Lacan Seminar 1967 object a

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XV: The Psychoanalytic Act

Jacques Lacan

by Jacques Lacan

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Synopsis

Seminar XV, delivered by Jacques Lacan in 1967–68 under the title "The Psychoanalytic Act," undertakes to isolate and formalize what is genuinely at stake in the act performed by the psychoanalyst — an act that, Lacan argues, has never before been properly named, let alone theorized. The central argument proceeds in three interlocking movements: first, the psychoanalytic act is distinguished categorically from mere "doing" or motor behavior, and shown to be constituted by its inscription in the symbolic order; second, the act is located not at the entry into analysis (on the analysand's side) but at its termination — the moment Lacan calls "the pass" — when the Subject Supposed to Know falls and the analyst is reduced to the objet petit a; third, this terminal structure is formalized through the logic of quantification (universal and particular propositions, Frege's Begriffsschrift) and shown to bear directly on the "not-all" structure of the unconscious, sexuation, and the impossibility of the sexual relation. The seminar develops from Seminar XIV's "Logic of the Phantasy" and traces the forced choice of alienation ("either I do not think or I am not") through to the rewriting of Freud's "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" as "Wo $ tat... muss Ich (o) werden" — the analyst must become the waste-product (objet a) of the new order they introduce. The year is interrupted by the events of May '68, which Lacan reads as an unintended enactment of the "act" dimension the seminar had been theorizing, and the seminar closes with a ceremonial address in which Lacan identifies Verleugnung (disavowal) as the concept he had reserved for the analyst's relation to the Subject Supposed to Know, and acknowledges that the seminar delivered only a fraction of what he had intended to say.

Distinctive contribution

Seminar XV is the only place in the Lacanian corpus where the concept of "the psychoanalytic act" is introduced and systematically developed as a formal concept in its own right, distinct from action, behavior, and symptomatic doing. While Seminar XI theorizes the four fundamental concepts and Seminar XIV develops the logic of the phantasy, Seminar XV takes the structure produced at the end of analysis — the pass, the destitution of the Subject Supposed to Know, the reduction of the analyst to the objet a — and treats this not as a clinical observation but as the formal site from which the concept of the act in general must be rethought. The seminar's distinctive move is to read the analyst's position through the mathematics of quantification: it is precisely the "not-all" structure of the universal proposition that explains why "not all knowledge is conscious" does not yield a positive unconscious knowledge, and why the analyst's function cannot be that of a subject of knowledge. This makes Seminar XV the crucial bridge between the logic of the phantasy (Seminar XIV) and the later theory of the four discourses and sexuation (Seminars XVII and XX).

The seminar is also distinctive for its sustained, polemical confrontation with psychoanalytic institutions. Lacan repeatedly argues that the analytic establishment systematically conceals the psychoanalytic act — that there is a structural Verleugnung at work in the way training analyses and the consecration of analysts are organized. The figure of Winnicott is used as a case study: someone who, despite being the most clinically astute of British object-relations thinkers, is pulled by the very force of the untheorized act into positions that negate the analytic stance (taking the place of truth, acting rather than interpreting). The Marxist analogy — the analysand as assembly-line product, the analyst as a kind of alienated laborer — gives the institutional critique an unusual political-economic edge, one that is then given sudden historical weight by the May '68 interruption. No other Lacanian text combines the formal rigor of logical quantification with this degree of institutional and political self-reflexivity.

Main themes

The psychoanalytic act as distinct from action, behavior, and symptomatic doing
The pass: the structural passage from analysand to analyst via the fall of the Subject Supposed to Know
The Subject Supposed to Know as the constitutive illusion of transference and its necessary subversion
Alienation and the forced choice ('either I do not think or I am not') as the logical structure of the analytic situation
Logical quantification (universal/particular, Frege's Begriffsschrift) as the formal apparatus for the unconscious and the 'not-all'
The objet petit a as the structural residue of the analytic act and the cause of desire
Institutional disavowal (Verleugnung) and the psychoanalytic establishment's occlusion of the act
The rewriting of Freud's 'Wo Es war' as the formula of the analyst's self-dissolution into the objet a
May '68 as an unexpected historical enactment of the act-dimension the seminar theorizes
The impossibility of the sexual relation and jouissance as the ethical horizon of psychoanalysis

Chapter outline

Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967 — p.1-11
Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967 — p.12-30
Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967 — p.31-45
Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967 / Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968 — p.46-83
Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968 — p.71-83
Seminar 7: Wednesday 24 January 1968 — p.84-95
Seminar 8: Wednesday 31 January 1968 (Lacan absent — discussion session) — p.96
Seminar 9: Wednesday 7 February 1968 — p.97-112
Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968 — p.109-123
Seminar 11 & 12: Wednesday 28 February and 6 March 1968 — p.124-136
Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968 — p.137-147
Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 March 1968 — p.148-161
Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 March 1968 (Closed Seminar — question and answer session) — p.162-180
8 and 15 May 1968: Strike Notes — p.181-186
Lecture of 19 June 1968 (Closing Ceremonial Address) — p.187-198
Annex 3: Lacan's Summary for the École Pratique des Hautes Études Yearbook — p.199-206

Chapter summaries

Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967 (p.1-11)

Lacan inaugurates the seminar by insisting that 'the psychoanalytic act' is a strange locution that has never been properly theorized, despite the word 'act' being familiar in clinical discourse (symptomatic acts, acting out, Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life). His opening move is categorical: the act cannot be reduced to motor behavior, energetic discharge, or the physiological reflex as understood in ego-psychology or Pavlovian experimentation. The act is constituted by its inscription in the symbolic order — it implicates the subject, and specifically the unconscious, as 'activated' (mis en acte) in a way that distinguishes it from mere action.

The Pavlovian conditioned reflex serves as a structural illustration rather than a model. Lacan argues that Pavlov, despite his materialist intentions, inadvertently demonstrates the very logic of the signifier: the experimenter 'receives his own message in an inverted form.' The laboratory animal's response to the bell rather than the food is a figure for the speaking being's relation to language, not for neurophysiology. This structural miscognition is, Lacan insists, symptomatic of a broader ideological occlusion — which is precisely what the concept of the psychoanalytic act must pierce.

Knowledge (savoir) is carefully distinguished from knowing (connaissance): Cantor's diagonal proof is invoked to show that a truth-bearing combinatorial can exist — and determine a field — before any subject 'knows' it. This distinction between savoir and connaissance sets up the central problematic of the seminar: if there is an unconscious knowledge, what kind of subject could be said to hold or enact it, and what kind of act would be required to make contact with it?

Key concepts: The Act, Signifier, Unconscious, Knowledge, Splitting of the Subject, Language Notable examples: Pavlov's conditioned reflex experiments; Cantor's diagonal proof and the transfinite

Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967 (p.12-30)

Lacan continues the distinction between act and doing by taking up the symptomatic act as Freud theorizes it in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The symptomatic act — the slip, the parapraxis, the accidental gesture — is posited not in spite of but because of its apparent triviality: it is precisely where one is 'not thinking' that the signifying dimension of the act is most naked. Lacan insists that the motor aspect of the act is not the gesture itself but the intention that sets it in motion, and that its retroactive (nachträglich) inscription as signifying is not an addition but constitutive.

The seminar introduces the figure of 'stupidity' (la connerie) as a structural, quasi-intransitive function: not an insult but a formal property of the overlap between truth and the sexual act. Lacan argues that the sexual act is characterized by an inherent inappropriateness for enjoyment, a structural mis-meeting, and that it is within this dimension — where truth is irreducibly compromised by a kind of constitutive 'stupidity' — that the psychoanalytic act must operate. The example drawn from a Winnicott critique (reading a passage from a 1955 article on counter-transference) begins to sharpen the contrast between a normative, ego-psychological discourse about analysis and the properly analytic act.

The discussion of Freud's own mistakes in the Interpretation of Dreams — slips that Freud attributes to something 'held back' in his own interpretive process — is used to show that even the founder of analysis systematically eluded the question of the psychoanalytic act. The analyst's symptomatic acts (slips of the pen, errors of attribution) are as susceptible to analysis as the patient's; what remains untheorized is the act by which the analyst constitutes himself as analyst.

Key concepts: The Act, Symptom, Signifier, Truth, Jouissance, Language Notable examples: Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life (errors in dream interpretation); Winnicott's article on counter-transference (1955); Fenichel's 'genital character'

Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967 (p.31-45)

This session pivots to the question of transference and its relation to the psychoanalytic act. Lacan begins from Winnicott's remark that the word 'self' 'knows more than we do' — a remark he finds striking precisely because it comes from someone not associated with a linguistic orientation. Winnicott's observation serves as an entry point into the problem of what kind of knowledge is at stake in the analytic situation, and whether transference can be legitimated by an appeal to the analyst's 'objectivity.'

Lacan's central claim is that transference is not an obstacle to be managed but is itself constituted by the Subject Supposed to Know — a concept he introduces here as structural and not merely descriptive. From the first session, the analysand presupposes that the analyst already knows; and it is precisely this presupposition that makes the analytic situation possible. But the analytic act proper is defined by the analyst's capacity to displace that function — to feign its support while knowing it is destined to fall — and this displacement is the condition of truth, not of knowledge.

The institutional dimension enters here with force. Lacan argues that there is a systematic blackout in analytic societies about the end of training analysis — no one has articulated what happens 'on the analyst's side' at the conclusion of a training analysis, and this is structurally linked to the suppression of any account of the psychoanalytic act. The most frenzied miscognition of the act comes precisely from those who practice it. The Meno is evoked to frame the question of where knowledge 'was' before it was known, setting up the problematic of a knowledge without a pre-established subject.

Key concepts: Subject Supposed to Know, Transference, Knowledge, The Act, Unconscious, Analysand Notable examples: Winnicott on 'self' and counter-transference; Plato, Meno (Socrates questioning the slave)

Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967 / Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968 (p.46-83)

These two sessions, bridged in the manuscript, develop the topology of the act through three 'levels of mathesis' drawn from the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: 'I read,' 'I write,' 'I lose.' Analysis, Lacan argues, begins with 'I lose' — the slip, the stumbling, the parapraxis — and this is not incidental but constitutive of the field. The three registers (Symbolic, Imaginary, Real) are mapped onto a triangular diagram: Truth at the symbolic pole, Jouissance at the Real, and Knowledge as an imaginary idealization, with the barred Subject ($), the unary stroke, and the objet petit a as the three projected points. Winnicott's 'transitional object' is cited as a clinical illustration that points toward, but falls short of, the full concept of the objet a as the subject's first object of enjoyment.

Seminar 5 introduces the act through the figure of the New Year: an act is always related to a beginning, and especially to where no natural beginning exists. The psychoanalytic act is defined as that which constitutes a true beginning where none naturally exists. This leads to the central formalization of the seminar: the forced choice of alienation — 'either I do not think or I am not' — taken from the Logic of the Phantasy, is now identified as the structural formula of the psychoanalytic act. The 'arche-point' (zero, the mark, the beginning) is already marked before it is chosen, and the effect of alienation has already taken place.

The session then places the psychoanalytic act within a genealogy of theories of the act: Aristotle (the exemplary act), religious direction (the act in the eyes of God, good intentions), Kant (the act regulated by a universal maxim), Hegel's 'law of the heart,' and the political act of Marxism. Against all of these, Lacan proposes a rewriting of Freud's formula: 'Wo $ tat... muss Ich (o) werden' — where the subject worked (in the double sense of having just ceased and being about to act), I must become the waste-product (o-object) of the new order I introduce. The analyst's self-dissolution into the objet a is the condition — not the failure — of the act.

Key concepts: The Act, Objet petit a, Alienation, Jouissance, Logical Time, Subject Supposed to Know Notable examples: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (three levels of mathesis); Winnicott's transitional object; Freud's 'Wo Es war, soll Ich werden'; Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (law of the heart)

Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968 (p.71-83)

This session elaborates the structural passage from analysand to analyst — what Lacan calls the 'tipping over' of completed analysis. The analysand who has realized himself in castration (the phallic lack, -φ) rotates into the position of the analyst, who must embody the désêtre of the Subject Supposed to Know and offer himself as the objet petit a. The logic of alienation that initiates analysis is preserved and repeated at a new level: the new analyst installs the o-object at the very place formerly occupied by the Subject Supposed to Know, knowing that this is a 'falsified' subject supposed to know.

Lacan introduces the figure of 'the pass' (la passe): the moment at which the analysand-becoming-analyst recognizes that all o-objects are 'without essence' and that the subject of every act is a subject not-present-in-the-act. The psychoanalytic act is thus defined as a saying (un dire) that supersedes the normative frameworks of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, not by offering a better framework but by making the subject's own dissolution the condition of the act. The Cartesian cogito is re-read not as a foundation of certainty but as the moment where the split between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement is most clearly visible.

Key concepts: The Act, Objet petit a, Subject Supposed to Know, Splitting of the Subject, Castration, Aphanisis Notable examples: Descartes, Meditations (cogito); Freud's formula 'Wo Es war'

Seminar 7: Wednesday 24 January 1968 (p.84-95)

Lacan uses the Klein group (Vierergruppe) to articulate the tetrahedron of alienation: the forced choice between 'I do not think' and 'I am not' is mapped onto a structural schema in which the analyst's resistance is not a personal failing but a constitutive feature of analytic structure. The analyst 'refuses to act' — and this refusal is precisely what allows the signifier to operate in the analysis. Lacan rehabilitates resistance as a structural necessity rather than a defect of the analysand or analyst: it is the very form in which the analytic relation sustains itself.

The objet petit a's diversity (gaze, voice, breast, anal object, plus an empty center) is presented as 'absolutely decisive for everything involved in the structure of the unconscious.' The session raises the question of whether anything at all can be stated universally about the psychoanalysand — can a universal proposition be formed about the subject who chooses to abdicate from his own discourse? This introduces the logical problematic that will dominate the middle sections of the seminar: whether analytic experience admits of quantification at all, and what the status of the 'all' is when predicated of a subject constitutively defined by its own absence from representation.

Key concepts: The Act, Objet petit a, Alienation, Signifier, Unconscious, Universality Notable examples: Klein group (Vierergruppe) schema

Seminar 8: Wednesday 31 January 1968 (Lacan absent — discussion session) (p.96)

Lacan did not attend this session; a discussion took place among participants including Melman, Guattari, Oury, Tosquellès, and others. No substantive content from this session is preserved in the manuscript beyond the list of participants.

Seminar 9: Wednesday 7 February 1968 (p.97-112)

Resuming after a fortnight's gap, Lacan frames the central logical problem: what makes someone a psychoanalyst? The question is posed in formal terms — as a question of predication and quantification ('if one psychoanalyst exists, everything is assured'). The psychoanalysand is defined as the subject who constitutes himself by testing himself against the effects of language, who 'chooses abdication'; the psychoanalyst is the predicate that must be affirmed of the one who has passed through this experience. But the logical syllogism (every psychoanalysand who completes analysis becomes an analyst) cannot be completed without already presupposing the existence of one psychoanalyst — an existence that is never simply given, always instituted by an act.

Lacan introduces the Marxist analogy explicitly: the psychoanalysand is produced 'like an Austin' on an assembly line, and the analyst 'operates as' the objet a without being it fully. This produces the paradox at the heart of the analytic act: the analyst must put in question the Subject Supposed to Know — the very fiction on which the transference depends — while simultaneously sustaining it as the condition of the analytic task. The act of faith involved in beginning an analysis is thus a curious double-bind: the analyst 'saves' the analysand by affirming what he knows to be unsustainable. The psychoanalytic act is theorized as this double structure: authorizing the analysand's task while knowing the Subject Supposed to Know is a fiction.

Key concepts: Subject Supposed to Know, Transference, Objet petit a, The Act, Analysand, Alienation Notable examples: Marx, Capital (assembly-line production analogy)

Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968 (p.109-123)

This session opens with the question of the unsigned journal articles of the École Freudienne — why anonymity? Lacan uses this institutional incident to develop the structure of the 'consecration' of the psychoanalyst: the act by which someone becomes a psychoanalyst is not simply a qualification conferred by an institution but an act of self-institution that is structurally inseparable from the completion of a training analysis. The unsigned article is a figure for the analyst who must sustain the function of the Subject Supposed to Know without being identified with it personally.

Lacan returns to transference and its constitutive opacity, recounting Freud's famous moment when a patient threw her arms around his neck: Freud's response ('she is taking me for someone else') is not a modest disavowal of being the love-object but a structural recognition that what is at stake in transference is love — and love, at the level of the analytic situation, is always love addressed to the Subject Supposed to Know. The Oedipus complex is presented not as an explanatory structure but as a mythical frame that 'regulates the game' without accounting for masculine enjoyment. Lacan closes with the formula: logic is defined as that which functions to dissolve the problem of the Subject Supposed to Know, and psychoanalysis can leverage logical quantification precisely because logic operates in a field where that subject is reduced to nothing.

Key concepts: Subject Supposed to Know, Transference, The Act, Universality, Desire, Matheme Notable examples: Freud and the patient who threw her arms around his neck; École Freudienne's unsigned journal

Seminar 11 & 12: Wednesday 28 February and 6 March 1968 (p.124-136)

These closely related sessions develop the formal logic of quantification as the instrument for addressing the status of the unconscious. Lacan begins with a seemingly simple linguistic example: 'Je ne connais pas tout de la poésie' (I don't know everything about poetry) vs. 'J'ignore tout de la poésie' (I know nothing about poetry). Despite term-for-term equivalence, the two sentences are essentially different propositions — one universal, one particular — and this difference is grounded not in semantic content but in the signifying distinction between the stating subject and the subject of the statement.

Lacan moves through Aristotelian subalternation, double negation, and the formal structure of the square of opposition. The key argument is that the double negation is not always equivalent to simple affirmation: sometimes it marks the 'fissure' — the split between the enunciating subject and the subject of the utterance — that formal logic tends to mask but that psychoanalysis must keep in view. The logical work of this section directly serves the claim that 'the unconscious is structured like a language' is not a knowledge-claim but a structural claim: Lacan's discourse 'organizes' the unconscious, and the isomorphism between a discourse on the unconscious and a discourse on language is what validates Freud — not meaning or sense alone. The formula 'the unconscious is structured like a language' is reread as grounded in logical asceticism, not in a claim to know the unconscious content.

Key concepts: Unconscious, Language, Universality, Signifier, Splitting of the Subject, Matheme Notable examples: Aristotle, Prior Analytics (square of opposition, subalternation); Pichon and Damourette on French negation

Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968 (p.137-147)

Lacan opens by defending psychoanalysis against the charge of philosophical dilettantism: what is at stake in the use of logic is not metaphor but the formal articulation of language-effects. He then introduces Frege's Begriffsschrift as the instrument for formalizing the universal affirmative proposition. The assertoric bar in Frege's notation — which marks a propositional content as 'it is true' — is taken as the site where what Lacan calls 'sub-logic' (logic constitutive of the subject) operates. The hollow or concavity that Frege reserves in his notation for the argument-function distinction is read as the structural place of the objet petit a.

The analysis of demand and the partial object leads Lacan to argue that the breast functions as a Fregean 'variable' — the logical argument to the function of demand — that grounds the universal constant (the constant of the demand for the Other's love). The mother-child relation is denaturalized: it is a mammalian-biological contingency, not an essential truth of human subjectivity. The 'wandering soul of metempsychosis' is offered as a more logically coherent figure for subjective emergence than the fantasy of uterine origin, since what is at stake is the residue of the division of the subject — the objet a — not biological origin. Rank's 'trauma of birth' is explicitly critiqued as a symptomatic misrecognition of this originary loss.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Signifier, Universality, Matheme, Castration, Knowledge Notable examples: Frege, Begriffsschrift; Rank, The Trauma of Birth (critiqued)

Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 March 1968 (p.148-161)

Lacan turns to the question of 'the identification of the psychoanalyst' — how the psychoanalytic act produces not just an analysand who has 'got better' but a subject whose truth has been realized as irreducible impotence-of-knowledge. The formula on the board ('Every man is an animal, except that he names himself') frames the session's concern with how universals apply to subjects who name themselves, that is, to speaking beings who are always already the exception to their own predicate.

The psychoanalytic act is described as a distribution of the divided subject ($): the analysand who has traversed the experience acquires not a completed knowledge but the truth of the impossibility of completing it. The objet petit a — as feeding object (breast), excremental object, gaze, and voice — circulates through the analytic relation as the structural cause of the analysand's desire, and it is in the transference that these functions are distributed to the analyst as pivot. An analogy with tragic fiction is introduced: the hero 'doomed to be only the waste-product of his own enterprise' — Oedipus, Antigone — is a figure for the structure in which the act produces its own agent as residue. The 'not-all' is directly applied: it is not true that for all things in the analytic field, knowledge is conscious — but this does not entail the existence of a positive unconscious knowledge; rather, it reveals the structural limit of knowledge as constitutively partial.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Splitting of the Subject, The Act, Desire, Fantasy, Jouissance Notable examples: Oedipus and Antigone (tragic fiction and the waste-product of the act)

Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 March 1968 (Closed Seminar — question and answer session) (p.162-180)

This smaller, closed session is organized around written questions submitted by participants, beginning with a question from Mr Soury about 'consequence' and the signifier. Lacan distinguishes logical consequence (implication, the form that makes discourse hold together) from physical or temporal sequence — arguing that the specifically analytic dimension of consequence is signifying, not causal in any physicalist sense. This is consistent with his claim that 'the unconscious is structured like a language': what is preserved in the unconscious is not an energetic trace but a signifying sequence that can always be re-encountered because it was never inscribed in real time.

The session also features an exchange about the claim 'the unconscious is structured like a language' — with Lacan defending the asymmetry of the formula against its inversion (arguing that analytic experience is grounded in signifying consequence and logical articulation rather than dynamic causality). The quantification logic is revisited in the context of sexuation: the proposition 'all men love women' is taken up as 'obviously false,' but Lacan insists the important thing is not its falsity but its formal structure — what it means that the 'not-all' applies to desire. The analyst's function is defined not as a subject of knowledge but as occupying the structural place of the objet a — the third term that conditions desire. The failure to sustain this position drives analysts toward substituting fictional knowledge, institutional hierarchy, and 'private life' for genuine analytic discourse.

Key concepts: Unconscious, Language, Signifier, Objet petit a, Desire, Sexuation Notable examples: Ricoeur's reading of Freud (critiqued); May '68 student movement (referenced)

8 and 15 May 1968: Strike Notes (p.181-186)

Lacan joined the university strike called by the SNES but attended the seminar room on both dates, addressing those who appeared informally. He insists that his discourse is addressed only to psychoanalysts, and that the May '68 events are a structural phenomenon — not mere disorder or 'unruliness' (contra Raymond Aron) — in which the relations between desire and knowledge are put in question at a social level. He explicitly links these events to his 1966 'Science and Truth' and to the problematic of knowledge transmission that has animated the seminar throughout.

Lacan reads the solidarity of demonstrators (singing the Internationale while being battered) as an instance of surface-identification, a feeling of 'absolute community' produced by physical proximity and shared risk — distinguishable from but not unrelated to the transferential community of the analytic situation. He notes ironically that the student insurgency 'only expects stone-throwers' from psychoanalysts — and that the tear-gas canisters occupy the function of the objet a (thrown objects, partial objects of the scene). Reich's ideas, which he says 'prepared the way' in Nanterre, are described as 'demonstrably false.' The overall tone is one of restrained solidarity combined with sharp diagnostic distance: the May events enact something real about the relation of desire to knowledge, but the psychoanalytic contribution to understanding this has been systematically suppressed by analysts themselves.

Key concepts: The Act, Desire, Knowledge, Objet petit a, Jouissance, The big Other Notable examples: May '68 events; Nanterre and Reich's influence; Raymond Aron (critiqued)

Lecture of 19 June 1968 (Closing Ceremonial Address) (p.187-198)

Lacan closes the academic year with a brief ceremonial address rather than a proper seminar, acknowledging that the events of May '68 have left the discourse on the psychoanalytic act incomplete — he estimates the audience received 'a little less than a quarter' of what he had intended to say. He identifies Verleugnung (disavowal) as the concept he had reserved to articulate the analyst's proper position with respect to the Subject Supposed to Know: the analyst must neither wholly identify with nor wholly repudiate this position, but sustain a specific relation of disavowal toward it. The absence of senior School members from the seminar throughout the year is noted pointedly — and illustrated by an anecdote about an analyst who had made a standing 11:30 dental appointment on Wednesdays, insisting this was 'neither an act nor a parapraxis.'

The closing pages develop the figure of 'frozen words' from Rabelais as a figure for the frozen discourse of the dead Freudian societies and their survival. Lacan states explicitly what he had been working toward: interpretation does not come from the analyst's knowledge but from the analyst's fantasy — 'from what is most opaque, most closed, most autistic in his word' — and it is from this that the 'unfreezing' of the analysand's word takes place. The Subject Supposed to Know is redoubled by what Lacan now calls the 'subject supposed to demand': interpretation reaches the analysand through the gap — figured as a Möbius strip — that constitutes the Other. The May events are finally affirmed as a 'rendezvous' with the act-dimension the seminar had been theorizing, even if this rendezvous arrived 'a little late.'

Key concepts: The Act, Subject Supposed to Know, Objet petit a, Fantasy, Truth, Analysand Notable examples: Rabelais's 'frozen words'; Poe's Mr Valdemar; May '68 as 'rendezvous' with the act

Annex 3: Lacan's Summary for the École Pratique des Hautes Études Yearbook (p.199-206)

This formal summary, written by Lacan for the institutional yearbook, provides a compressed but remarkably dense account of the seminar's argument. The psychoanalytic act is defined as 'the elective moment when psychoanalysand passes to psychoanalyst' — isolated from any other contingent conditions, this is the act proper. Lacan formalizes it as follows: the act takes the place of an assertion whose subject it changes. It is not an act to walk if one merely says 'it walks' — it is an act only if 'I am getting there' is verified in it. The psychoanalytic act reproduces itself from the very doing it commands, which means it is subject to a logical consistency that must be decided: can a relay be taken up from an act that dismisses (destitue) the very subject that establishes it?

The annex introduces the term 'subjective dismissal' (destitution subjective) as the name for what the psychoanalytic act produces: the analysand who has verified the objet a as the cause of desire acquires a knowledge — but by whom? Who pays the price of the truth that 'at the limit the subject treated cannot be cured of'? The annex also reflects on the May '68 events as a forced encounter with the act-dimension: the 'insurrection' is read as symptom, as the effect of a knowledge that 'crushes not so much by its excess as by the auditing of its logic.' Lacan closes by insisting that his texts are deliberately difficult to read — 'unreadability' is a protection against histrionicization — and that the psychoanalytic act finds its own end in producing something 'incurable' in the subject devoted to subversion.

Key concepts: The Act, Objet petit a, Knowledge, Truth, Splitting of the Subject, Aphanisis Notable examples: May '68 (as symptom of the knowledge/desire relation); Ratman case (Freud 'taken in like a tyro')

Main interlocutors

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Gottlob Frege, Begriffsschrift
Aristotle, Prior Analytics
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Descartes, Meditations
Marx, Capital
D.W. Winnicott
Otto Rank, The Trauma of Birth
Alexandre Koyré
Jacques Lacan, Écrits
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XIV (Logic of the Phantasy)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI (Four Fundamental Concepts)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar X (Anxiety)
Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis)
Plato, Meno
Paul Ricoeur (critiqued)

Position in the corpus

Seminar XV sits at an indispensable structural juncture in the Lacanian corpus. It is the direct heir of Seminar XIV (Logic of the Phantasy, 1966–67), which developed the forced choice of alienation and the structure $ ◇ a; Seminar XV takes that logic and asks: what does it mean to perform an act from within that structure? It is equally the bridge to Seminar XVII (The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 1969–70), where the four discourses will formalize the positions of analyst, master, university, and hysteric — positions whose genetic logic is already operative in Seminar XV's account of the analyst as the one who occupies the place of the objet a rather than the place of knowledge. The concept of 'subjective destitution' elaborated in the annex is also the direct precursor to Seminar XX's (Encore) treatment of jouissance, not-all, and the impossibility of the sexual relation. Readers coming from Seminar XI should read Seminar XV to understand how the four partial objects (gaze, voice, breast, anal) acquired their formal-logical underpinning; readers coming from Seminar XX should read Seminar XV to understand how the 'not-all' was first derived from quantification theory rather than from the logic of sexuation proper.\n\nWithin the broader Lacanian-adjacent corpus, Seminar XV is in dialogue with Žižek's accounts of the act (particularly in The Sublime Object of Ideology and The Ticklish Subject), which draw heavily on the pass and the destitution of the subject supposed to know. It is also essential context for reading Alain Badiou's theory of the event and the subject of fidelity, which Badiou explicitly develops against and in dialogue with Lacan's account of the act and its consequences. Because the manuscript is an unedited translation from French manuscripts (translated by Cormac Gallagher) and has never been officially published, it occupies a slightly liminal position in the primary corpus — essential for specialists, less accessible than the Écrits or the officially published seminars. It should be read after Seminar XI and Seminar XIV, and before Seminar XVII and Seminar XX.