Reminiscence and Remembering

In Seminar XXIII, Lacan draws a structural distinction between reminiscence and remembering in order to clarify the ontological status of his own theoretical invention — the Borromean knot as a writing of the Real. Remembering (in the Freudian sense of Erinnerung) belongs to the order of the Symbolic: it is the retrieval of a signifying trace, the reconstitution of the past within the articulated chain of speech and representation. It operates through the logic of the signifier, in which meaning is retrospectively conferred by the signifying chain — what Lacan elsewhere theorises as Nachträglichkeit (deferred action). Reminiscence, by contrast, carries a different epistemic valence: it is the sense of encountering something already-known, an apparition of the pre-symbolic or the pre-representational that seems to well up spontaneously from within, as though the subject were "putting a finger on" something that was already there. Lacan treats this sense as "quite illusory" — an imaginary capture that mistakes the Real for a content that could be re-membered, as though the Real had always been lying in wait as memory.

The theoretical move is to identify Lacan's invention of the Borromean knot not as reminiscence — not as the recovery of an already-present Real — but as a forcing: a traumatic, symptomatic inscription that constitutes a genuinely new symbolic form. By distinguishing reminiscence from remembering, Lacan is simultaneously distinguishing the Imaginary (the illusory sense of recognition, of things "coming back") from the Symbolic (the articulated work of inscription) and locating his own theoretical labour — his knotting — on the side of the Symbolic as sinthome rather than on the side of an imaginary spontaneous rediscovery. The Real that the Borromean knot writes is not remembered; it is forced into symbolisation for the first time.

This concept appears in jacques-lacan-seminar-23-cormac-gallagher (p. 160), embedded within Lacan's extended meditation on the Borromean Knot as his own sinthome. The distinction between reminiscence and remembering is not developed as a standalone theoretical elaboration but functions as a hinge that articulates Lacan's self-understanding of his own invention. Its immediate context is the claim that the knot is a "forcing" — a term carrying the resonance of set-theoretic forcing — and that the Real it inscribes is not something spontaneously recalled but something newly and symptomatically produced.

In relation to the cross-referenced canonical concepts, the distinction maps onto several structural axes simultaneously. Against the Imaginary, reminiscence is aligned: it belongs to the register of the specular, of illusory recognition, of the ego's sense that it is simply "seeing again" what was always there — consistency mistaken for content. Against the Letter and the Symbolic, remembering and, more precisely, the Borromean writing of the Real are aligned: the knot is a material inscription, a letter in the Real, a trace that does not pre-exist its own writing. The concept also touches Knowledge (savoir): reminiscence would be the imaginary form of knowledge-that-knows-itself, while the forcing of the knot produces knowledge that did not know itself until it was written. Lalangue is implicated insofar as the distinction itself is made possible by the equivocal materiality of Freud's own vocabulary — Lacan is reading Freud against Freud, attending to the letter of Freud's energetics to extract a distinction Freud's system required but could not itself articulate. The concept is thus a local specification within Seminar XXIII's broader argument about the sinthome as the fourth ring that ties together an otherwise dissolving RSI structure — here deployed reflexively, to think the status of Lacan's own theoretical act.

Seminar XXIII · The SinthomeJacques Lacan · 1975 (p.160)

it is what, what allows us to put a finger on, but in a quite illusory way, what may be, what may be what is called reminiscence... This is how the two functions are distinguished in Freud... it is in this that reminiscence is distinguished from remembering.

The phrase "in a quite illusory way" is the theoretically loaded crux: it marks reminiscence as belonging to the Imaginary register of false recognition, distinguishing it categorically from remembering as a Symbolic operation, and the reference to "two functions" in Freud signals that this is not a phenomenological observation but a structural distinction already latent — but unthematised — in Freud's own conceptual apparatus.