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Lacan Seminar 1964 object a

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XII: Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis

Jacques Lacan

by Jacques Lacan

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Synopsis

Lacan's Seminar XII (1964–65), titled "Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis," pursues a systematic attempt to ground psychoanalytic practice in a rigorous logic of the subject — one that takes its orientation not from psychology, ego-adaptation, or intersubjectivity, but from the structural relationship between the subject, the signifier, and the objet petit a. The seminar opens by interrogating the very foundations of language (via Chomsky's syntactic structures and Saussure) in order to establish that syntax and grammar never exhaust sense, and that the signifier's operation always implicates a divided, vanishing subject. From there it develops, across a sustained series of sessions and student presentations, three interlocking problematic: (1) topology as the only adequate model for subjective structure (Klein bottle, Möbius strip, torus, cross-cap); (2) the logic of number and lack derived from Frege's Grundlagen der Arithmetik — showing that zero, defined by the concept of the non-identical-to-itself, is the originary operator from which the subject is generated and always already sutured into the signifying chain; and (3) identification as the core unresolved problem of analytic experience, irreducible to specular ego-formation and requiring instead a confrontation with the non-specularizable objet a. The seminar builds toward a triadic economy of Subject, Knowledge (unconscious), and Sex, in which sex names the impossible-to-know point that drives the entire dialectic, and in which the analyst's position — neither the subject supposed to know nor a mere interlocutor — can only be understood as a structural function in relation to this irreducible lack. By its closing sessions, Lacan maps neurosis and perversion onto this triad, articulates the end of analysis as the encounter with a barred Other whose knowledge is nothing, and announces that the following year's seminar will focus on the nature of the objet petit a.

Distinctive contribution

Seminar XII occupies a distinctive place in the Lacanian corpus as the seminar where topology ceases to be illustrative and becomes constitutively theoretical: Lacan insists with unusual explicitness that surfaces (Klein bottle, Möbius strip) are not metaphors for subjective structure but its only correct formalisation, because the subject, like these surfaces, has no interior/exterior distinction amenable to three-dimensional volume-thinking. This is not merely asserted but demonstrated through sustained engagement with the topological properties themselves — the circle of retrogression on the Klein bottle, the non-orientability of the Möbius strip, the cut that yields a remainder. No other seminar of the "object-a period" makes the mathematical necessity of topology so central to the analytic concept of lack and desire.

Equally distinctive is the seminar's extended, collaborative elaboration of the Fregian grounding of lack. The presentations by Yves Duroux and Jacques-Alain Miller (the latter's famous "Suture" paper is here delivered in its original context) work through Frege's Grundlagen der Arithmetik in order to establish that zero — the number assigned to the concept of the non-identical-to-itself — is structurally homologous to the Lacanian subject: something that appears only to disappear, whose very inscription generates the successor and thus the chain. The exchange between Miller and Leclaire over whether the analyst "sutures" gives this seminar a remarkable internal dialectical tension absent from most of Lacan's solo teaching, and the three-way schema of Subject/Knowledge/Sex introduced here anticipates the later Borromean topology. Finally, the seminar's closing sessions — the case of Philip via Leclaire, Montrelay's reading of Marguerite Duras's Lol V. Stein, and the discussion of the Platonic Sophist — demonstrate Lacan's conviction that psychoanalytic, logical, and literary discourses can independently converge on identical structural truths, a methodological claim about the universality of the logic of the signifier that is argued here more systematically than anywhere else in the primary corpus.

Main themes

  • Topology as constitutive theory of subjective structure (Klein bottle, Möbius strip, torus)
  • The logic of lack: Frege's zero as structural origin of the subject and the signifying chain
  • Suture: the subject's disappearing inscription into the signifying chain
  • Identification and the non-specularizable objet petit a as the second pole of analytic experience
  • The triadic economy of Subject, Knowledge, and Sex with sex as the impossible-to-know
  • The proper name as singular and the limits of classificatory logic
  • Transference, the Subject Supposed to Know, and the analyst's position as structural function
  • The end of analysis as encounter with the barred Other and the nature of the objet a
  • Neurosis (hysteria and obsession) differentiated by their relation to the demand and desire of the Other
  • The convergence of logic (Plato's Sophist, Frege), literature (Duras, Dostoevsky), and psychoanalysis on the same structural coordinates

Chapter outline

  • Seminar 1: Wednesday 2 December 1964 — Syntax, Sense, and the Signifier — p.1-6
  • Seminars 2–4: December 1964 – January 1965 — Topology, the Klein Bottle, and the Proper Name — p.2-51
  • Seminar 5–6: January 1965 — Euler Circles, Identification, and Topology of Demand — p.55-79
  • Seminar 7: Wednesday 27 January 1965 — The o-Object in the Clinic; Duroux on Frege — p.80-94
  • Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965 — Desire as Cut; Topology of the Klein Bottle Continued — p.95-109
  • Seminar 9: Wednesday 24 February 1965 — Miller's 'Suture': Logic of the Signifier — p.110-128
  • Seminar 10: Wednesday 3 March 1965 — Identification, Incorporation, and the Genesis of One from Zero — p.129-141
  • Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 March 1965 — Demand, the Purloined Letter, and the Möbius Cut — p.142-154
  • Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965 — The Scream, Silence, and the Voice as Objet a; Alcibiades — p.156-169
  • Seminar 13: Wednesday 24 March 1965 — Introduction; Closed Seminar Responses to Leclaire (Oury, Valabrega, Markovitz) — p.170-191
  • Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965 — Safouan, Leclaire, and the Name-of-the-Father; Exquisite Difference — p.192-214
  • Seminar 15: Wednesday 7 April 1965 — Cratylus, Nomination, and the Memorial Function of the Signifier — p.215-227
  • Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965 — The Analyst's Position; Subject, Knowledge, and Symptom — p.228-237
  • Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965 — Subject/Knowledge/Sex: The Triadic Economy; Meiosis and the Lost Object — p.238-248
  • Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965 — The Game, the Divided Subject, and the Analyst's Desire — p.249-258
  • Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965 — Leclaire vs. Miller on Suture; Audouard and Milner on the Sophist — p.259-278
  • Seminar 21: Wednesday 2 June 1965 — Miller's Reply to Leclaire on Suture — p.279-293
  • Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965 — Sinn/Zwang/Wahrheit: The Triadic Structure and the Entzweiung — p.294-313
  • Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965 — The Nature of the Objet a; Neurosis, Perversion, Psychosis; De Natura Objecti a — p.305-316
  • Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965 — Montrelay on Duras's Lol V. Stein; Zinberg on American Psychoanalysis — p.317-334

Chapter summaries

Seminar 1: Wednesday 2 December 1964 — Syntax, Sense, and the Signifier (p.1-6)

Lacan opens the seminar with Chomsky's famous nonsense sentence 'Colourless green ideas sleep furiously,' using it to drive a wedge between grammaticality and meaning (sense vs. significance). The sentence is grammatically well-formed but semantically anomalous — yet Lacan's juxtaposition of it with Racine's alexandrines suggests that what is called 'sense' in poetry is not reducible to semantic coherence but arises instead from consonantal and phonematic resonance, from the signifier's materiality rather than from reference. This opening move establishes the year's guiding orientation: the subject is always already implicated in the signifying chain, not as a meaning-giving consciousness but as an effect of its operation, and the referent of desire (not the semantic referent) is what is 'hollowed out' in the interval between two signifiers.

Key concepts: Signifier, Sense vs. Meaning, Signifying chain, Syntax, Subject Notable examples: Chomsky, Syntactic Structures; Racine, Andromaque (Songe, songe, Céphise)

Seminars 2–4: December 1964 – January 1965 — Topology, the Klein Bottle, and the Proper Name (p.2-51)

These sessions also introduce the problem of the proper name as the paradigm case of the singular. Lacan examines linguists (Gardiner, Sorensen), logicians (Russell), and philosophers who all fail to account for what the proper name actually announces. The syllogism 'Socrates is mortal' is used to show that Socrates is not simply a member of a class but something irreducible — a singular that cannot be captured by Euler-circle class logic. Lacan connects this to the forgetting of proper names in Freud (the Signorelli example) and the Name-of-the-Father: it is always at the level of the proper name, the 'nominal evocation,' that Freudian slippage occurs. Topology and the proper name thus converge on the same problem: how to formalise the subject as neither universal nor particular but singular.

Key concepts: Klein bottle, Möbius strip, Topology, Proper name, Singular vs. Universal, Name of the Father, Subject Notable examples: Chomsky, Syntactic Structures; Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Signorelli); Russell, Principia Mathematica; Aristotle, syllogistic

Seminar 5–6: January 1965 — Euler Circles, Identification, and Topology of Demand (p.55-79)

Building on the Klein bottle's topology of demand, Lacan shows how demand — structured as a spiral on an ordinary torus — takes on a fundamentally different character on the Klein bottle: the circuit necessarily crosses what he calls the 'circle of retrogression,' reversing its direction. This models how demand in the analytic field never simply loops back to itself but always involves a structural reversal that escapes the demand-Other dyad. The o-object is introduced here as the irreducible remainder that falls from this cut — the 'voice' (illustrated through Socrates's daimon and his relation to death) is one such object, neither specular nor symbolisable but always present as a cause of desire.

Key concepts: Identification, Euler circles, Klein bottle, Demand, Objet petit a, Voice, Möbius strip, Torus Notable examples: Socrates (Apology, Phaedrus); Aristotle, Analytics

Seminar 7: Wednesday 27 January 1965 — The o-Object in the Clinic; Duroux on Frege (p.80-94)

The second movement is Duroux's presentation 'Number and Lack,' a careful exposition of Frege's Grundlagen der Arithmetik. Duroux shows that neither empiricist (psychological) nor formalist accounts of number — which rely on the ambiguous term Einheit (unit) — can ground the passage from a collection to its number without an arbitrary coup de force. Frege resolves this by grounding zero in pure logic: zero is the number assigned to the concept of the non-identical-to-itself. Since nothing can be non-identical to itself without destroying the field of truth, zero marks the place of the excluded — the structural correlate of lack. The successor operation is then grounded in a double contradiction (contradictory contradiction), the negation of a negation. This is immediately framed by Lacan as the structural homology that illuminates the relationship between the subject and the signifier.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Counter-transference, Transference, Lack, Zero, Frege, Successor function, Number Notable examples: Frege, Grundlagen der Arithmetik; Clinical case of borderline patient

Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965 — Desire as Cut; Topology of the Klein Bottle Continued (p.95-109)

The session returns to the clinical example introduced in Seminar 7, drawing out the structural lesson about the o-object in different clinical structures (neurosis, psychosis, perversion). The analyst's failure in the case is framed as a failure to distinguish between the two poles of analytic experience: the pole of the ego ideal (the specular, identifiable) and the pole of the objet a (the non-specularizable, which centres specularisation without itself appearing in the mirror). Lacan insists that the end of analysis cannot consist in the rectification of the ego ideal alone — both poles must be reckoned with, and the o-object cannot be reduced to a parental imago or a developmental stage.

Key concepts: Desire, Cut, Klein bottle, Objet petit a, Ego ideal, Identification, Transference, A-cosmic surface Notable examples: Munch, The Scream (introduced in later context); Clinical borderline case continued

Seminar 9: Wednesday 24 February 1965 — Miller's 'Suture': Logic of the Signifier (p.110-128)

Miller demonstrates that the generation of the number series in Frege — zero (assigned to the non-identical-to-itself), then one (assigned to the concept 'identical to zero'), then the successor — recapitulates the Lacanian formula 'the signifier represents the subject for another signifier.' The subject appears in order to disappear, always finding 'one more' (and one less) than what was counted. The structural homology between Frege's arithmetic and the analytic subject is not analogical but rigorous: both are governed by the originary function of lack. Miller also introduces the concept of the 'dissimulated chain' — the chain whose concealment is the condition of the apparent chain's intelligibility — as the structural definition of the unconscious.

Key concepts: Suture, Signifier, Subject, Lack, Zero, Successor function, Frege, Alienation, Signifying chain Notable examples: Frege, Grundlagen der Arithmetik; Shackleton Antarctic expedition (anecdote of counting)

Seminar 10: Wednesday 3 March 1965 — Identification, Incorporation, and the Genesis of One from Zero (p.129-141)

Lacan examines Freud's account of primordial identification with the father (Einverleibung, incorporation) in Group Psychology Chapter VII, arguing that incorporation is logically prior to all specular or conscious/unconscious distinctions. The body enters here not as a biological given but as what is introduced by libido — a radical materialism whose support is not biology but the body as that which, since the Cartesian reversal, we no longer know how to speak about except in terms of extension. The 'genesis of one from zero' — illustrated by the void of the mustard pot, the 'one Tuborg' — establishes the subject as the filling of a lack, from which the symmetry of demand (having the object/being the object) first becomes possible.

Key concepts: Identification, Incorporation, Lack, Zero, One, Body, Demand, Objet petit a, Signifier Notable examples: Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; Descartes, piece of wax; Zen parable (Tchi Un)

Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 March 1965 — Demand, the Purloined Letter, and the Möbius Cut (p.142-154)

Poe's 'Purloined Letter' is invoked to recall the earlier argument about the autonomy of the signifying chain: the binary combinatory (zero/one alternation) generates, from the zero-to-zero pulsation, the radical function of the Ich in language — the fleeting knot of the subject who speaks himself by not speaking himself. The Möbius strip is then introduced as the simplest model for how this cut functions: the subject's self-inscription on the surface of desire is always a cut that reveals the non-orientable. The session begins to sketch the relationship between this topological cut and the image — the image at the limit of the image — that will become the scream and the gaze.

Key concepts: Demand, Signifier, Möbius strip, Repetition, Zero/one, Desire, Cut, Subject Notable examples: Poe, The Purloined Letter; Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (repetition)

Seminar 12: Wednesday 17 March 1965 — The Scream, Silence, and the Voice as Objet a; Alcibiades (p.156-169)

Lacan then turns to the Symposium — Alcibiades's account of Socrates — as the privileged model for the transference. Alcibiades, who recounts his failed seduction of Socrates, is the paradigm of the subject who attributes to the analyst (Socrates) a hidden, mysterious agalma — a precious inner object — and who mistakes the objet a for a specular treasure that can be obtained. The analyst's (Socrates's) response is to point to Agathon, redirecting desire: the objet a is not in the analyst. This session also introduces the three registers of the o-object (breast, waste, voice, gaze) and begins to differentiate their clinical incidence across neurosis, psychosis, and perversion.

Key concepts: Voice, Objet petit a, Silence, Demand, Transference, Agalma, Gaze, Subject Supposed to Know Notable examples: Munch, The Scream; Plato, Symposium (Alcibiades and Socrates)

Seminar 13: Wednesday 24 March 1965 — Introduction; Closed Seminar Responses to Leclaire (Oury, Valabrega, Markovitz) (p.170-191)

Markovitz's paper (not in the French typescript) appears to develop the phonematic analysis further (pe, je, li in 'poord'jeli') and connects the formula to Philip's oscillation between the name of the analyst (Serge) and the name of the father, arguing that analysis is a 'reincarnation of the signifier' in which the subject re-inscribes himself in his language. These interventions collectively demonstrate the seminar's method: clinical material is read through the structural categories (proper name, signifying chain, objet a, Name-of-the-Father, fundamental fantasy) rather than through developmental or ego-psychological interpretive frameworks.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Signifier, Proper name, Name of the Father, Transference, Objet petit a, Phoneme, Signifying chain Notable examples: Leclaire's case of Philip (Poord'jeli); Lady with the Unicorn tapestries

Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965 — Safouan, Leclaire, and the Name-of-the-Father; Exquisite Difference (p.192-214)

Leclaire's own contribution is focused on the concept of the 'exquisite difference' — the irreducible singular difference that subtends the obsessional's relation to the signifier. The paradigm case is the 'acid fringe of sweetness': a pure, bodily, pre-imagistic sense of pure difference that cannot be captured by any signifier but that the signifier connotes as 'pure antinomy.' This is the phenomenological entry point for the subject's constitution as desiring — the circuit of sense from one body to another, organised around an inevitable gap (the nipple, the maternal dehiscence), through which desire is affirmed as inextinguishable. The proper name discussion continues, with Leclaire's analysis of how Philip's name functions as both singularising and alienating mark.

Key concepts: Name of the Father, Castration, Desire, Signifier, Identification, Exquisite difference, Proper name, Obsessional neurosis Notable examples: Leclaire's case of Philip; Freud, case of the Rat Man (Dick signifier)

Seminar 15: Wednesday 7 April 1965 — Cratylus, Nomination, and the Memorial Function of the Signifier (p.215-227)

The session uses the example of the cosmonaut Leonov — who no one thought to call an 'angel,' though the word was structurally available — to illustrate how nomination cannot be arbitrary: new wine cannot simply be put into old names, and the resistance to 'angel' as a signifier reveals how old signifiers carry structural weight (the angels of scripture, the good angel as objet a). The key theoretical claim is that the signifier represents the subject for another signifier, and this formula already bars any simple theory of communication (emitter/receiver, information theory). The cybernetic and biological uses of 'information' are critiqued as covertly re-installing a subject of knowledge without acknowledging it.

Key concepts: Signifier, Nomination, Proper name, Master signifier, Point de capiton, Truth, Subject Supposed to Know Notable examples: Plato, Cratylus; Cosmonaut Leonov (angel anecdote); Dostoevsky, Diary of a Writer (five men, one word)

Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965 — The Analyst's Position; Subject, Knowledge, and Symptom (p.228-237)

Lacan then analyses three symptomatic cases from Freud — Dora (the cough as signifier of the oral-genital substitution; Vermögen/impotence), Little Hans (the fable about the stork as counter-signifier), and the Rat Man (slimming in relation to the signifier 'Dick') — to demonstrate that the symptom always involves a question of knowledge: in the symptom, there is always indicated that something is to be known, and that the subject does not know it. This is what distinguishes the analytic symptom from the medical sign (dullness indicating hepatitis) and gives psychiatry its ontological status as a field in which the signifier, not the organism, is at stake. The session ends on the 'impasse': the analyst's position might seem to be a fetishism of impossible knowledge.

Key concepts: Symptom, Knowledge, Subject Supposed to Know, Signifier, Analyst's desire, Demand, Identification Notable examples: Freud, Dora (cough, Vermögen); Freud, Little Hans; Freud, Rat Man (Dick signifier)

Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965 — Subject/Knowledge/Sex: The Triadic Economy; Meiosis and the Lost Object (p.238-248)

Lacan introduces meiosis — the chromosomal reduction that produces the polar body as expelled remainder — as a speculative biological figure for the lost object. The polar globule is expelled precisely as the complement of what is reduced and lost in the formation of the sexual cell; it may illuminate the phantastical function of the lost object, incarnated by objects that may have more than an external relationship to this biologically expelled residue. Lacan uses this to make the point that the psychoanalyst is no less excluded from knowledge of sexual difference than any other subject: analysis belongs to the Western tradition of the subject in relation to the missing signifier, not to traditions (Taoist, oriental) that begin from the male/female opposition as a given signifying dyad.

Key concepts: Subject, Knowledge, Sex, Objet petit a, Lost object, Unconscious, Real, Signifier Notable examples: Meiosis and polar body (biological speculation); Taoism contrasted with Western subject-tradition

Seminar 19: Wednesday 19 May 1965 — The Game, the Divided Subject, and the Analyst's Desire (p.249-258)

The analyst's desire is defined here with unusual precision: the analyst cannot be the subject supposed to know, because the third player — the reality of sexual difference — is always already present, and the analysand's defensiveness is directed against this reality rather than against the analyst. The analyst's ruse is not to play the game of mutual deception but to separate out from the defensiveness a progressively purer form of the fundamental fantasy. This is what the analyst's desire consists in: not to teach the patient anything, but to learn from the patient how to handle the objet a and its relationship to the division of the subject. Analysis verifies, in a radical fashion, that desire is the desire of the Other — not because the analyst's desire is imposed on the patient, but because the analyst makes himself the desire of the patient.

Key concepts: Game theory, Divided subject, Objet petit a, Analyst's desire, Fantasy, Real, Subject Supposed to Know, Desire Notable examples: Pascal, probability theory; Von Neumann, game theory; Anecdote of the three-year-old girl and her father

Seminar 20: Wednesday 26 May 1965 — Leclaire vs. Miller on Suture; Audouard and Milner on the Sophist (p.259-278)

Audouard and Milner then present papers on Plato's Sophist, which Lacan has been urging participants to read as a proto-structural text. Audouard reads the dialogue's structure of fisherman/fish/Sophist as a model for the analytic encounter: who is the fish, who is the fisherman? The Stranger tries to define the Sophist by dichotomy but is himself caught in the Sophist's net. Milner's presentation is more technical: he argues that Plato's hierarchy of genera in the Sophist — being, rest, motion, the same, the other — is a logical necessity (minimal group to support binary opposition of blending/non-blending), and that non-being arises not as a sixth genus but as the very condition of computability, the 'locus of zero.' The subject identified with non-being disappears into the proper name, anticipating the Lacanian structure of the subject as effect of the signifier.

Key concepts: Suture, Signifier, Subject, Non-being, Sophist, Number, Proper name, Psychoanalyst's position Notable examples: Plato, Sophist; Polyphemus and Outis (No-one); Palamedes

Seminar 21: Wednesday 2 June 1965 — Miller's Reply to Leclaire on Suture (p.279-293)

The session also introduces Milner's key finding from the Sophist: the signifier's identity is constituted at its root by the non-identical-to-itself, by lack. Non-being is not one genus among others but the locus of zero, the condition of the whole number series and of any computability. The subject — identified with non-being in Plato's Sophist — disappears into the proper name, unable to name itself except through the other's discourse. Lacan closes by anchoring his project in the triad subject/knowledge/sex mapped onto the Symbolic/Imaginary/Real, and locates the Real as the dimension the analyst is structurally excluded from — which is precisely why taking the path of logic is the paradoxical route toward it.

Key concepts: Suture, Signifier, Subject, Non-being, Knowledge, Real, Symbolic, Imaginary Notable examples: Plato, Sophist; Frege, Grundlagen der Arithmetik

Seminar 22: Wednesday 9 June 1965 — Sinn/Zwang/Wahrheit: The Triadic Structure and the Entzweiung (p.294-313)

Lacan introduces a topological model — a strip folded three times to form a triangle — whose three sides exhibit a structural asymmetry: two sides are symmetrically folded with respect to each other, but the third (the junction of the subject to knowledge) is non-symmetrical. This asymmetry models the Entzweiung: the division of the subject cannot be resolved by any specular or symmetrical operation. Castration is named as the name of this negativity, the impossibility of the copula, through which the subject is integrated into the truth of sex. The session also revisits the number two (dyad) as the number that is always the stumbling block of being and the One — from Plato's Parmenides and Sophist through Aristotle's account of Plato's lecture to Simplicius — anticipating the objet a as the structural locus of the real beyond knowledge.

Key concepts: Entzweiung, Splitting of the Subject, Castration, Real, Truth, Symptom, Sinn/Zwang/Wahrheit, Möbius strip, Dyad Notable examples: Frege, Sinn and Bedeutung; Aristotle via Simplicius on Plato's lecture on number; Folded strip (topological demonstration)

Seminar 23: Wednesday 16 June 1965 — The Nature of the Objet a; Neurosis, Perversion, Psychosis; De Natura Objecti a (p.305-316)

The session explicitly warns against the clinical trap of interpreting the o-object in its faecal species as the truth of the obsessional: to do so merely satisfies the neurotic's demand and does not confront the objet a in its function as cause of desire. The end of analysis is formulated as the signifier of a barred Other whose knowledge is nothing — not an identification with the analyst, not a 'perfectly analysed' conclusion, but the ability to tolerate one's relations with psychoanalysis itself and to sustain the truth in its real effects. Lacan insists against psychologism as the radical deviation: to look for the real that psychoanalysis deals with in the psychological is the negation of psychoanalysis.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Neurosis, Hysteria, Obsessional neurosis, Perversion, Psychosis, Castration, Demand, End of analysis, Real Notable examples: Möbius strip (triangular fold)

Seminar 24: Wednesday 23 June 1965 — Montrelay on Duras's Lol V. Stein; Zinberg on American Psychoanalysis (p.317-334)

The formula 'Lol V. Stein' is analysed as a word with the structure of a pure present-absent word — a 'hole-word' that can close the circuit of sense but which Lol is incapable of pronouncing. The novel also demonstrates the alienating dialectic of desire (desire is the desire of the Other; the subject exists in the form of the other's desiring discourse) and the objet a as the body-remainder constituted by what is irretrievably missing. The session concludes with a second contribution by an unnamed speaker on Norman Zinberg's account of the 'ethical illness' of American psychoanalysis — its co-optation by social sciences, cinema, and capitalist ostentation — which Lacan uses to frame the stakes of his own teaching as its resistance to psychologism and to the deformation of psychoanalysis into a unitary language for fragmentary practices.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Gaze, Desire, Hole-word, Proper name, Fantasy, Real, Subject Notable examples: Marguerite Duras, The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein; Zinberg on American psychoanalysis; Hiroshima mon amour

Main interlocutors

  • Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
  • Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
  • Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
  • Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
  • Gottlob Frege, Foundations of Arithmetic (Grundlagen der Arithmetik)
  • Plato, Sophist
  • Plato, Symposium
  • Plato, Cratylus
  • Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
  • Heidegger, Being and Time
  • Descartes, Meditations
  • Aristotle, De Interpretatione
  • Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica
  • Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures
  • Dante, De vulgari eloquentia
  • Jacques-Alain Miller (Suture presentation)
  • Yves Duroux (Frege presentation)
  • Serge Leclaire (Philip case and Poord'jeli)
  • Michèle Montrelay (Duras reading)
  • Marguerite Duras, The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein
  • Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky, Diary of a Writer
  • Lacan, Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts)

Position in the corpus

Seminar XII sits at the hinge between Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964) and Seminar XIII (The Object of Psychoanalysis, 1965–66). It inherits from Seminar XI the four concepts — the unconscious, repetition, the transference, the drive — and the concept of alienation-as-vel, but it substantially advances their formalisation. Where Seminar XI establishes the objet a as cause of desire and introduces the distinction between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the statement, Seminar XII works out the logical and topological infrastructure required to sustain these claims: the Fregian derivation of the subject from lack (suture), the Klein bottle as non-orientable surface of desire, and the triadic economy of Subject/Knowledge/Sex that will anchor Lacan's later work. It is therefore the necessary reading between Seminar XI and the later object-a seminars (XIII on the object, XIV on the Logic of Fantasy, XVI on From an Other to the other). Readers coming from Seminar XI will find here the mathematical grounding for claims that Seminar XI stated but did not fully derive; readers approaching the sexuation formulae of Seminar XX will find here their topological and logical prehistory.

Within the broader Lacanian corpus, Seminar XII is the primary locus for Miller's suture concept (later published in Cahiers pour l'analyse) and Duroux's Frege presentation — both of which became canonical texts of the Althusserian/Lacanian structuralist moment. It is also where the Platonic Sophist is most systematically read as a proto-logic of the signifier, anticipating the close engagement with antiphilosophy in the later Lacan. Scholars interested in the relationship between Lacanian theory and analytic philosophy (Frege, Russell), or between Lacanian theory and literary reading (Duras, Poe), will find Seminar XII uniquely rich. It should be read alongside Écrits (especially 'The Subversion of the Subject' and 'Position of the Unconscious') and alongside Miller's published 'Suture' paper, which was delivered here in its original form.

Canonical concepts deployed