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Lacan Seminar 1965 object a

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIII: The Object of Psychoanalysis

Jacques Lacan

by Jacques Lacan

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Synopsis

Lacan's Seminar XIII, "The Object of Psychoanalysis" (1965–1966), pursues a single sustained argument: that the objet petit a — irreducible remainder, cause of desire, non-specularizable waste product of signification — is not a content but a topological structure, and that only two-dimensional surface theory (Möbius strip, cross-cap, torus, Klein bottle, projective plane) can provide an adequate, non-metaphorical account of the divided subject's constitution. Beginning from the relationship between science and truth as established in the Cartesian-Fregean tradition, Lacan shows that the subject of science is a barred subject whose division is grounded in the structural fall of the objet a, not in any experiential content. He develops this through a sequence of theoretical moments: Green's survey of the o-object in Lacan's own earlier work; the topology of surfaces as structural support for splitting; Pascal's Wager as a theory of the signifier of the barred Other; Dante's Divine Comedy and the mirror of Narcissus as illustration of the non-specular nature of the o-object; a travelogue of America serving as negative mirror for the concept of repetition; the scopic drive and projective geometry; and finally an extended, multi-session reading of Velázquez's Las Meninas — developed in dialogue with Michel Foucault — as a "trap for the look" that concretizes the structural position of the gaze as objet a. The seminar concludes by revisiting jouissance, castration, the Oedipus complex, and the phallic function, arguing that Freud's own circuit remains incomplete until the o-object is recognized as the non-biological, topological condition of desire, and that feminine jouissance is structurally placed at the side of the Other rather than at the side of the master — thereby exposing what Lacan calls "Hegel's error."

Distinctive contribution

Seminar XIII is distinctive in the corpus precisely because it is the seminar in which Lacan most systematically pursues the claim that topology is not an optional illustration but the very materiality of psychoanalytic structure. In earlier seminars (notably Seminar XI) the topological figures appear as supporting metaphors; here Lacan insists, repeatedly and explicitly, that the Möbius strip, cross-cap, torus, and Klein bottle ARE the structure of the subject — that the cut on the Möbius strip does not represent the divided subject but IS the divided subject, constitutively and not secondarily. This move — from topology-as-metaphor to topology-as-structure — is Seminar XIII's most radical theoretical contribution, and it is nowhere argued with equal sustained rigor elsewhere in the primary corpus.

A second distinctive contribution is the extended theorization of the scopic drive and the gaze as objet a via projective geometry. By working through Desargues, Alberti, and Pappus/Pascal, and by subjecting Velázquez's Las Meninas to a multi-session structural analysis conducted in explicit dialogue with Foucault's reading in Les Mots et les Choses, Lacan produces the most detailed account available in any of the seminars of how the field of vision is organized around an irreducibly split subject point — the vanishing point and the "fundamental line" — such that the o-object (look/gaze) falls precisely in the gap between the two and cannot be captured in any mirror. This constitutes a uniquely dense intersection of art history, projective geometry, and psychoanalytic drive theory not replicated elsewhere in the corpus.

Finally, Seminar XIII is the locus of an important transitional argument about jouissance: it is here that Lacan first maps feminine jouissance topologically — placing it on the side of the Other (O) rather than the side of the master — and explicitly contests the Hegelian master-slave dialectic as a frame for sexual jouissance, anticipating the arguments of Seminar XX (Encore) by nearly a decade. The seminar thus sits at the hinge between the "object-a period" and the later work on sexuation and the not-all.

Main themes

  • Topology as the non-metaphorical structure of the divided subject
  • Objet petit a as non-specularizable cause of desire and structural hole
  • The scopic drive, the gaze, and projective geometry
  • Science, truth, and the subject of science (Descartes-Frege axis)
  • Pascal's Wager and the signifier of the barred Other S(Ø)
  • The mirror of Narcissus and the non-specular in Dante's Divine Comedy
  • Las Meninas as structural diagram of fantasy, gaze, and the big Other
  • Jouissance, castration, and the phallic function beyond the Oedipus complex
  • Demand, desire, and the toric structure of neurosis
  • Repetition versus inert accumulation: the psychoanalytic past

Chapter outline

  • Seminar 1 (Table of Contents): The Object of Psychoanalysis 1965–1966 — p.2
  • Seminar 2: The Subject, Lack, and the Scientific Object (8 December 1965) — p.3-10
  • Seminar 3: Topology and the Subject (15 December 1965) — p.14-27
  • Seminar 4: André Green on the O-Object (22 December 1965) — p.28-45
  • Seminars 4–5 (Discussion Sessions): Stein, Conté, Melman — Narcissism, Predication, and the Analyst's Word — p.46-115
  • Seminar 5: The O-Object (5 January 1966) — p.59-75
  • Seminar 6: Science, Logic, and the Möbius Strip (12 January 1966) — p.76-90
  • Seminar 7: Mirror Stage and the Divine Comedy — Dante and Narcissus (19 January 1966) — p.84-98
  • Seminars 9–10: Pascal's Wager I and II (2–9 February 1966) — p.118-137
  • Seminar 12: Lacan on America (23 March 1966) — p.139-150
  • Seminar 14: Summary of Crucial Problems; Jouissance (20 April 1966) — p.152-163
  • Seminar 15: Jones' Female Sexuality; The Four O-Objects (27 April 1966) — p.164-181
  • Seminar 16: Visual Structure of the Subject (4 May 1966) — p.182-197
  • Seminar 17: Perspective and Las Meninas I (11 May 1966) — p.198-214
  • Seminar 18: Michel Foucault and Las Meninas II (18 May 1966) — p.215-229
  • Seminars 19–20: Summary of the Year's Argument; Las Meninas III–IV; Topology of the O-Object (25 May – 1 June 1966) — p.230-255
  • Seminar 21: Jouissance and Castration — Re-thinking Freud (8 June 1966) — p.252-272
  • Seminar 22: O-Objects and Safouan's Case (15 June 1966) — p.273-288

Chapter summaries

Seminar 1 (Table of Contents): The Object of Psychoanalysis 1965–1966 (p.2)

The table of contents lists the twenty-two sessions of the seminar under the heading 'The Object of Psychoanalysis 1965–1966.' It provides the dates and session titles, charting the arc from 'Science and truth' (December 1, 1965) through sessions on topology, the o-object, Pascal's Wager, a report on America, sessions on the visual structure of the subject and Las Meninas (Seminars XVI–XX), through to the final sessions on jouissance, castration, and Safouan's case (Seminars XXI–XXII). This non-substantive document establishes the structural skeleton of the year's argument: the seminar moves from an epistemological foundation (science/truth/subject) through formal topology, then into extended analysis of the scopic field, and closes with questions of jouissance and sexuality.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Topology, Scopic Drive, Jouissance, Subject

Seminar 2: The Subject, Lack, and the Scientific Object (8 December 1965) (p.3-10)

Lacan opens the year by reflecting on his audience's desire for the spectacle of thinking-in-progress, which he treats as symptomatic: analysts prefer the 'show-biz' dimension of the seminar, a preference itself structured by the very mechanisms of transference and narcissism the seminar will theorize. He reframes his own cogito — 'I think, therefore I cease to be' — against Descartes, and situates the year's problem as the divided subject's relation to truth and knowledge. The scientific object, Lacan argues, is constitutively a 'passage' or metabolization of lack: it is never a simple presence but always the mark of something missing, indexed by number (which itself emerges from set theory as the notation of a hole — 'there is one missing'). This is illustrated through the cave-man example and Kronecker's claim that whole numbers are a gift of God, which Lacan takes as revealing that number is not a measuring apparatus but the formalization of the object as lack.

Key concepts: Subject, Lack, Signifier, Truth, Knowledge, Splitting of the Subject

Seminar 3: Topology and the Subject (15 December 1965) (p.14-27)

This session introduces two-dimensional surface topology as the formal support of the seminar's entire argument. Lacan opens with a schema of alienation — the forced choice between disappearance and mutilation — and situates the o-object at the intersection of truth and knowledge (rendered via Euler circles, but with explicit caution that these are metaphorical). He then introduces the work of the Japanese Buddhist monk Jiu Oun as an oblique way of approaching the topology of the cut, before developing the Möbius strip as the central figure: the strip's essential property is that the cut traced in its centre is itself the Möbius strip. Division is therefore not secondary to the subject but constitutive of it. The Möbius strip's single edge, its non-orientability, and the fact that every cut produces another Möbius strip are not illustrations of subjectivity but structural supports for it.

Key concepts: Möbius Strip, Splitting of the Subject, Objet petit a, Topology, Alienation

Seminar 4: André Green on the O-Object (22 December 1965) (p.28-45)

This session is given over to a long paper by André Green, 'J. Lacan's o-object, its logic, and Freudian theory: convergences and interrogations.' Green systematically reconstructs the trajectory of the o-object through Lacan's own earlier schemas: from the mirror-stage diagram where (o) mediates subject and Other, through Schema R where (o) mediates subject and ego ideal, to the formulation of o as the object of desire fallen from the field of the Other through the series of castrations (weaning, sphincter training, castration proper). Green's distinctive contribution is to read the o-object through Frege's logic of the zero and the suture (via Miller), arguing that the double structure of zero — as the concept of the non-identical to itself and as the first object — maps the double structure of the objet a as both absence and remainder. Green also raises the question of the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz (representative of representation), the distinction between word-representations and thing-representations, and the status of affect as signifier, thereby expanding the Lacanian framework in the direction of Freudian metapsychology.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Suture, Narcissism, Mirror Stage, Signifier, Lack Notable examples: Freud, Die Verneinung; Frege, Foundations of Arithmetic

Seminars 4–5 (Discussion Sessions): Stein, Conté, Melman — Narcissism, Predication, and the Analyst's Word (p.46-115)

These discussion sessions elaborate and critique Conrad Stein's two articles on narcissistic regression in the analytic situation, with interventions by Conté and Melman. Stein's thesis — that the analytic situation involves a topical regression toward primary narcissism in which 'it speaks' (the subject de-differentiates from the analyst) — is taken up as a clinical illustration of the theoretical problem of specularization. The word of the analyst is identified as operating either toward narcissistic fusion or toward the rupture of that fusion; this ambivalence corresponds to the distinction between Bejahung (affirmative identification) and Verneinung (denial/negation). Lacan's interventions — particularly in the fourth closed seminar — reframe the analyst's position: it is not that of truth's 'faithful servant' but of the structural place of the o-object, which is non-specularizable and can only operate as a cut. The discussion of predication (formal, imaginary, and reflective registers; 'he speaks,' 'it speaks,' 'I speak') is the most technical moment, elaborating how the analytic subject's discourse moves across registers of the first, second, and imaginary third person.

Key concepts: Narcissism, The big Other, Objet petit a, Suture, Transference, Subject Supposed to Know

Seminar 5: The O-Object (5 January 1966) (p.59-75)

Lacan opens the new year with a declaration that the o-object is the 'rejected stone' that has become the cornerstone — ubiquitous in analytic practice but consistently misrecognized. The seminar's central philosophical move is a critique of spherical, three-dimensional, metric space as the implicit cosmology of Western epistemology (from Aristotle through Descartes to contemporary object-relations theory), and the identification of this spherical space with the mirror-logic of knowledge as adequatio. Against this, Lacan introduces the torus as the minimal topological structure that breaks from the sphere: the torus introduces two topologically irreducible types of loop (around the inner void and around the tube), and their relationship formally captures the knot between demand and desire — a desire always presupposes at least two demands and vice versa. This is the structural ground for replacing the myth of autoerotic fusion (which requires a spherical subject) with the openness-at-the-center that the torus formalizes.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Topology, Demand, Desire, Möbius Strip, Subject

Seminar 6: Science, Logic, and the Möbius Strip (12 January 1966) (p.76-90)

Lacan returns to the torus and undertakes a more rigorous topological analysis, distinguishing cuts that produce one circuit from cuts that produce two, and showing how the structure of the subject as barred ($) is formally captured by the strip that results from cutting a Möbius strip equidistant from its edge — a strip applicable to the torus, enveloping the Möbius strip but not itself a Möbius strip. This is the most technically demanding moment in the seminar's surface topology. Against the logical tradition that grounds truth in bivalence (alethes, true or false), Lacan argues that modern propositional logic cannot account for the o-object hidden in the suture of the subject — the object that is neither the alethes nor the false but the unlocatable remainder that suture covers. The projective plane and Möbius strip are then introduced as the adequate structures for thinking the conjunction-in-difference proper to subjectivity, against the sphere's false homogeneity.

Key concepts: Möbius Strip, Topology, Splitting of the Subject, Truth, Suture, Cross-cap

Seminar 7: Mirror Stage and the Divine Comedy — Dante and Narcissus (19 January 1966) (p.84-98)

The seminar turns to literature through a presentation by Mme Parisot on Roger Dragonetti's article 'Dante et Narcisse ou les faux monnayeurs de l'image,' followed by Lacan's own theoretical commentary. Dragonetti traces the two appearances of Narcissus in the Divine Comedy: in Hell, in the episode of the counterfeiters (Master Adam, whose sin is fabricating florins with impure alloy), and in Paradise, where Dante mistakes the souls in the moon for reflected images. The counterfeit mirror — water transmuted into the mirror of Narcissus — figures the primal capture of consciousness by its own image: the falsification of the sign (impure gold) allegorizes the subject's self-enclosure in its own reflection, which is the structure of perversion. In Paradise, the o-object appears as what cannot be specularized: when Dante believes he sees a mirror, he finds that the image reflects nothing, for the o-object appears 'as an image and an image of nothing.' Lacan reads this as a precise figuration of the non-specularizable nature of the objet a, and links Dante's poetic construction to courtly love and the structure of sublimation.

Key concepts: Mirror Stage, Narcissism, Objet petit a, Imaginary, Fantasy, Desire Notable examples: Dante, Divine Comedy; Dragonetti, Dante et Narcisse

Seminars 9–10: Pascal's Wager I and II (2–9 February 1966) (p.118-137)

These two sessions undertake a sustained reading of Pascal's Wager that reconstructs it as a theory of the signifier of the barred Other S(Ø). Lacan opens by distinguishing the God of the philosophers (supreme being, ground of existence) from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — the God who cannot be known in his being, whose existence is radically suspended. This suspension, Lacan argues, introduces the division between being and existence that is also the division of the subject. Pascal's Wager then turns on a structural feature: the stake is the existence of the partner (God), and the infinity of potential happiness is confronted with the finite pleasure of the present. Lacan shows that the 'rule of parts' — Pascal's theory of chance and the division of stakes in interrupted games — formalizes the subject's relation to the signifier: the lost object (objet a) is not implicated in ordinary signifying loss but appears as the pure remainder when the Wager reveals the field of the Other as barred. The gambler's passion is structurally homologous: what is wagered is not simply money but a mode of encounter with the real in which chance functions as the condition of desire's object.

Key concepts: The big Other, Objet petit a, Truth, Desire, Jouissance, Signifier Notable examples: Pascal, Pensées

Seminar 12: Lacan on America (23 March 1966) (p.139-150)

Returning from his first American visit, Lacan uses a personal travelogue to theorize a theoretical distinction crucial to the seminar: the difference between a 'past without repetition' — inert cultural accumulation (exemplified by Pop Art, the perfectly preserved University of Chicago campus, Diego Rivera's fresco at the Hotel Del Prado) — and the psychoanalytically operative past structured by repetition. America functions as a 'retroactive figure of an adherence to something which was never lived': it presents the past as perfectly archived, frozen, without the cut of the signifier. Against this 'past-as-block,' psychoanalytic history requires the second circuit — the Möbius-like return that transforms rather than replicates. Lacan also describes his American seminars, in which he centered his argument on the distinction between demand and desire and announced that topology would provide the structural substance for showing how one demand generates a duplicity of desire.

Key concepts: Repetition, Signifier, Objet petit a, Desire, Demand Notable examples: Pop Art; Diego Rivera, Un rêve de dimanche après-midi sur l'Alameda

Seminar 14: Summary of Crucial Problems; Jouissance (20 April 1966) (p.152-163)

This session reads a summary Lacan wrote for the École des Hautes Études yearbook on Seminar XII ('Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis') and uses it as a pivot to reintroduce the problem of jouissance. The summary rehearses the key claim that 'the being of the subject is split,' that the unconscious has the structure of language, and that censorship is not a metaphor but cuts into something material. Lacan then elaborates the analyst's structural implication in the symptom: the analyst is the 'subject supposed to know,' but his being-of-knowledge is inflected in the confrontation with the patient's truth, just as Oedipus — manifesting as a being of knowledge — gives his hand to the Sphinx. The session also develops a polemical account of topology against relativism: topology is not just another kind of knowledge that 'gets around the difficulty' but a radical structural recasting of the subject's position. Jouissance is introduced as what language/desire both defends against and compels us to question, placed on the hither side of the big Other and caught in the net of subjective topology as sexual jouissance.

Key concepts: Jouissance, Subject Supposed to Know, Topology, Splitting of the Subject, Knowledge, Truth

Seminar 15: Jones' Female Sexuality; The Four O-Objects (27 April 1966) (p.164-181)

Opening with Augustine's 'inter urinas et faeces nascimur,' Lacan reframes this statement as being about the birth of the subject rather than the living body, and uses it to introduce the four o-objects: anal, phallic (penis/-phi), gaze, and voice. The gaze and voice had remained 'half in the shadow' even in Freudian theory despite their active role; Lacan announces he will take up the look next session and recommends Foucault's Las Meninas chapter in preparation. A presentation by Mlle Grazien then surveys Jones' 1927 article on the early development of female sexuality and Jones' concept of aphanisis — the total disappearance of sexual capacity — which Lacan has previously valorized in relation to the fading of the subject. The session also touches on Jones' theory of symbolism (all symbols are, in varying degrees, symbols of the phallus), and on the mediating function of the phallus in feminine jouissance: the penis becomes a signifier of the loss that occurs at the level of jouissance through the function of law.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Phallus, Jouissance, Castration, Scopic Drive, Demand Notable examples: Jones, The early development of female sexuality; Foucault, The Order of Things

Seminar 16: Visual Structure of the Subject (4 May 1966) (p.182-197)

Lacan opens the scopic turn of the seminar by situating the problem of the visual subject: the classical notion of a subject who unifies the perceptual field by being its 'pure unifying spirit' is precisely the myth of the subject that topology displaces. The visual structure of the subject does not rest on a point-to-point correspondence between surfaces (retina, picture plane) but on a topological structure in which the subject is inscribed within the figure rather than standing outside it. Working through projective geometry — Desargues, Pascal (the hexagon theorem), and the principle of duality (which transposes point and line) — Lacan shows that the apparatus of perspective already implies a split subject point: the vanishing point (the subject qua seen, on the horizon line) and a second, structurally necessary but invisible point that falls in the gap between the subject and the picture plane. This gap is where the objet petit a (the look) is placed. The screen — the principle of the analytic 'doubt' — is the surface that supports everything presented to the subject but also hides something behind it.

Key concepts: Gaze, Scopic Drive, Topology, Objet petit a, Subject, Fantasy Notable examples: Desargues, Projective Geometry; Alberti, De Pictura; Pascal, hexagon theorem

Seminar 17: Perspective and Las Meninas I (11 May 1966) (p.198-214)

Lacan works through the perspectival construction in greater detail, establishing the two subject points: the vanishing point on the horizon line (determined by the plane through S parallel to the ground plane) and the second, invisible 'fundamental line' point (determined by the intersection of the picture plane with the ground plane, projected to infinity). This second point is structurally indispensable but cannot be designated as one designates the vanishing point — it is 'totally hidden,' falling in the gap between two parallel lines as projected onto the figure plane. Lacan introduces Las Meninas as the painting that makes this structural gap visible. Against the art-critical reading that the painting is 'about' looks that intersect, Lacan notes that none of the looks in the painting actually meet: Doña Margarita does not look at the maid, the dwarfs look elsewhere, Velázquez himself is not within reach of touching the canvas. What is at stake is not the phenomenology of gazes but the structural position of the painter's subject point — which is doubled, split, between the visible (vanishing) and the invisible (hidden) subject of the perspectival construction.

Key concepts: Gaze, Topology, Objet petit a, Splitting of the Subject, Fantasy, Imaginary Notable examples: Velázquez, Las Meninas; Alberti, De Pictura; Desargues, Projective Geometry

Seminar 18: Michel Foucault and Las Meninas II (18 May 1966) (p.215-229)

Lacan salutes Michel Foucault's presence at the seminar and opens with an explicit dialogue between his own reading and Foucault's analysis in the first chapter of Les Mots et les Choses. Foucault had read Las Meninas as a representation of the world of representations — a picture in which the act of representation is itself represented, characteristic of the Classical episteme. Lacan accepts this as a 'particularly relevant point of intersection' while redirecting it: what interests him is not the epistemic structure of the Classical age but the structural topology of the subject in the scopic field. The royal couple's mirror at the back of the painting occupies the position of the big Other — pure vision, pure reflection, an 'empty Other' that sustains what does not need it to be sustained. Velázquez's formula, spoken in Lacanian language, is: 'You do not see me from where I am looking at you' — the fundamental formula of the scopic drive and the irreducible asymmetry of the gaze relation. The picture is not a mirror but a trap for the look: the painting seizes us because it positions us as the missing Other whose gaze is supposed to anchor the whole scene.

Key concepts: Gaze, The big Other, Objet petit a, Fantasy, Scopic Drive, Mirror Stage Notable examples: Velázquez, Las Meninas; Foucault, The Order of Things; Balthus (painting, unnamed)

Seminars 19–20: Summary of the Year's Argument; Las Meninas III–IV; Topology of the O-Object (25 May – 1 June 1966) (p.230-255)

Lacan recapitulates the year's argument through two channels: a written summary (prepared for the École des Hautes Études) that traces the move from object relations to the scopic drive, and a final theoretical elaboration of Las Meninas. The painted mirror at the back of Las Meninas is not a mirror in the strict topological sense — mirror and window are structurally distinct — and what the royal couple's position at the mirror enacts is the function of the big Other as the empty, purely reflective condition of the scene. Velázquez refuses to 'traffic with his Dasein': unlike a bad painter who produces only self-portraits whatever he paints, Velázquez introduces himself into the picture at the precise point where his structural position (the split subject of perspective) requires it. The Infanta at the center of the painting is the 'hidden object' — the slit (fente) around which the whole gyneceum is organized. Lacan then gives the most explicit account of the o-object's topological identity: it is the 'hole' in surfaces like the torus, cross-cap, and Klein bottle — not a represented object but the very condition of representation, detachable from the surface with scissors but not thereby made visible. The neurotic's toric structure — demand aimed at the desire of the Other, desire aimed at the demand of the Other — is identified as the limitation of neurosis.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Gaze, Topology, The big Other, Cross-cap, Scopic Drive Notable examples: Velázquez, Las Meninas

Seminar 21: Jouissance and Castration — Re-thinking Freud (8 June 1966) (p.252-272)

The final open seminar gathers the year's argument around jouissance, castration, and the critique of Hegel. Lacan opens with a mathematician's confession that 'in mathematics one does not say what one is speaking about; one quite simply speaks it' — an aperçu that captures the topology's own mode of operating: the structure 'speaks itself' without naming its object. The o-object is then returned to its bodily origins: the breast (oral), the feces (anal), the penis/(-phi) — and the seminar challenges the entire tradition of 'oblativity' and genital theory as fundamental obscurantism. Against Hegel, Lacan argues that jouissance remains on the side of the slave (who renounces it) not the master (who desires pure prestige): the Hegelian story cannot explain the social cement of the society of masters, while Freud's answer — the homosexual bond, founded on the prohibition of the jouissance of the feminine Other — does. Feminine jouissance is structurally placed at the side of the Other and cannot be captured in the masculine-feminine polarity, because there is no polarity — only the phallus as mediating signifier. The Oedipus complex is reread as requiring two full circuits (like the Möbius strip) to complete its meaning, and castration is reaffirmed as the signifier of the loss at the level of jouissance through the function of law.

Key concepts: Jouissance, Castration, Phallus, Real, The big Other, Fantasy Notable examples: Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit; Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Seminar 22: O-Objects and Safouan's Case (15 June 1966) (p.273-288)

The final closed seminar opens with Lacan's commentary on a paper by Clavreul on the perverse couple, from which he draws the thesis that 'perversion is normal' — the clinical question is why there are abnormal perverts, not what perversion is. He recommends the Mémoires de l'Abbé de Choisy en femme as a case study of perversion conducted without distress or social rupture. He then recapitulates the year's key theoretical advances: the gaze as the privileged objet petit a whose function as (-phi) articulates the castration complex, and the Oedipus Complex re-read via the Möbius strip as requiring two full circuits. Safouan then presents a case study of the duplication of the feminine object in the love life of an obsessional patient — a patient who splits his erotic investments between a narcissistic love object ('as if every part of her body were put in a jewel case') and an anaclitic object who places him in a passive position. The dream of the friend's leg in a stocking yields Safouan's interpretation: 'It is a jewel-case,' which temporarily restores the patient's sexual potency. Lacan concludes by linking the jewel-case/stocking to Napoleon's remark about Talleyrand — 'a silk stocking full of shit' — returning to the anal o-object as the condition of desire of the Other.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Castration, Fantasy, Jouissance, Narcissism, Phallus Notable examples: Mémoires de l'Abbé de Choisy en femme; Safouan's case (obsessional patient)

Main interlocutors

  • Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
  • Sigmund Freud, Die Verneinung
  • Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id
  • Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
  • Sigmund Freud, Screen Memories
  • Sigmund Freud, The Unconscious
  • Gottlob Frege, Foundations of Arithmetic
  • René Descartes, Meditations
  • Blaise Pascal, Pensées
  • Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
  • Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
  • Heidegger, Being and Time
  • Girard Desargues, Projective Geometry
  • Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura
  • Jacques-Alain Miller (suture)
  • André Green
  • Ernest Jones (female sexuality, aphanisis)
  • Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy
  • Velázquez, Las Meninas
  • Roger Dragonetti, Dante et Narcisse
  • Lacan, Écrits
  • Lacan, Seminar XI
  • Lacan, Seminar XII

Position in the corpus

Seminar XIII sits at the center of what is called Lacan's 'object-a period,' between Seminar X (Anxiety, 1962–63) where the objet a is first systematically formalized, Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts, 1964) where the gaze and voice are introduced as partial drives, and Seminar XIV (The Logic of Fantasy, 1966–67) and Seminar XV (The Psychoanalytic Act, 1967–68) where the consequences of the o-object for analytic practice are worked out. Readers coming to Seminar XIII should have already encountered Seminar X (for the full elaboration of anxiety and the o-object as cause) and Seminar XI (for the drives, the gaze, alienation/separation). Those interested in the topological program should read it alongside Seminar IX (Identification, 1961–62) where the Möbius strip and cross-cap are first introduced, and Seminar XXII (RSI, 1974–75) where the knot-topology develops into the Borromean structure. Seminar XIII is also the most direct companion to the Écrits piece 'Science and Truth' (1966), which is the written version of the first session, and to Lacan's late essay 'Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a' in Seminar XI.

Within the secondary corpus, Seminar XIII is in close dialogue with works on the gaze (Todd McGowan's work, Joan Copjec's Read My Desire) and with accounts of topology in Lacan (Gabrielle Kasimir, Arkady Plotnitsky). Its treatment of Las Meninas in dialogue with Foucault makes it essential reading alongside Foucault's The Order of Things and secondary literature on their intersection. The seminar is less well-known than Seminars VII, XI, or XX, partly because it has not been officially published, but it arguably contains the most sustained and technically rigorous account of topology-as-structure in all of Lacan's teaching, and should be read by anyone who wishes to understand why Lacan insists that topology is not a metaphor.

Canonical concepts deployed