine
desire," but above all because she is at the same time the object and the touchstone
of desire: objet a (part object) of desire and phallus (present in Ophelia). The two
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terms are not quite distinguished and if Ophelia can only be discovered in mourning,
- "I loved Ophelia" - such mourning is both that of the object and that of the phallus.
Against Jones, whose definition of aphanisis was an attempt to find in the fear of
being deprived of one's desire a factor common to both sexes, Lacan maintains a
radical asymmetry in the rapport to the phallic signifier. Man "is not without having
it" and woman "is without having it." The only object of desire, and at the same time
its only signifier, seems indeed to be the phallus, which only appears "in flashes,"
during decisive phallophanias where death is at the rendezvous.

Slavoj Zizek notes that for Lacan the phallus is the pure signifier that stands for its
own opposite, that it functions as the signifier of castration. The transition from pre-
symbolic antagonism (the Real) to the symbolic order where signifiers are related to
meaning takes place by way of this pure signifier, without signified. "In order for the
field of meaning to emerge, for the series of signifiers to signify something, there
must be a signifier that stands for nothing, a signifying element whose very
presence stands for the absence of meaning, or rather for the absence tout court."
This nothing is the subject itself, "the subject qua S." This Lacanian matheme
designates the subject deprived of all content.

1959 – 1960, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, New York: Norton, 1992

At the root of the ethics is desire, but a desire marked by the "fault". Analysis' only
promise is austere: it is "the entrance into-the-I," l'entrée-en-Je. "I must come to the
place where the Id was," where the analysand discovers, in its absolute nakedness,
the truth of his desire. The end of the cure is then the purification of desire. Lacan
makes three statements: one is only guilty of "having given in on one's desire"; "the
hero is the one who can be betrayed with impunity"; goods exist, but "there is no
other good than the one that can pay the price of the access to desire," a desire that
is only valid insofar as it is desire to know. Lacan lauds Oedipus at Colonus who calls
down curses before dying, and he associates him with Antigone, walled up alive,
who has not given in at all. Both have rejected the right to live in order to enter the
"in-between-two-deaths," - entre-deux-morts - that is immortality.

Since Le désir et son intépretation, the analysis of the son's passion (subject) has
become more pressing. Who is the Father? Here is the terrible Father of the primal
horde (Freud's Totem and Taboo); Luther's God with "his eternal hatred against
men, a hatred that existed even before the world was born"; the father of the law
who, as to Saint Paul, leads to temptation: "For me, the very commandment - Thou
shall not covet - which should lead to life has proved to be death to me. For sin,
finding opportunity in the commandment, seduced me and by it killed me." Lacan
adds, "I have put the Thing in the place of sin," denouncing the complicity between
the law and the Thing, "which is called Evil." But what is the Thing against which the
Father cannot or does not know how to defend himself? It has nothing to do with the
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object, which is created by words. It is the outside signifier and also the hostile
outside signified: a mute reality prior to primal repression that puts in its place the
pure signifying web without being able to hide it. It is the center of the unconscious
but it is excluded; it is the Real but always represented by an emptiness, the
‘nonthing’, l'a chose, the nothing, a hole in the Real from which the Word, the
Signifier, creates the world. It is the place of deadly jouissance sanctioned by the
prohibition of incest. It is associated with the mother who represents it by her
manifest carnality, and with woman who, idealized in courtly love, speaks the truth:
"I am nothing but the emptiness which is in my cloaca." The idea of a distorted
sexuality meets the 70s mantra: "There is no such thing as a sexual rapport."
Woman, who is the other, bears the burden of the curse, although the Thing is
settled at the heart of all subjects who have to recognize it. Who am I? "You are the
waste that falls in the world through the devil's anus." However, salvation holds on
by a thread: the theme of the exquisiteness of the son's love for the father would be
amplified in D'un Autre à l'autre. This father is a symbolic Father, he is all the more
present for being absent, a Father without a body or the glorious body of signifiers, a
father who can only be the object of an act of faith, for: there is no Other of the
Other" to guarantee him. Sublimation is an attempt to confront the Thing: true love
for one's neighbour consists in recognizing in him, as in oneself, the place and the
wound of the Thing. As for disbelief, by rejecting the Thing it makes it reappear in
the Real, which is the Lacanian definition of psychosis.

If ethical thought "is at the centre of our work as analysts," then, in the cure, ethics
converges from two sides. On the side of the analysand is the problem of guilt and
the pathogenic nature of civilised morality. Freud conceives of a basic conflict
between the demands of civilised morality and the essentially amoral sexual drives
of the patient. If morality takes the upper hand and the drives are too intense to be
sublimated, sexuality is either expressed in perverse forms or repressed. Freud
further develops this idea in his theory of an unconscious sense of guilt and in his
concept of the superego, that interior moral agency which becomes crueller to the
extent that the ego submits to its demands. The analyst, on the other hand, has to
deal with the pathogenic morality and unconscious guilt of the patient and with the
ethical problems that arise in the cure.

Lacan addresses the issue of how the analyst will respond to the patient's sense of
guilt by arguing that he must take it seriously, for whenever the patient feels guilty
it is because he has given way to his desire: "the only thing of which one can be
guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire." As to the pathogenic
morality acting through the superego, Lacan asserts that psychoanalysis is not a
libertine ethos. The ethical position of the analyst is revealed by the way that he
formulates the goal of the cure. Ego-psychology, for instance, proposes a normative
ethics in the adaptation of the ego to reality. Lacan opposes this stance and devises
an ethics relating action to desire: "Have you acted in conformity with the desire
that is in you?"

The Seminars of Jacques Lacan 15
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Traditional ethics (Aristotle, Kant) revolves around the concept of the Good, where
different goods compete for the position of Supreme Good. Lacanian ethics see the
Good as an obstacle in the path of desire, thus "a repudiation of the idea of Good is
necessary." It also rejects ideals, such as health and happiness. Traditional ethics
tends to link the good to pleasure: moral thought has "developed along the paths of
an hedonistic problematic." Lacan does not take such an approach because
psychoanalytic experience has revealed the duplicity of pleasure: there is a limit to
pleasure, and when it is transgressed, it becomes pain. Jouissance is the paradoxical
satisfaction that the subject derives from his symptom, the suffering he derives from
his satisfaction. Finally traditional ethics puts work and a safe, ordered existence
before questions of desire by telling people to make their desires wait. Lacan forces
the subject to confront the relation between his actions and his desire in the
immediacy of the present.

Lacan introduces the notion of das Ding, the Thing, via the opposition between the
pleasure principle and the principle of reality, this opposition, however, is deluding
since the latter is but a modification of the former. Two are the contexts where das
Ding operates. Firstly there is Freud's distinction between Wortvorstellungen, word-
presentations, and Sachvorstellungen, thing-presentations. The two types are bound
together in the preconscious-conscious system, whereas in the unconscious only
thing-presentations are found. This seems to contradict the linguistic nature of the
unconscious. Lacan counters the objection by pointing out that there are two words
in German for "thing": das Ding and die Sache. Freud employs the latter to refer to
the thing-presentations in the unconscious, and if at one level Sachvorstellungen and
Wortvorstellungen are opposed, on the symbolic level they go together. Die Sache is
the representation of a thing in the symbolic, whereas das Ding is the thing in the
real, which is "the beyond-of-the-signified." Thing-presentations found in the
unconscious are of linguistic nature, as opposed to das Ding, which is outside
language and outside the unconscious. "The Thing is characterized by the fact that it
is impossible for us to imagine it."

Yet, in relation to jouissance, as well as being the object of language, das Ding is the
object of desire. It is the lost object which must be continually looked for, the
unforgettable Other, the forbidden object of incestuous desire, the mother. The
Thing appears to the subject as the Supreme Good, but if the subject transgresses
the pleasure principle and attains it, it is experienced as suffering or/and evil
because the subject "cannot stand the extreme good that das Ding may bring on
him." It would seem then fortunately that the Thing is usually inaccessible.

1960 – 1961, Book VIII: Transference

Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, Cambridge, Polity, 2015

In La relation d'objet Lacan provided a way of understanding the paradoxical
function of transference in the analytical cure. In its symbolic aspect (repetition) it
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helps the cure progress by revealing the signifiers of the subject's history. He argues
that in its imaginary aspect (love and hate) it acts as a resistance. He uses Plato's The
Symposium to illustrate the rapport between analysand and analyst: Alcibiades
compares Socrates to a box enclosing a precious object, agalma. Just as Alcibiades
attributes a hidden treasure to Socrates, so too the patient sees his object of desire
in the analyst. Lacan articulates the objet a with agalma, the object of desire we seek
in the other.

Before, the emphasis was placed on repetition, now it is placed on transference love,
amour de transfert: both are inseparable, but the perspective changes. To insist on
repetition means to refuse to see in the analytic situation an intersubjective rapport
to be dealt with here and now. What speech constructed in the past can be
deconstructed in the cure by speech: the cure is "pure symbolic experience." On the
individual level, it allows for "the reshaping of the imaginary," on the theoretical
level for an intersubjective logic to be constructed. Thus, analysis is described as a
particular experience of desire, on the side of sexuality. Speech has an effect only
after transference. For Lacan "it is from the position that transference bestows the
analyst with that he intervenes in transference itself," and "transference is
interpreted on the basis of and with the aid of transference itself." In "The direction
of the treatment and the principles of its power" (Écrits: A Selection) Lacan
presented countertransference as a resistance of the analyst and raised the problem
of the analyst's desire. Here, subjective disparity becomes the rule establishing
dissymmetry between the two protagonists vis-à-vis desire: what the patient will
discover through the disappointment of transference love. Because in the cure one
learns to talk instead of making love, in the end desire, which has been purified, is
but the empty place where the barred subject accesses desire. We should note that
training analysis does not put the analyst beyond passion; to believe that it does
would mean that all passions stem from the unconscious, a notion that Lacan rejects.
The better analysed the analyst is, the more likely he is to be in love with, or be quite
repulsed by, the analysand. In training-analysis there will be a mutation in the
economy of desire in the analyst-to-be: desire will be restructured, so that it will be
stronger than passions. Lacan calls it the desire proper to the analyst.
In The Symposium the analyst's position is identified with Socrates', while Alcibiades
occupies the position of the analysand, who after Socrates will discover himself
desiring. "To isolate oneself with another so as to teach him what he is lacking and,
by the nature of transference, he will learn what he is lacking insofar as he loves: I
am not here for his Good, but for him to love me, and for me to disappoint him."

Alcibiades desires because he presumes Socrates is in possession of the agalma - the
phallus as desirable. But Socrates refuses the position of loved object to assert
himself as desiring. For Lacan desire never occurs between two subjects but
between a subject and an overvalorized being who has fallen to the state of an
object. The only way to discover the other as subject is "to recognize that he speaks
an articulated language and responds to ours with his own combinations; the other
cannot fit into our calculations as someone who coheres like us." Socrates, by shying
away from Alcibiades' declaration, by refusing to mask his lack with a fetish, and by
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showing him Agathon as the true object of his love, shows the analyst how to
behave: such is the other aspect of "subjective disparity" taking place in analysis.
There is no rapport between what the one possesses and what the other lacks. The
phallus, from being objet a, the imaginary object, emerges as the signifier of
signifiers, as "the only signifier that deserves the role of symbol. It designates the
real presence that permits identification, the origin of the Ideal-of-the-Ego on the
side of the Other." There is a woman in The Symposium, Diotima, who speaks in the
form of myth. In the fable where female lack is confronted with male resources, the
feminine first has an active role before the desirable masculine. The reversal occurs
because in love one only gives what one does not have: the masculine, by shying
away from the demand, is revealed as a subject of desire. Later, Lacan would make
Socrates the model of hysterical discourse, but also of analytic discourse because he
attains the knowledge, the episteme, of love.

Having managed to provoke "a mutation in the economy of his desire," the analyst
has access both to the unconscious and to the experience of the unconscious
because, like Socrates, he has confronted the desire for death and achieved the
"between-two-deaths" - entre-deux-morts. Having placed the signifier in the position
of the absolute, he has abolished "fear and trembling." "One puts one's desire aside
so as to preserve what is the most precious, the phallus, the symbol of desire."
Desire is only its empty place.

1961 – 1962, Livre IX: L'identification

In Le transfert Lacan describes symbolic identification as identification with the
signifier. Here, he examines the rapport of the subject to the signifier. In the three
types of identification isolated by Freud in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the
Ego (1921, S.E. XVIII), he finds:

1. A primitive identification with the father as such based on a single feature:
the matrix of the Ideal-of-the-Ego, a symbolic introjection of the father's
mark, "An identity of body links the Father of all times to all those who
descend from Him."
2. A regressive identification in love relations: the object refuses itself,
therefore the subject identifies with the object (one centered around objet a
and the phallus).
3. A hysterical identification where the subject recognizes in the other his
global situation.

By asserting the identification of the signifier and the identification with the
signifier, Lacan brings about a new category consisting in the first two and centered
on the rapport to the Father and to the phallus. It becomes crucial to institute the
subject in his rapport to the signifier - to the signifier alone. To mark the difference
between the preverbal and the verbal Lacan points at his dog, Justine, who has
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speech but not language: insofar as she speaks, she never takes him for an other, she
is not capable of transference and lives in the demand. In "The agency of the letter in
the unconscious or reason since Freud" (Écrits: A Selection) he refers to the language
of the affect and of the body as the "nonhuman" aspect of those who "do not have
language." The only salvation lies in "the signifying identification" where the
preverbal is articulated within the subject's relation to the word.

In "The agency of the letter..." the signifier is turned into an inscription in the
unconscious, a seal, which in L'identification becomes the "unbroken line," trait
unaire, a symbolic term which is to produce the ego-ideal. Though this trait may
originate as a sign, it becomes a signifier when incorporated into a signifying
system: identification raises the question of the identical. Can it be said that A = A?
No, for there already is a difference due to repetition: hence A ≠ A. Against the One of
totality, Lacan institutes the 1 as the single mark, the unbroken line, made by mere
repetition. The signifier has a unity only insofar as it is that which all the other ones
are not, insofar as it is pure difference: the One as such is the Other. There is no
tautology in expressions such as "war is war" or "Lacan is Lacan." The real thing has
nothing to do with this, it is the same signifier that functions to connote pure
difference, for, in repetition, the signifier represents the subject for another signifier
and not for some one. The identification of the signifier and the identification with
the signfier closely mingle. Formal logic, the study of the proper name, the complex
grammar of negation... everything works toward defining the unbroken line as "a
return, the seizing of the origin of a counting before the number." The phallus as the
symbolic mark is at the origin since "narcissism and incorporation should be located
in the direction of the Father and not in the direction of the parasited mother's
body." Lacan's response to the problem of the origin (the chicken or the egg?) is the
rooster, the signifier that makes the rooster, the letter or unbroken line. His project
is to create "a topological structure of the subject."

To whoever asks, "What is the truth of your discourse?", Lacan answers: "I am an
analyst, and as such, I have to disappoint you, I don't tell the truth about truth." "I
can take you very far on the path of the 'who am I' without the truth of what I am
telling you being guaranteed, but nevertheless, in what I am telling you, it is still a
matter of truth."

1962 – 1963, Book X: Anxiety

Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, Cambridge, Polity, 2014

Lacan states that in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926, S.E. XX) Freud speaks
of everything but anxiety just "to leave the emptiness in which there is anxiety." This
affect, related to the structure of the subject, is not repressed but adrift; only the
signifiers that anchor it are repressed. For Lacan anxiety, angoisse, is not without an
object, but this object is unknown. Since anxiety is linked to desire, and fantasy is
the support of desire, the starting point is the fantasme elaborated in the Graph of
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Desire in Les formations de l'inconscient: $<>a (Subject barred by the
signifier/relation to/objet a, which is the object of desire, the imaginary part-object,
an element imagined as separable from the rest of the body). He then proceeds to
define objet a, which relates anxiety with desire.

Objet a is the cause of desire, not its aim. On one hand, it is "the residue of division
when the subject is marked by the 'unbroken line' of the signifier in the field of the
Other." Objet a is different from the a of the mirror stage, it is not specular; neither is
it "visible in what continues for the subject the image of his desire." It is what is lost
during the original constitution of the subject where the Father is primary. If we
consider the body, objet a is not created by the separation from the mother, but
from the separation from the body proper. Objet a is the placenta, l'hommelette, and
even the breast tied to the subject and detached from the mother. They are all
objects of desire for us, and there is no anxiety for the woman. In a system centered
on the signifier, objet a seems to be the irreducible Real, "a lack which the symbol
does not fill in," a "real deprivation."

On the other hand, anxiety arises when lack comes to be lacking. It is not nostalgia
for the material breast, but the threat of its imminence. Lacan uses Jones’ analysis of
the nightmare, "this being, the incubus, who weighs on our chest with his opaque
weight of foreign jouissance," "who crushes the subject under his jouissance," and
who is "a questioner." Anxiety, like desire, is linked to the Other, to the jouissance
and to the demand of the Other. Lacan links it to the terrible commandment of the
Father-God: "Jouis!" For instance, what or whose apparition does for the sudden gap
of an opening window (The Wolf Man)? An uncanny strangeness or familiarity, it is
the horror of the Thing against which only desire and law combined are able to
protect us. This takes place when the subject loses the support of the lack that
allows him to constitute himself: - Φ (the phallus as symbol of lack). It is difficult to
situate - Φ and objet a in their mutual rapport. The phallus is sometimes the agalma,
and sometimes an operating libidinal reserve that saves the subject from the
fascination of the part object. Hence, the importance granted to symbolic castration
in front of "the father's opaque and ungraspable desire," a castration at the origin of
the law.

Anxiety, then, is an affect, not an emotion; the only affect which is beyond all doubt
and which is not deceptive. Whereas Freud distinguishes between fear (focused on a
specific object) and anxiety (which is not), Lacan posits anxiety as not without an
object: it simply involves a different kind of object, one that cannot be symbolized as
other objects are. This object is objet a, the object-cause-of-desire, and anxiety arises
when something fills the place of it, when the subject is confronted by the desire of
the Other and does not know what object he is for that desire. Also Lacan links
anxiety to lack. All desire springs from lack, and anxiety appears when this lack is in
itself lacking: "anxiety is the lack of a lack." Anxiety is not the absence of the breast,
it is rather the possibility of its absence which saves the subject from anxiety. Acting
out and passage to the act are last defenses against anxiety
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And what happens in the cure? How can the analyst measure how much anxiety a
patient can bear? How may the analyst deal with his own anxiety? The desire of the
analyst is here involved and he has to institute, along with anxiety, the - Φ, an
emptiness whose function is structural.

1964, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of

Psychoanalysis
Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, New York: Norton, 1978

January 15 1964, marks the opening session of the seminars at the École Nationale
Supérieure where, in the presence of celebrities (Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Fernand
Braudel) and a new younger audience, Lacan talks about the censorship of his
teachings and his excommunication from official psychoanalytical circles. He wants
to train analysts and, at the same time, address the non-analyst by raising the
following questions: Is psychoanalysis a science? If so, under what conditions? If it is
- the "science of the unconscious" or a "conjectural science of the subject" - what can
it teach us about science?

Praxis, which "places the subject in a position of dealing with the real through the
symbolic," produces concepts; four are offered here: the unconscious, repetition,
transference and the drive. The 1973 title has often been contested in favour of the
1964's: Les fondements de la psychanalyse, which implies neither that it is a matter of
concepts, nor that there are only four of them. Lacan is suspicious of the rapport
between psychoanalysis, religion and science. Did they not have a founding father
and quasi-secret texts? Freud was "legitimately the subject presumed to know," at
least as to the unconscious: "He was not only the subject who was presumed to
know, he knew." "He gave us this knowledge in terms that may be said to be
indestructible." "No progress has been made that has not deviated whenever one of
the terms has been neglected around which Freud ordered the ways that he traced
and the paths of the unconscious." This declaration of allegiance contrasts with the
study of Freud's dream about the dead son screaming "Father, can't you see I'm
burning?" The main problem remains that of transference: the Name-of-the-Father
is a foundation, but the legacy of the Father is sin, and the original sin of
psychoanalysis is Freud's desire that was not analyzed. In "The Freudian thing"
(Écrits: A Selection), Lacan presents the Name-of-the-Father as a treasure to be
found, provided it implies self-immolation as a sacrificial victim to truth.

Of the four concepts mentioned, three were developed between 1953 and 1963. As
to drives, whose importance has increased since the study of objet a in L'angoisse,
Lacan considers them as different from biological needs in that they can never be
satisfied. The purpose of the drive is not to reach a goal (a final destination) but to
follow its aim (the way itself), which is to circle round the object. The real source of
jouissance is the repetitive movement of this closed circuit. Freud defined Trieb as a
montage of four discontinuous elements: "Drive is not thrust (Drang); in Triebe und
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Triebschicksale (1915, S.E. XIV) Freud distinguishes four terms in the drive: Drang,
thrust; Quelle, the source; Objekt, the object; Ziel, the aim. Such a list may seem quite
natural; my purpose is to prove that the text was written to show that it is not as
natural as that." The drive is a thoroughly cultural and symbolic construct. Lacan
integrates the aforementioned elements into the drive's circuit, which originates in
an erogenous zone, circles the object and returns to the erogenous zone. This circuit
is structured by the three grammatical voices:

1. the active (to see)
2. the reflexive (to see oneself)
3. the passive (to make oneself be seen)

The first two are autoerotic; only in the passive voice a new subject appears, "this
subject, the other, appears in so far as the drive has been able to show its circular
course." The drive is always active, which is why he writes the third instance as "to
make oneself be seen" instead of "to be seen."

Lacan rejects the notion that partial drives can attain any complete organization
since the primacy of the genital zone is always precarious. The drives are partial, not
in the sense that they are a part of a whole (a genital drive), but in that they only
represent sexuality partially: they convey the dimension of jouissance. "The reality
of the unconscious is sexual reality - an untenable truth," much as it cannot be
separated from death. "Objet a is something from which the subject, in order to
constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ. This serves as symbol of the lack,
of the phallus, not as such, but in so far as it is lacking. It must be an object that is
separable and that has some rapport to the lack. At the oral level, it is the nothing; at
the anal level, it is the locus of the metaphor - one object for another, give the feces
in place of the phallus - the anal drive is the domain of the gift; at the scopic level, we
are no longer at the level of demand, but of desire, of the desire of the Other; it is the
same at the level of the invocatory drive, which is the closest to the experience of the
unconscious." The first two relate to demand, the second pair to desire. Under the
form of objet a, Lacan groups all the partial drives linked to part objects: the breast,
feces, the penis, and he adds the gaze and the voice. Here, he asserts the split
between the eye and the gaze when he analyzes Holbein's The Ambassadors as a
"trap for the gaze" (piège à regards), but also as a dompte-regard (the gaze is tamed
by an object) and a trompe-l'oeil. In the foreground, a floating object, a phallic ghost
object gives presence to the - Φ of castration. This object is the heart of the
organization of desire through the framework of the drives.

In "La Lettre volée" (Écrits) Lacan states that "the unconscious is the discourse of the
Other," meaning that "one should see in the unconscious the effects of speech on the
subject." The unconscious is the effect of the signifier on the subject - the signifier is
what gets repressed and what returns in the formations of the unconscious. How
then is it possible to reconcile desire linked to the signifier and to the Other with the
libido, now an organ under the shape of the "lamella," the placenta, the part of the
body from which the subject must separate in order to exist? A new conception of
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repetition comes into play, whose functioning stems from two forces: automatism
on the side of the signifier and the missed yet desired encounter on the side of the
drive, where objet a refers to the "impossible" Real (that as such cannot be
assimilated). If transference is the enactment (la mise en acte) of the reality of the
unconscious - what Lacan's deconstruction of the drive wants to bring to light - if
desire is the nodal point where the motion of the unconscious, an untenable sexual
reality, is also at work, what is to be done? The analyst's role is to allow the drive "to
be made present in the reality of the unconscious": he must fall from the idealized
position so as to become the upholder of objet a, the separating object.

1964 – 1965, Livre XII: Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychoanalyse

For Lacan the fundamental problem is that of the subject's relation to language.
However, taking into account the Real - from the trilogy of the Symbolic, the
Imaginary and the Real - modifies the situation. Previously, the crucial issues were
the rapports between identification, transference and demand; now the question
"will entail the holding out of a form, of an essential topology for analytic praxis."
The signifier returns as structured on the Mobius strip with three forms of the hole,
the torus or ring, the cross-cap, and Euler's circles as the maze of the torus or of the
spiral of the demand on the surface of the Klein bottle. These figure though
constructed in a simple and combinatory way, are nevertheless complicated to
comment.

The torus is a ring, a three dimensional object formed by taking a cylinder and
joining the two ends together. The topology of the torus illustrates some analogies
against the structure of the subject: its centre of gravity falls outside its volume, just
as the centre of the subject is outside, being decentered (ex-centric). The "peripheral
and central exteriority of the torus constitutes one single region." Psychoanalysis
posits the distinction between container and contained much as the unconscious is
not a purely interior psychic system but an intersubjective structure, "the
unconscious is outside" - extimité. A common concept of structure implies the
opposition between directly observable contingencies and deep phenomena, which
are not the object of immediate experience. Lacan disagrees with such an opposition
as implicit in the structure. He rejects the notion of observable contingencies, since
observation is always already theoretical; and he also rejects the idea that
structures are somehow distant from experience, since they are present in the field
of experience itself: the unconscious is on the surface and looking for it in the depths
is to miss it. As the two sides of the Mobius strip are continuous, so structure is
continuous with phenomena.

Thus, the Mobius strip subverts our normal (Euclidean) way of representing space,
for it seems to have two sides but in fact has only one. The two sides are
distinguished by the dimension of time, the time it takes to traverse the whole strip.
The figure illustrates how psychoanalysis problematizes binary oppositions
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(love/hate, inside/out, signifier/signified, truth/appearance): the opposed terms
rather than be radically distinct, are viewed as continuous with each other. For
instance, the Mobius strip helps to understand the traversing of fantasy (la traversée
du fantasme): only because the two sides are continuous it is possible to cross over
from inside to outside. Yet, when passing a finger round the surface of the strip, it is
impossible to determine the precise point where one has crossed over from inside
to outside. With Slavoj Zizek, the traversing of the fantasme implies to accomplish an
act that disturbs the subject's fundamental fantasy, unhinging the level that is even
more fundamental than basic symbolic identifications. For Lacan, "fantasy is not
simply a work of imagination as opposed to hard reality, meaning a product of the
mind that obfuscates the approach to reality, the ability to perceive things as they
really are." Against the basic opposition between reality and imagination, fantasy is
not merely on the side of the latter, it is rather that little piece of imagination by
which the subject gains access to reality - the frame that guarantees the sense of
reality. Thus when the fundamental fantasy is shattered, the subject sustains a loss
of reality. Then, traversing the fantasme has nothing to do with a sobering act of
dispelling the fantasies that obscure the clear perception of the real state of things
or with a reflective act of achieving a critical distance from daily ruminations
(superstitions). Fantasy intervenes as support when a line is drawn between what is
simply our imagination and "what really exists out there." On the contrary,
"traversing the fantasme involves the subject's over-identification with the field of
imagination: in it, and through it, the subject breaks the constrains of fantasy and
enters the terrifying, violent territory of pre-synthetic imagination, where disjecta
membra float around, not yet unified and domesticated by the intervention of a
homogenizing fantasmatic frame."

As for Lacan's assertion of the subject's constitutive decentrement, subjective
experience is not regulated by objective unconscious mechanisms decentred with
regard to the subject's self-experience and as such beyond control, but by something
more unsettling. For a standard view the dimension that is constitutive of
subjectivity is that of phenomenal self-experience. In Lacan's perspective the analyst
is the one who can deprive the subject of the very fundamental fantasy that
regulates the universe of self-experience. The subject of the unconscious emerges
only when the subject's fundamental fantasy becomes inaccessible, is primordially
repressed, argues Zizek. Thus, the unconscious is the inaccessible phenomenon, not
the objective mechanism that regulates phenomenal experience. When the subject
displays signs of a fantasmatic self-experience that cannot be reduced to external
behaviour, what characterizes human subjectivity proper is the gap, la béance, that
separates the two: fantasy becomes unattainable; it is this inaccessibility that makes
the subject empty, $. The rapport totally subverts the standard notion of a directly
self-experiencing subject. Instead, there is an impossible rapport between the
empty, non-phenomenal subject and the phenomena that remain inaccessible. This
actual rapport is registered by Lacan's articulation of fantasy, $ <> a, developed in
Seminar XIV, La logique du fantasme.

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Lacan's interest in topology arises since he sees it as providing a non-intuitive,
purely intellectual means of expressing the concept of structure. His topological
models "forbid imaginary capture": unlike intuitive images, in which perception
eclipses structure, here "there is no hidden of the symbolic." Hence, topology
replaces language as the main paradigm of structure: it is not a mere metaphor for
structure; it's structure itself.

1965 – 1966, Livre XIII: L'objet de la psychoanalyse

The theme of the subject divided between knowledge and truth is raised throughout
the seminar. Lacan responds to the alternative between the mathematical model
and metaphor by stating that "topology is not a metaphor, but a rigorous montage
with the objet a." Thus the use of four mathemes: the disk with a hole, the Möbius
strip, the torus and the Klein bottle. "The hole of the lack of the objet a would be
located at the intersection of the fields of truth and knowledge": such is the
contribution of psychoanalysis. It can therefore question science as to the truth
whose contingency is missed or forgotten; the same happens with religion. Lacan
both splits and unites his audience in two categories: "those who use my word for
analytic purposes," and "those who prove that it can be followed in all its coherence
and rigor, that it fits in a structure valid even outside its present practice." He also
distinguishes between the analyst who at the moment of knowledge is divided (and
he knows it), and the status of the subject-supposed-to-know (the subject of
science) who restores the prestige of méconnaissance by thinking that he is uniting
knowledge and subject.

Lacan goes to the Graph of Desire and relates them to his topology. The objet a is
situated on four sides:

1. the demand of the Other (objet a is feces)
2. the demand on the part of the Other (objet a is the breast)
3. desire on the part of the Other (objet a is the gaze)
4. desire of the Other (objet a is the voice)

In this perspective he gives an account of his lectures in the United States, organized
by Roman Jakobson, notably "Of Structure as an In mixing of an Otherness
Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever," at Johns Hopkins University. Michel Foucault
talks about Velasquez's Las Meninas. His address allows Lacan to conjure his theory
of the painting as "a trap for the gaze," a gaze in which what falls is objet a. The little
girl is the slit in the perspective and the vanishing point, the hidden center of the
painting, and "in this gap, béance where there is nothing to see, it is impossible to
recognize the structure of the objets a: underneath the Infants’ dresses, 'it looks at
me,' while the eye is made not to see..." Georges Bataille's Histoire de l'oeil is quoted
as a text that establishes a connection among all the objets a in their rapport to the
feminine sexual organ. Therefore, the phallus is the sign that occupies the place of
The Seminars of Jacques Lacan 25
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this gap, the impossible or untenable real. This entails a reshaping of the
unconscious around language and the gaze (excluded by Freud). Lacan goes back to
the Freudian dimension of desire and of the subject whose foundation is castration.
The vagina, the feminine sexual organ, becomes the objet a, which fascinates and
leads to ruin unless there is the screen of the phallus, even under the form of - Φ. In
the end, the penis, as a manifestation that is seen, hardly hides the presence of an
objet a that would be an enigmatic - a.

The gaze, it should be noted, is not found on the side of the subject, but on that of the
object. "It marks the point in the object (the picture) from which the viewing subject
is already gazed at" (Slavoj Zizek). The gaze is a spot in the picture, which does not
warrant the presence of the subject and by blurring its visibility, introduces a split in
the rapport between the object and the subject: the latter cannot see the picture at
the point from which it is gazing at him. Zizek brings out Psycho, where Norman
Bates' house is rendered uncanny because Hitchcock’s viewpoint switches from the
house coming closer (as seen by the approaching woman) to the same woman
coming closer (as seen from the house), giving the anxious impression that the
house is gazing at her.

1966 – 1967, Le séminaire, Livre XIV: La logique du fantasme

Lacan stresses the importance of the signifying structure in fantasy. He takes as his
starting point the matheme $, which is the logical articulation of fantasy. The
matheme was already introduced in Les formations de l'inconscient, in the graphs of
desire, and was later developed in 1960 in "The subversion of the subject and the
dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious" (Écrits: A Selection) as the first
topology of the subject.

$ represents the division of the subject barred by the signifier that constitutes him.
The sign <> enunciates the relation either of inclusion/implication, or of exclusion
between the two terms. It's a binary system where the verb as such disappears to
leave room for the algebraic sign of a pure relation. Definitions of objet a will vary
over the years; to understand it here, one should go back to the part object of La
relation d'objet et les structures freudiennes, and then address its analysis in
L'angoisse and L'objet de la psychanalyse. In 1960, however, Lacan mentions the
fascination of the fantasy in which "the subject becomes the cut that makes shine in
its inexpressible oscillation".

The objet a would be the primal object, forever lost, the remainder or the product,
which cannot be assimilated because it is real, of the cut operated by the primal
signifier engendering the subject when it repeats itself in absolute difference
(L'identification). "If a is the frame of the subject, this frame falls at the level of the
most fundamental act of life, the act in which the subject as such is engendered, i.e.
the repetition of the signifier." This is the symbolic paternal mark or the phallic
The Seminars of Jacques Lacan 26
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mark since there is no signifier of sexual difference: "The phallus alone is the sex-
unity." The objet a creates a hole constantly filled, in the partial drives, by the
different objets a, the breast, feces, the penis, the gaze or the voice, objects that are
in themselves caught in imaginary substitutions. To understand fantasy, one should
try to determine the logical status of objet a, which can only be accomplished by way
of a topology dealing with geometrical figures. Is objet a situated on the side of the
drive or of desire of which it is the cause? Is it born out of the separation from the
placenta as a part of the body proper or from the division from oneself from the
signifier, the cost that the speaking being has to pay to become a subject? Is there
really an alternative? Lacan talks of a surface where "desire and reality" are "the
right and the wrong sides"; however, the passage from one side to the other is
unnoticeable, as if there were only one side, because "the relation of texture does
not entail any break." Might the fantasy allow oneself to go from the drive to desire
and from desire to the drive, to link them or to disjoint them?

Lacan oscillates between exaltation and bouts of anxiety: "The logic of fantasy is the
most fundamental principle of any logic that deals with formalizing defiles," and at
the same time defers his presentation of "alienation in terms logical calculation"
because its formulation is not yet ready. The reason might have been that "truth is
related to desire," which "creates difficulties for handling it like logicians do." His
aim is to define "a logic that is not a logic, an entirely new logic that I have not
named yet, for it needs to be instituted first." Using the character of Diotima from
The Symposium, he mentions academic Penia (the lack) before psychoanalytic Poros
(male resource) and wonders, "up to what point, between the two, he could let the
obscurity go."

The seminar shifts its course toward the search for a logic of the subject around the
Cartesian cogito, then toward "the sexual act," questioning "the impossible
subjectivization of sex," and of jouissance.

The multiple transformations of Descartes' cogito ergo sum (either I think or I am";
"either I don't think or I am not"; "I am where I don't think," or "I think where I am
not") end with a play of words: Cogito ergo es. The Latin es (you are) marks the
fundamental dependency on the Other and raises the problem of the passage from
objet a to the Other or from the Other to objet a. Applied to desire, "I desire you"
means "I implicate you in my fundamental fantasy" as objet a. Applied to love, "You
are not, therefore I am not"; "You are nothing but what I am"; "You are the nothing
that I am." Now, in German, Es is the id, defined as the "non-I," the impersonal id, is
it the reservoir of drives? Is it the cauldron (with a hole in it) of Freud's witches? Or
is it an aggregate of signifiers?

Lacan elaborates on the notion of "unbeing," désêtre, which would become the mark
of the end of analysis. He elaborates on puns: the unconscious desire is "pure
desire," dés-être like dés-espoir, despair, is an irpas, from the Latin ire, to go and the
negation pas, not, which is an impassé, something that had not gone through, linked
to the desire of the Other, but also an impasse, a dead end, due to repetition. The
The Seminars of Jacques Lacan 27
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interpretation does not entail any solution, issue, to the interpreted desire because
there is no solution, issue, to the unconscious desire that "will always remain a
désirpas (desire-not)." For Lacan, is this knowledge of the truth of the unconscious
desire really the solution, issue to be offered in analysis, the solution to the
unfulfilled desire" of hysteria, to the "prevented desire" of phobia, or to the
"impossible desire" of obsession? By itself, the objet a upholds "the truth of
alienation"; to discover this truth is to discover that "there is no universe of
discourse" because something real (something impossible because not
symbolizable) eludes it.

"The big secret of psychoanalysis is that there is no sexual act," all there is sexuality,
a very different thing. The act has a specific definition: it provokes a signifying
doubling that allows for an insertion of the subject in a chain in which he inscribes
himself. Or it raises the institution of the signifier. But there is no signifier of sexual
difference and none of the feminine sex either. Between man and woman "there is
this third object, objet a, whose always sliding function of substitution makes it
impossible to keep them opposed in whatever eternal essence. It is impossible then
to posit a subject inscribing himself as sexed in the act of conjunction to the subject
of what is called the opposite sex." At the symbolic level, "there is no sexual
rapport": there is merely (a + 1) and (a - 1), where a term marks the difference as a
plus or a a minus. The phallus is "the sex-unity": the 1 symbolizes the
incommensurable.

Lacan uses Marx's analyses of use value and exchange value, and starts his theory of
"man-he" (l'homme-il). The "man-he" is also the man-standard and the man-stallion
(l'homme-étalon), as well as the bull and the poor bearer of the symbol of sex,
doomed to symbolic castration. He does not know how to live since there is no Other
to guarantee him, not even if he were God, marked as he is by castration. The only
safeguard is the construction of a protective society based on masculine
homosexuality. The Father of Freud's primal horde, because he supposedly jouis all
women, sees "his jouissance killed." Then, if the almighty phallus circulates, it is due
to women. "Woman represents the phallus as an exchange value among men; and, if
the power of the penis bears the mark of castration, it is because fictitiously she
becomes what is enjoyed, ce dont on jouit, and circulates as an object of jouissance:
she is the locus of transference of this jouissance value" represented by the phallus.
Through her identification to the use value embodied in the phallus, woman
transforms herself into an object-good. Yet, she does not lack resouirces, such as
masquerade, to act as "man-she," l'homme-elle. "She is inexpungible as a woman
precisely outside the system of the sexual act," or "she has a different use of her own
jouissance outside this ideology." Thus, Lacan establishes "the radical
heterogeneity" of the jouissance of the two sexes whose rapport could only be
problematic. He begins here a reflection that will lead him to Encore, the twentieth
seminar.
The Seminars of Jacques Lacan 28
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1967 – 1968, Livre XV: L'acte psychanalytique

Since La logique du fantasme, where he states that there is not "sexual act," Lacan
questions the difference between the act, l'acte and a mere action, agir. To make
love would be an action, un agir, and to get married an act, un acte, because there is
a commitment and a recognition, which entail repetition and the inscription in the
Other. The signifier will appear soon: the absence of contradiction between Saint
John's "In the beginning was the Word," and Goethe's "In the beginning was the
action." Lacan then asserts "the irreducibility of the sexual act to any truthful
relation." Since love is itself purely narcissistic, a social pact is what remains of a
possible rapport between the sexes.

As to the different types of acts in psychoanalysis, there is the founding act: before,
the effects of the unconscious existed, but nobody knew that they existed. There is
the entrance into analysis and the fact of becoming an analyst, which are decisions
and commitments. On the side of the analysand, there are slips and failures, which
lead Lacan to give an Éloge de la connerie, Praise of Folly. In analysis it is almost
impossible to answer simply to the injunction "render unto truth the things that are
truth's and unto folly the things that are folly's," because the two overlap and then
one finds "the folly of truth even more often than the truth of folly." The passage à
l'acte and the "acting out" are activities that, although they fill a distressing hole,
reproduce the past instead of remembering it in words. On the side of the analyst,
"outside the manipulation of transference, there is no psychoanalytic act." In order
for the analysand to move to the function of analyst, the latter - while pretending to
be the upholder of the subject-supposed-to-know - must accept being "reduced to
the function of cause of a process in which the subject-supposed-to-know is
undone." Moreover, in the end the analyst must accept to be "nothing more than a
waste of the operation represented by the objet a," which will produce an effect of
truth. The position of the analyst is untenable, and this is why he opposes "the most
violent misconstruction, méconnaissance, as to the analytic act itself." Besides, the
analysand who experiences désêtre discovers, when becoming an analyst, that he is
forced to restore for another the subject-supposed-to-know. The transmission
would thus be completed, very different from the passe itself. The psychoanalytic
act, a "setting into act of the subject" and a "setting into act of the unconscious," is
like a tragedy where the hero falls in the end as a piece of trash.

"In the beginning of psychoanalysis is transference," without any intersubjectivity,
because between the two partners the subject-supposed-to-know acts as a third, as
"the pivot from where everything that goes on in transference is articulated." This
pivot is the signifier introduced in the discourse instituted by it, a formation as
though detached from the analysand, which has nothing to do with the analyst's
person. It is "a chain of letters that leads the not-known to frame knowledge," which
concerns desire. The Graph of Desire still guides the analysis but an identity is
asserted between the matheme of the subject-supposed-to-know and the agalma of
Plato's The Symposium, which presents "the pure angle of the subject as the free
The Seminars of Jacques Lacan 29
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rapport to the signifier, a signifier from which both the desire of knowledge and the
desire of the Other are isolated."

Lacan wants to establish, as to the passage from the analysand to the analyst, "an
equation whose constant is the agalma" (this term being a sort of compromise
between objet a and the phallus). Once "the desire that, in its functioning, upholds
the analysand has been resolved, the analysand no longer wants to remove the
possibility of such desire, the remainder which, insofar as it determines his division,
makes him fall from his fantasy and destitute him as subject." Lacan interprets the
depressive position often noticed as the end of the analysis in terms of désêtre and
"subjective destitution. "The subject sees its assurance sink, a self-assurance that
comes from the fantasy in which everybody's opening onto the real is constituted."
The subject realizes that the grasp of desire is nothing other than that of a désêtre.
"In this désêtre what is unveiled is the nonessential nature of the subject-supposed-
to-know; the analyst-to-be is dedicated to the agalma of the essence of desire, even
if it means that the analyst-to-be has to be reduced to an ordinary signifier, since the
subject is the signifier of the pure signifying relation." Does going through the
fantasy, then, mean going toward the drive or toward a confrontation with the
signifier? Thus Lacan answers: "The being of desire meets the being of knowledge to
be reborn from their knot in a strip formed by the only side on which only one lack
is inscribed, that which upholds the agalma." The agalma becomes the signifier of
the bar that is put on the Other (A); the gap of (- Φ) opens in the Other; and the (a)
falls from the Other.

Slavoj Zizek argues that "here we find the inescapable deadlock that defines the
position of the loved one: the other sees something in me and wants something from
me, but I cannot give him what I do not possess - or as Lacan puts it, there is no
rapport between what the loved one possesses and what the loving one lacks. The
only way for the loved one to escape this deadlock is to stretch out his hand toward
the loving one and to return love, that is to exchange, in a metaphorical gesture, his
status as the loved one for the status of the loving one. This reversal designates the
point of subjectivization: the object of love changes into the subject the moment it
answers the call of love. And it is only by way of this reversal that a genuine love
emerges: I am truly in love not when I am simply fascinated by the agalma in the
other, but when I experience the other, the object of love, as frail and lost, as lacking
'it', and my love none the less survives this loss."

1968 – 1969, Livre XVI: D'un Autre à l'autre

Lacan takes a stand in the crisis of the university that follows May 1968: "If
psychoanalysis cannot be articulated as a knowledge and taught as such, it has no
place in Academia, where it is only a matter of knowledge." He rejects non-
conceptualization: structure is the real. Dealing with the passage from objet a to the
Other and from the Other to objet a, Lacan analyzes and combines Pascal, Marx and
The Seminars of Jacques Lacan 30
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the logic of the link between l, the unbroken line, the trait unitaire of L'identification
and a as follows:

To that, he adds questions on feminine jouissance (is it the place of the Other or of
the Thing?), on the nullibiquité, non-ubiquitousness, of the phallus that testifies that
jouissance is real but cannot be symbolized, on the Phallus as a symbol that is
lacking or outside system, and the repetition of the Graphs of Desire.
Marx invented surplus-value, plus-value, and he, Lacan, invented the objet a. He
asserts that he is going to construct the plus-de-jouir so as to isolate the objet a, he
will do so by homology with surplus-value. In the matheme of fantasy, $<>a, "the
being of a is the plus-de-jouir, surplus-jouissance.1 At the level of the enunciation,
perversion reveals "surplus-jouissance in its bare form." The rapport between
surplus-jouissance and surplus-value is the function of the objet a. The perverse has
given to God his true plenitude by giving a back to the Other. Hence, a is in A (the
small other is in the big Other); however, a makes a hole in A. Jouissance is excluded,
the Other is the place where it is known, a is the effect of fall that results from it. So,
after going from a to A, one must go from A to a.

"I mainly talk about a dead God, maybe in order to better free myself from my
relation to a dead Freud." Yet, in Le Pari, Pascal raises the question of the existence
of God. The only true question is that of the subject: Does I exist? Do I exist? "The
nothing that life is," which is at stake for Pascal, is the surplus-jouissance. The
assumption of the loss creates the gap, béance, between the body and its jouissance:
such is the effect of the objet a, the lost object, in the field of the Other. For Pascal,
the central point is "the infinite nothing"; the only salvation is grace, for God's mercy
is bigger than His justice. Grace allows proximity to the desire of the Other in its
various forms: "I ask myself what you want," then "I ask you what you want," which
leads to "Thy Will be Done!" However, this sentence is uttered to a faceless Other.
God's will, for not being our will, comes to lack; then, for lack of God, we are left with
the Father as dead, the Father as a name (the pivot of discourse) and as the rapport
of jouissance to castration. "The Name-of-the-Father is a rift that remains wide open
in my discourse, it is only known through an act of faith: there is no Incarnation in
the place of the Other."

Slavoj Zizek aptly describes surplus-jouissance (lacanian ink 15) as follows:
"So in the case of the caffeine-free diet Coke, we drink the Nothingness itself, the
pure semblance of a property that is effectively merely an envelope of a void. This

1Bruce Fink notes that the translation of plus-de-jouir rendered in Television (New York: Norton, 1989) as
"over-coming" is deficient. Since plus-de-jouir is based on plus-value (Marx's surplus value), it means a
surplus, extra or supplemental jouissance: the plus should be understood in the sense of Encore, More. He
stresses, "The more sensual sense of being 'overcome' with or 'overwhelmed' by pleasure is related to the
Other jouissance.
The Seminars of Jacques Lacan 31
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example makes palpable the inherent link between three notions: that of the Marxist
surplus-value, that of the Lacanian objet a as surplus-jouissance, and the paradox of
the superego, perceived long ago by Freud: the more you drink Coke, the more you
are thirsty; the more profit you have , the more you want; the more you obey the
superego command, the more you are guilty. In all three cases, the logic of balanced
exchange is perturbed in favour of an excessive logic of "the more you give, the more
you owe (or the consumerist version "the more you buy, the more you have to
spend"), of the paradox which is the very opposite of the paradox of love where, as
Juliet put in her immortal words to Romeo, 'the more I give, the more I have'.
The key to this perturbation is the surplus-jouissance, the objet a which exists (or
rather insists) in a kind of curved space in which, the more you approach it, the
more it eludes your grasp (or, the more you possess it, the greater the lack).
Perhaps, sexual difference enters here in an unexpected way: the reason why the
superego is stronger in man is that it is man, not woman, who is intensely related to
this excess of the surplus-jouissance over the pacifying functioning of the symbolic
Law. In terms of the paternal function, the opposition between the pacifying
symbolic Law and the excessive superego injunction is the one between the Name-
of-the-Father (the paternal symbolic authority) and the "primordial father," allowed
to enjoy all women. This rapist "primordial father" is a male (obsessional), not
feminine (hysterical), fantasy: it is man who is able to endure his integration into
the symbolic order only when this integration is sustained by some hidden
reference to the fantasy of the unbridled excessive jouissance embodied in the
unconditional superego injunction to enjoy, jouir to go to the extreme, to transgress
and force constantly the limit. It is man in whom the integration into the symbolic
order is sustained by the superego exception."

1969 – 1970, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis

Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, New York: Norton, 2006

Lacan identifies four viable types of social bond, which regulate intersubjective
relations. Articulations of the symbolic network, the Four Discourses get structured
throughout dramatic reflection: plus-de-jouir and jouissance; the master and the
slave; Marx; knowledge, truth and jouissance; the Father of Totem and Taboo who is
all love - or all jouissance - and whose murder generates the love of the Dead Father,
a father to whom Lacan opposes both the Father presiding over the first idealization
- the one deserving love - and the Father who enters the discourse of the Master and
is thereby castrated ab initio. For Lacan "the death of the father is the key to
supreme jouissance, later identified with the mother as aim of incest."
Psychoanalysis "is not constructed on the proposition 'to sleep with the mother' but
on the death of the father as primal jouissance." The real father is not the father of
biological reality, be he who upholds "the Real as impossible." From the Oedipus
complex Lacan only saves the paternal metaphor and the Name-of-the-Father which
"is positioned where knowledge acts as truth. Psychoanalysis consolidates the law."
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The novelty in this seminar is the return of the hysteric, with Dora and la Belle
Bouche erre - the Beautiful Mouth wanders - an allusion to the dream of the beautiful
butcher's wife analyzed by Freud and carried on in "The direction of the treatment
and the principles of power" (Écrits: A Selection). Three questions: the rapport
between jouissance and the desire for unfulfilled desire; the hysteric who makes
man - fait l'homme or the Master - she constructs him as "a man prompted by the
desire to know"; a new conception of the cure as a "hystericizaton of dicourse,"
which the analyst introduces at the structural level. This leaves untouched hysteria
as attributed to woman - the only discourse where sexual difference comes openly
into play. Castration is "the deprivation of woman," insofar as "she would fulfill
herself in the smallest signifier." Woman is absent from the field of the signifier.

As to the mathemes "a fundamental starting relation" functions as a postulate:

S1 refers to "the marked circle of the field of the Other," it is the Master-Signifier. S2
is the "battery of signifiers, already there" at the place where "one wants to
determine the status of a discourse as status of statement," that is knowledge -
savoir. S1 comes into play in a signifying battery conforming the network of
knowledge. is the subject, marked by the unbroken line - trait unaire - which
represents it and is different from the living individual who is not the locus of this
subject. Add the objet a, the object-waste or the loss of the object that occurred
when the originary division of the subject took place - the object that is the cause of
desire: the plus-de-jouir.

Discourse of the Master:

It is the basic discourse from which the other three derive. The dominant position is
occupied by the master signifier, S1, which represents the subject, S, for all other
signifiers: S2. In this signifying operation there is a surplus: objet a. All attempts at
totalisation are doomed to fail. This discourse masks the division of the subject, it
illustrates the structure of the dialectic of the master and the slave. The master, S1,
is the agent who puts the slave, S2, to work: the result is a surplus, objet a, that the
master struggles to appropriate.

Discourse of the University:

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It is caused by a anticlockwise quarter turn of the previous discourse. The dominant
position is occupied by knowledge - savoir. An attempt to mastery can be traced
behind the endeavours to impart neutral knowledge: domination of the other to
whom knowledge is transmitted. This hegemony is visible in modernity with
science.

Discourse of the Hysteric:

It is effected by a clockwise quarter turn of the discourse of the master. It is not
simply "that which is uttered by the hysteric," but a certain kind of articulation in
which any subject may be inscribed. The divided subject, S, the symptom, is in the
pole position. This discourse points toward knowledge. "The cure involves the
structural introduction of the discourse of the hysteric by way of artificial
conditions": the analyst hystericizes the analysand's discourse.

Discourse of the Analyst:

It is produced by a quarter turn of the discourse of the hysteric in the same way as
Freud develops psychoanalysis by giving an interpretative turn to the discourse of
his hysterical patients. The position of the agent - the analyst - is occupied by objet
a: the analyst becomes the cause of the analysand's desire. This discourse being the
reverse of the discourse of the master, does it make psychoanalysis an essentially
subversive practice, which undermines attempts at domination and mastery?

In any case, this algebra is concerned with the positions, which are fixed:

At the end of the seminar Lacan adds the opposition between 'impossibility' and
'impotence' - impuissance: "the impossible is the real where speech, as objet a,
functions like a carrion" and "impotence protects truth." He states in his new
translation of Wo Es War, soll Ich werden, work is for the analyst and "plus-de-jouir is
for you": "Where plus-de-jouir was, the plus-de-jouir of the other, me, insofar as I
utter the psychoanalytic act, I must come."

There is the story of the three Congolese, analyzed by Lacan after WWII: "Their
unconscious functioned according to the rules of the Oedipus complex, it was the
unconscious that had been sold to them at the same time as the laws of colonization,
The Seminars of Jacques Lacan 34
Synopsis from lacan.com
an exotic form of the discourse of the Master, a regression before imperialist
capitalism." Are the capitalistic or imperialistic discourses mentioned only
metamorphoses of the discourse of the Master?

As to the envers of psychoanalysis, sometimes it is the discourse of the Master when
it functions as a foil. Sometimes it is unconscious discourse as the knowledge
located where wrong and right sides (analytic discourse) cannot be separated,
following the Möbius strip. "The envers is assonant with truth; one moves to the
envers, but the envers does not explain any right side."

Radiophonie" (Autres écrits) is an interview recorded while L'envers... is taking place.
In it Lacan declares that if "language is the condition of the unconscious, the
unconscious is the condition of linguistics." Freud anticipates Saussure and the
Prague Circle when he sticks to the patient's words, jokes, slips of the tongue, and
brings to light the importance of condensation and displacement in the production
of dreams. The unconscious is the fact "that the subject is not the one who knows
what he says. Whoever articulates the unconscious says that it is either that or
nothing." Linguistics has no hold on the unconscious since it leaves as a blank that
which produces effects on the unconscious, the objet a, the focus of the analytic act -
of any act. "Only the discourse that defines itself in terms given by psychoanalysis
manifests the subject as other, whereas science, by making the subject a master,
conceals him, so the desire that gives way to him bars the subject for me without
remedy." There is only one myth in Lacan's discourse: the Freudian Oedipus
complex. "In psychoanalysis, as well as in the unconscious, man knows nothing of
woman, and woman nothing of man. The phallus epitomizes the point in myth
where the sexual becomes the passion of the signifier." There is, however, no
algebraic formula for the unconscious discourse: "...the unconscious is only the
metaphorical term designating the knowledge only sustained when presented as
impossible, so that it can conform by being real - real discourse."