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Lacan Seminar 1967 object a

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XV: The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation)

Jacques Lacan

by Jacques Lacan

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Synopsis

Seminar XV (1967–68), titled The Psychoanalytic Act, is Lacan's sustained attempt to think the passage from analysand to analyst as a properly logical and ethical event rather than a merely institutional or pedagogical one. The central question is deceptively simple: what kind of act does the psychoanalyst perform, and what does the psychoanalysand accomplish at the end of a training analysis? Lacan's answer unfolds across a double movement: he establishes that the psychoanalytic act is structurally grounded in the analyst's prior experience of his own désêtre — his shedding of the Subject Supposed to Know — which repositions him as pure support for the objet petit a, and simultaneously argues that the telos of every analysis is the analysand's forced recognition that the Subject Supposed to Know has been reduced to that same residual, essenceless object. The act, Lacan insists, is not a doing (faire) but a saying (un dire): it changes the subject of an assertion, and in the psychoanalytic case it institutes a subject who is constitutively absent from the act that establishes him. To ground this claim rigorously Lacan turns to modern logic — Aristotelian syllogistic, Fregean predicate logic, and the logic of quantifiers — arguing that logic's proper function is precisely to resorb the problem of the Subject Supposed to Know, and that it is this structural homology that makes formal logic the privileged interlocutor of psychoanalytic theory. The seminar is interrupted and cut short by the events of May 1968, which Lacan reads not as political noise but as a structural symptom of the failure of psychoanalysts to articulate the relation between desire and knowledge, a failure whose void had been filled by demonstrably false Reichian energetics. The annex summary that closes the volume distills the year's argument into its sharpest formulation: the psychoanalytic act dismisses the very subject it establishes, grounds an ethics of jouissance, and is only possible on the condition that there is no Other of the Other — no metalanguage — to guarantee the Subject Supposed to Know.

Distinctive contribution

Seminar XV makes a contribution that no other text in the Lacanian corpus quite replicates: it attempts to formalise the passage itself — the moment at which an analysand becomes an analyst — as the paradigmatic instance of the act as such, and to do so through the resources of modern predicate logic. Where Seminar XI theorises the four fundamental concepts and Seminar XIV works through the logic of fantasy, Seminar XV takes the endpoint of that fantasy-traversal and asks what structural transformation it requires of the subject who enacts it. The concept of désêtre — the analyst's shedding of being, his reduction to the function of the objet petit a — is developed here with a specificity not found elsewhere, and the institutional consequence (the "pass" procedure, the passe) is shown to follow from structural necessity rather than administrative preference. Crucially, Lacan demonstrates that the analyst does not become the objet a but operates as it — a distinction with major clinical consequences that the seminar works through with unusual concreteness.

The turn to formal logic is equally distinctive. Lacan does not treat Aristotelian syllogistic or Fregean Begriffsschrift as analogies or metaphors for psychoanalytic concepts; he argues that logic is literally defined by its function of resorbing the Subject Supposed to Know, which makes it structurally isomorphic with the endpoint of analysis. The extended passages on quantification (the universal and the particular, the not-all, double negation, and contradiction) lay groundwork for what will become the sexuation formulae of Seminar XX, but here they are deployed in direct service of the question: what can it mean to say "a psychoanalyst exists"? This logical apparatus, combined with readings of Cantor's diagonal argument and Gödel-style incompleteness, gives Seminar XV a technical density unique in the seminar series. Finally, the seminar's interruption by May 1968 is itself theorised — not appended as biographical accident but read as structural testimony to the gap between the act and its appropriation, between the word and the act that must have already been there for the word to arrive at all.

Main themes

  • The psychoanalytic act as passage from analysand to analyst
  • The Subject Supposed to Know and its necessary reduction to objet petit a
  • Désêtre: the analyst's shedding of being as structural condition of analysis
  • Logic (Aristotelian, Fregean, quantificational) as the formal mirror of the analytic endpoint
  • The not-all and the impossibility of totalising psychoanalytic knowledge
  • The distinction between act (dire) and doing (faire)
  • Transference as structurally identical with the Subject Supposed to Know
  • May 1968 as symptom of the failure to articulate desire and knowledge
  • The sexual non-relation as logical consequence of the subject's relation to the o-object
  • Institutional organisation of psychoanalysis as systematic concealment of the analytic act

Chapter outline

  • Seminar 1: Wednesday 15 November 1967 — p.1-15
  • Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967 — p.16-30
  • Seminar 3: Wednesday 29 November 1967 — p.31-45
  • Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967 — p.46-58
  • Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968 — p.59-70
  • Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 January 1968 — p.71-83
  • Seminar 7: Wednesday 24 January 1968 — p.84-95
  • Seminar 8: Wednesday 31 January 1968 (discussion session) — p.96-96
  • Seminar 9: Wednesday 7 February 1968 — p.97-112
  • Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968 — p.109-123
  • Seminar 11: Wednesday 28 February 1968 — p.124-124
  • Seminar 12: Wednesday 6 March 1968 — p.125-136
  • 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 with discussion) — p.162-180
  • 8 and 15 May 1968: Notes on the Strike Sessions — p.181-186
  • Meeting of 15 May 1968 — p.187-191
  • Lecture of 19 June 1968 (closing session) — p.192-204
  • 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.1-15)

Lacan opens by announcing the year's subject — the psychoanalytic act — and frames it as a strange but necessary coupling of terms that has never before been systematically examined. He begins from the most elementary sense of 'act': the decision to enter analysis is itself an act, as is the psychoanalyst's act of constituting himself as such. The key move is to insist that the act in psychoanalysis profoundly implicates the subject precisely because the subject, in psychoanalysis, is 'activated' (mis en acte) — a formula he had used earlier for transference but now intends to specify with far greater precision.

Lacan pivots to the question of knowledge (savoir) versus cognition (connaissance), drawing on the distinction between savoir-vivre and savoir-faire to show that knowledge is not simply pre-given but emerges in relation to a formal operation on the letter. He invokes Cantor's diagonal argument as his central example: the transfinite was not 'awaiting' Cantor from all eternity but became accessible only through a specific combinatorial operation. This opens the question of whether the psychoanalytic field — and the structural knowledge it generates — similarly came into existence only through Freud's founding act. The question of where knowledge was before it was known is thus posed as the structural analogue to the question of the analytic act itself.

Key concepts: The Act, Knowledge, Unconscious, Signifier, Subject Supposed to Know Notable examples: Cantor's diagonal argument; Freud's founding of psychoanalysis; savoir-vivre / savoir-faire distinction

Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1967 (p.16-30)

This session turns to the symptomatic act — parapraxis, the slip of the tongue, the accidental action — as the privileged entry point into the dimension of the act in psychoanalysis. Lacan emphasises that what makes these acts analytically significant is not their motor character but their signifying dimension: they are acts in the reading, constituted après-coup (Nachträglich) through their elevation to the field of the Other. He uses a witticism anecdote to dramatise this: an utterance becomes wit not through intention but through its retroactive constitution by the Other's field.

Lacan also engages critically with Pavlov, arguing that Pavlov's conditioning apparatus inadvertently reproduces the fundamental structure of language — the subject receiving its own message in inverted form — making Pavlov an unwitting structuralist. The ideological aim of a 'materialist reduction' of the speaking being conceals the structural truth of the experiment. This critique pivots toward the central problem: what any founder of an experience — Pavlov included, Freud above all — does not know about the structural presuppositions of his own act. The session closes by marking the register of the psychoanalytic act as 'risky' but necessary to traverse.

Key concepts: The Act, Signifier, Unconscious, Language, Repetition Notable examples: Pavlov's conditioning experiments; The witticism anecdote; Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life

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

Lacan opens with a detailed critical reading of Winnicott's article on counter-transference (1960) and his concept of the 'true self', diagnosing in Winnicott's formulations a symptomatic miscognition of the analytic act. Winnicott's 'true self' behind the 'false self' installs the analyst himself as the presence of truth — a move that, however well-intentioned, negates the analytic position by converting it into a regime of 'doing' (faire) rather than act.

The session's central theoretical advance concerns the systematic concealment of the end of the training analysis. Lacan argues that everything done in the organisation of psychoanalytic societies conspires to render opaque what happens at the end of analysis on the analyst's side — and that this blackout is strictly correlated with the absence of any genuine theorisation of the psychoanalytic act. The question is not merely subjective discomfort with the analytic position but what would follow, in terms of knowledge, if the act were finally articulated. Lacan also introduces the Platonic dialogue Meno and the figure of the slave who 'rediscovers' geometry, using it to isolate the function of the Subject Supposed to Know: Socrates' questioning presupposes a prior knowledge somewhere, and it is precisely this structural presupposition that constitutes what Lacan names the 'subject supposed to know' — the hinge on which every question about knowledge, and every transference, turns.

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

Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967 (p.46-58)

Lacan introduces a triad of epistemic modes — 'I read / I write / I lose' — via an exchange from Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, using it to situate the psychoanalytic act in the register of 'I lose': the field of the slip, the stumbling, the parapraxis. This 'losing' is not failure but the constitutive starting point of analytic work, marking the entry into the field where the signifying incidence is at stake.

The session then moves to a crucial formulation about jouissance: what Freud introduces with the pleasure principle, properly read, is not that the living individual chases satisfaction but that there is a status of enjoyment that is dissatisfaction — jouissance as intrinsically ruptured. Lacan also reads Winnicott's concept of 'freezing' (the false self blocking the true self) as an inadvertent theorisation of the castration-effect, but one that installs the analyst at the wrong place — as the guarantor of the 'true self' rather than as support for the objet a. The session closes with a topological diagram (Symbolic, Imaginary, Real) and a critique of its misappropriation as theological allegory.

Key concepts: The Act, Jouissance, Objet petit a, Splitting of the Subject, Knowledge Notable examples: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard); Winnicott's concept of the true/false self; Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968 (p.59-70)

Lacan uses the occasion of the New Year to approach the act from the angle of beginning: an act is structurally linked to the determination of a beginning where none exists in the real. Traditional acts — the Emperor ploughing on New Year's Day — mark the necessity of founding a beginning through a signifying gesture. This sets up the question of whether the psychoanalytic act constitutes a 'true beginning' rather than a renewal.

The session then returns to the alienation tetrahedron ('either I am not / I do not think') to articulate the structure of the psychoanalytic act. The mark of alienation is already present at the arché-point: there is no choice between the mark and the individual, so the alienating effect has always already taken place. Crucially, Lacan formulates what happens at the end of a training analysis: the Subject Supposed to Know is 'reduced to the not being there which is characteristic of the unconscious itself'. The analysand who completes analysis and takes up the position of analyst knows — without being able to say it, because he has become it — that the analyst has been reduced to the o-object, to 'residue, rubbish, rejected thing'. This désêtre is what the new analyst inherits: he installs the Subject Supposed to Know again not in naivety but knowing that it is a structural fiction, and knowing that the objet petit a is what now occupies that place.

Key concepts: The Act, Désêtre, Subject Supposed to Know, Objet petit a, Alienation, Splitting of the Subject Notable examples: Traditional ceremonial act (Emperor ploughing); Cantor's transfinite numbers (returned to)

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

Lacan begins by distinguishing between 'act according to one's conscience' (the classical locus of the act) and the psychoanalytic act, arguing that conscience as a reference collapses once it is shown to lead neither to knowledge nor to truth. The seminar ranges across Aristotle (the exemplary act), Kant (the act as universalisable maxim), Sade (the maxim's obscene underside), and Hegel's critique of the 'law of the heart' — the protestation against disorder that becomes disorder's most permanent support. All these are situated as failed attempts to ground the act.

Lacan then proposes his own re-reading of Freud's formula Wo Es war, soll Ich werden: substituting the barred subject for the Es, the formula becomes Wo $ tat (where the signifier worked, in the double sense of having ceased or being about to act), and the conclusion is not soll Ich werden (I ought to become) but muss Ich (o) werden — I must become the waste product of what I am introducing as a new order into the world. This is the most condensed statement of the analyst's structural fate: to become, through the act, the refuse of his own institution. The session also works through the Cartesian cogito as the foundation of modern science's evacuation of the subject, distinguishing this from the Freudian detour that relocates the subject precisely in what the cogito excludes.

Key concepts: The Act, Objet petit a, Splitting of the Subject, Alienation, Castration, Désêtre Notable examples: Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (law of the heart); Kant's categorical imperative; Descartes, cogito; Freud's Wo Es war formula

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

Lacan takes up the Klein group schema as the structure within which the psychoanalytic act is to be articulated, though the actual development of the schema is reserved. The key theoretical move is the distinction between act and doing (faire): the psychoanalyst's constitutive gesture in the analytic situation is his refusal to act — a structural refusal that is altogether different from passivity. It is this refusal that makes transference possible and positions the objet a as the horizon toward which every act tends without ever reaching.

The session introduces the asymmetry of war discourse (via Clausewitz) as a structural analogue to the analytic situation: just as Clausewitz showed that war introduces an irreducible asymmetry between the two parties that prevents it from being a symmetrical exchange, the analytic situation involves an asymmetry that prevents it from being a dialogue. The analyst operates as objet a — the cause of desire rather than its object — and this structural asymmetry is what distinguishes psychoanalysis from every form of intersubjective communication. Lacan also clarifies that the fundamental rule (free association) is precisely a device through which the subject is asked to absent himself, to leave the signifier to its operation: the 'in act' of the signifier is not yet the act, but approaches it in so far as the subject withdraws from doing.

Key concepts: The Act, Objet petit a, Transference, Desire, Language, Signifier Notable examples: Klein group schema; Clausewitz on the asymmetry of war

Seminar 8: Wednesday 31 January 1968 (discussion session) (p.96-96)

Lacan did not attend this session; it was conducted as a discussion among participants including Melman, Oury, Guattari, Tosquellès, and others. The session functioned as an open seminar, experimenting with a format Lacan had announced for certain restricted meetings during the year. Its significance in the seminar's architecture is primarily institutional: it demonstrates the structure of what Lacan was attempting with the 'closed seminar' format, where written questions submitted in advance would determine access, and where dialogue would replace monologue. The absence of Lacan is itself readable, in the seminar's own terms, as a demonstration of what it means for the analyst to refuse to act — the discussion that takes place in his absence showing what happens when the support of the Subject Supposed to Know is vacated.

Key concepts: The Act, Subject Supposed to Know, Analysand

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

Returning after a fortnight, Lacan takes up the logical question with new urgency. He positions the psychoanalysand and the psychoanalyst in the formal terms of Aristotelian logic: the psychoanalysand occupies the place of the subject (what is spoken about), and the psychoanalyst occupies the place of the predicate (that which is attributed). But the logical difficulty is that the predicate 'psychoanalyst' cannot be predicated in the usual way: the question 'what makes someone a psychoanalyst?' cannot be answered by appeal to training, qualifications, or institutional ratification, but only by the structural passage through the act.

Lacan introduces Peirce's schema of the empty box — the subject as that which slips away beneath predication — and argues that his own formula 'the subject is what a signifier represents for another signifier' precisely captures the Aristotelian logical subject understood as non-being. This grounds the analytic situation in a logic of the subject as absence: the psychoanalysand, in committing himself to the drift of language, undertakes the trial of losing himself in it in order to find himself. The session then turns to the objet petit a as the 'middle term' in the syllogism connecting psychoanalysand-as-subject to psychoanalyst-as-predicate, with the psychoanalyst defined not as a pre-given identity but as a production of the psychoanalysing task — sustained by the analyst's identification with the o-object in itself.

Key concepts: Subject Supposed to Know, Objet petit a, Signifier, Universality, The Act, Knowledge Notable examples: Aristotle, Prior Analytics (syllogistic); Peirce's schema of the empty box; Marx, Capital (alienated production analogy)

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

Lacan opens with the episode of the unsigned articles in the new journal of his School, using the scandal of anonymity as a test case for the consequences of the psychoanalytic act: those who should have grasped the structural rationale for unsigned articles — members of his School, analysts who had heard him — immediately fell back on imaginary interpretations (the analyst as employer of employees). This 'stunting of the faculty of comprehension' is, Lacan suggests, practically included in the consequences of the psychoanalytic act as currently institutionalised.

The session's theoretical core is a re-reading of transference through the Subject Supposed to Know. Lacan returns to the founding scene: the hysteric throwing her arms around Freud's neck after hypnosis. Freud's response — 'she is taking me for someone else', the mystisch Element — is not about whether he believed himself to be the object of love, but about the structural function of the Subject Supposed to Know as the indispensable hinge of transference. Love and transference are distinguished: transference is love insofar as it addresses the Subject Supposed to Know; the psychoanalytic act consists precisely in putting that presupposition in question. Lacan also introduces the biological figure of meiosis (expulsion of polar globules) as a metaphor for the analysis's end: castration is the 'reduced cell', the preparation for the subjective articulation of man and woman — though at the level of subjectification, the sexual partner always presents in the real as the objet a to be expelled.

Key concepts: Transference, Subject Supposed to Know, Objet petit a, Castration, The Act, Desire Notable examples: Freud's account of the hysteric and the emergence of transference; Meiosis as metaphor for end of analysis; Genesis (Adam's rib)

Seminar 11: Wednesday 28 February 1968 (p.124-124)

This session, a restricted closed seminar, pivots decisively toward logic as the formal apparatus required to pose the question of the psychoanalytic act with precision. Lacan announces — through Jacques Nassif's presentation of the previous year's work on the logic of fantasy — that what must now be constructed is not a metaphorical logic ('there is a logic in everything') but a rigorous, formal logical network. The stakes: to pose the question of 'a psychoanalyst exists' in terms of logical quantification, since only in this way can the Subject Supposed to Know be properly addressed rather than simply conjured away.

The theoretical claim is striking: logic, as Lacan defines it, is precisely that field which has as its end the resorption of the problem of the Subject Supposed to Know. Logicians do not notice this function because it is their blind spot — they perform this resorption without theorising it. Psychoanalysis, precisely because it cannot perform this resorption (the Subject Supposed to Know is its very engine), needs logic to map the fissure that logic itself conceals. This is the methodological ground for everything that follows in the seminar's engagement with quantifiers, Fregean notation, and the structure of the universal and the particular.

Key concepts: Subject Supposed to Know, Logic, Topology, The Act, Universality, Knowledge Notable examples: Jacques Nassif's presentation on the logic of fantasy; Russell, Principia Mathematica (alluded to)

Seminar 12: Wednesday 6 March 1968 (p.125-136)

Lacan works through a sustained example drawn from the structure of French negation — the difference between 'je ne connais pas tout de la poésie' (I don't know everything about poetry) and 'j'ignore tout de la poésie' (I don't know anything about poetry) — to ground the logical distinction between the universal and the particular proposition. Despite the term-by-term equivalence of the two statements, they generate propositions of essentially different value: one is particular-negative (there are some things I don't know), the other universal-negative (I know nothing). This difference, he argues, is not merely linguistic but logical, and it is the same difference that governs the psychoanalytic field: 'all knowledge is not conscious' does not entail 'there is something unconscious' without a further logical step.

The session extends to Aristotelian subalternation and the logic of contradiction, with Lacan noting that Freud's famous claim that 'the unconscious does not know contradiction' has had the perverse effect of releasing psychoanalysts from any obligation to understand contradiction — precisely the opposite of the rigour it should have demanded. The double negation is shown to be not always equivalent to a return to affirmation: in some uses it assures the passage from the universal to the particular; in others it produces a positive particular existence from an exception. This logic of the exception — the one man who is not wise, who reduces the universal to a rule with exceptions — will structure Lacan's later theorisation of sexuation.

Key concepts: Universality, Logic, Signifier, Subject Supposed to Know, Unconscious, Knowledge Notable examples: Aristotle, Prior Analytics (subalternation, contradiction); Frege's Begriffsschrift; Freud on the unconscious and contradiction

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

Lacan addresses the question 'what is it to be a psychoanalyst?' by returning to the definition he had offered in 'Variants of the Standard Treatment' (Écrits): psychoanalysis is constituted by its irreducible object, the language-effect, and by the constitutive division of the subject that no knowledge can exhaust. This is what distinguishes psychoanalysis from psychotherapy (which aims at adaptive adjustment) and from Hegelian absolute knowing (which aims at the sublation of the subject-division in completed self-knowledge).

The session also develops Fregean predicate logic in detail — the Begriffsschrift, the assertoric bar, the notational distinction between propositional content and the judgement that it is true — as the proper formal framework for inscribing the psychoanalytic positions. The 'sub-logic' Lacan introduces is logic in so far as it is constitutive of the subject: it is at this level that 'it is true' is not simply assertoric but carries the full weight of the subject's relation to truth. The session then turns to the partial object (the breast) and its function as the first demand-object: it is logically prior to the imaginary of totality, and the child's first demand constitutes the breast not as biological object but as objet a — the cause of desire rather than its satisfaction, and the model for the o-object's function throughout the analytic relation.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Signifier, Knowledge, Subject Supposed to Know, Demand, Fantasy Notable examples: Frege, Begriffsschrift; Melanie Klein on pre-genital levels and the Oedipus complex; Écrits ('Variants of the Standard Treatment')

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

This session focuses on what Lacan calls the 'identification of the psychoanalyst' — how the psychoanalytic act produces the analyst's position as an effect rather than presupposing it as a pre-given identity. The central claim is that the psychoanalytic act consists in the distribution of the divided subject ($) across the analytic relation: the truth conquered by the subject through the analysis is precisely the impotence of knowledge, the irreducible limit of what can be known about one's own subjective determination. This impotence is not a failure but the constitutive achievement of the analysis.

The session works through the logic of the not-all in relation to knowledge: because a negation operates on the universal ('all knowledge is not conscious'), something arises from the existence of a particular; because not all is affected with a negation, a positive particular existence emerges from double negation. Lacan uses this to argue that the psychoanalyst's proper position is not one of mastery-knowledge but of occupying the place of the objet a — cause of desire and object of demand — a position illustrated through the partial drives (breast, scybala, gaze, voice). He also invokes the tragic hero as a structural analogue: the hero, like the analyst, is 'doomed to be only the waste product of his own enterprise', and the end of psychoanalysis, like tragedy, stages the schize — the division of the subject — rather than resolving it.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Splitting of the Subject, Knowledge, Castration, The Act, Fantasy Notable examples: Sophocles, Oedipus Rex and Antigone (tragic hero as structural analogue); Écrits ('Position of the Unconscious', the homelette)

Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 March 1968 (closed seminar with discussion) (p.162-180)

This restricted session takes the form of an exchange, with Lacan responding to written questions submitted by participants. The primary theoretical content concerns the formula 'the unconscious is structured like a language' — Lacan defends it against misreadings (particularly Ricoeur's, which is critiqued as distorting without the material it distorts) and clarifies that the formula is not a claim to positive knowledge but a structural claim about isomorphism: Lacan's discourse on the unconscious produces formulae isomorphic with those required for a discourse on language, and this isomorphism — not a content-claim — is what validates psychoanalytic discourse.

The session also engages the question of the dream: the dream is the royal road to the unconscious but is not identical with it, and the structural claim about language applies to the unconscious, not to every feature of the dream. Lacan then advances his most direct statement of the sexual non-relation: 'all men love women' is obviously false, but the important point is not the falsity but the logical consequence — there is no universal quantification possible over the sexual field, because the objet a always intervenes as the structural cause of desire, preventing any direct relation between the sexes. Man and woman 'have nothing to do with one another' (rien à voir ensemble) is the logical consequence, not a naturalist scandal. The analyst's function is not to pronounce on the sexual but to occupy the place of the objet a — the structural void that conditions desire.

Key concepts: Unconscious, Language, Objet petit a, Desire, Universality, The Act Notable examples: Ricoeur's reading of Freud (critiqued); Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (dream-work); Écrits ('Science and Truth')

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

These are not full seminars but notes of Lacan's presence during the May 1968 strike. Lacan, honoring the strike call, refused to give his seminar but remained present and spoke informally. He insists that what is at stake in the student insurrection is not mere disorder (contra Raymond Aron) but a structural phenomenon in which the relations between desire and knowledge — the relations of transmission — are put in question. The psychoanalytic failure to articulate these relations has left a vacuum filled by demonstrably false Reichian energetics, and Lacan names this as the specific responsibility that psychoanalysts have evaded.

Lacan reads the paving-stone versus the tear-gas grenade as structural counterparts, both occupying the function of the objet petit a in the dynamics of the insurrection. The feeling of 'absolute community' among students being bludgeoned while singing the Internationale is read analytically — as a surface effect of the shoulder-to-shoulder, a jouissance-effect that masks the structural relations at play. He calls for psychoanalysts to bear witness from their experience of language and the relation between the sexes, noting that when analysts do speak it is not taken into account — as if there had never been any psychoanalysts at all.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Jouissance, Knowledge, Desire, The Act Notable examples: May 1968 student insurrection; Reich's energetics (critiqued); Écrits ('Science and Truth')

Meeting of 15 May 1968 (p.187-191)

Lacan speaks informally in the midst of the strike, reflecting on the year's interrupted seminar and on the responsibility of psychoanalysts vis-à-vis the events. He notes the particular courage required of those in 'hard encounters', but distinguishes the feeling of community (the shoulder-to-shoulder in the street) from the analytic work of accounting for what underlies it. He reiterates that his discourse is addressed uniquely to psychoanalysts, and that the interruption by May '68 gives him the occasion to recognise his dissatisfactions — the failure of psychoanalysts to be 'up to what they have taken responsibility for'.

The session also reflects on psychoanalysts who signed protest texts: meritorious but 'clearly not enough'. The act of signing, unlike the act of analysis, does not touch the structural relations between desire and knowledge. Lacan uses this occasion to recall the objet a as the structural dynamic operative in the insurrection — the paving-stone and the tear-gas grenade occupying that function — and to mark that the failure to theorise this is a failure of the analytic community, not merely of politics.

Key concepts: The Act, Jouissance, Objet petit a, Knowledge, Desire Notable examples: May 1968; Psychoanalysts' collective letter of protest

Lecture of 19 June 1968 (closing session) (p.192-204)

Lacan closes the year with a ceremonial address acknowledging that the seminar produced 'a little less than a quarter' of what he had intended, the events of May 1968 having interrupted and accelerated the structure of what was supposed to be a slower unfolding. He is not, he says, entirely dissatisfied with this interruption, since it brought into play a dimension 'not altogether unrelated to the act'.

The session maps four terms — the Other as locus of knowledge, truth as what is refused from the symbolic and returns in the real as symptom, the subject as secondary determination by knowledge, and the irreversible modification of the subject-Other relation that psychoanalysis produces. Lacan introduces the 'subject supposed to demand' as a complement to the Subject Supposed to Know: it names the place at which the analyst is addressed by the analysand not as knower but as the one whose demand structures the encounter. Finally, he anticipates what the year would have arrived at: interpretation as drawn from the analyst's fantasy — the most opaque, closed, autistic aspect of the analyst's word — as the source from which the analysand's word is 'unfrozen'. This is a Rabelaisian figure (the 'frozen words') and a Poe figure (Valdemar), both pointing to the temporality of the act: the word arrives only because the act was already there.

Key concepts: The Act, Subject Supposed to Know, Truth, Objet petit a, Fantasy, Knowledge Notable examples: Rabelais's frozen words; Poe's Valdemar; The Other as locus of knowledge

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

This annex is Lacan's own condensation of the year's argument and arguably its most precise formulation. The psychoanalytic act is defined as the pivotal moment of passage from analysand to analyst, an act that 'dismisses the very subject that establishes it'. The act is not a doing but an assertion whose subject it changes: it works only if 'I am getting there' (j'y arrive) is verified in it. The analysand at the end of the task knows — but by whom? — the subjective dismissal to which the analysis has reduced the analyst (the o-object evacuated as the analysand drops it as cause of desire). The question of whether this knowledge is transmissible is posed: can a subject offer to reproduce what he has been delivered from, given that doing so requires presupposing the very lure (the Subject Supposed to Know) that is no longer tenable for him?

The annex also directly links the psychoanalytic act to the May 1968 events: the o-object in the form of the paving-stone, the social fault in the relation between knowledge and its proprietorial capture, the 'man reduced to a single dimension' by an anti-eros. Lacan formulates the key lemma 'there is no transference of transference' and defends his strategic unreadability as a protection against the immediate appropriation and historicisation of the act by those who would histrionicise it for comfort. The final lines assert: the word only comes because the act was there — a formulation that retroactively structures the entire year's seminar as itself an instance of the act it theorises.

Key concepts: The Act, Objet petit a, Subject Supposed to Know, Jouissance, Truth, Transference, Splitting of the Subject Notable examples: May 1968 insurrection; Freud, Rat Man (alluded to in closing)

Main interlocutors

  • Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
  • Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
  • Sigmund Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life
  • Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
  • Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
  • Descartes, Meditations
  • Plato, Meno
  • Aristotle, Prior Analytics
  • Aristotle, Organon
  • Gottlob Frege, Begriffsschrift
  • Georg Cantor (transfinite numbers)
  • Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica
  • Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
  • D.W. Winnicott (counter-transference and true self)
  • Paul Ricoeur (critiqued)
  • Karl Marx, Capital
  • Ivan Pavlov (conditioning experiments)
  • Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
  • Jacques Lacan, Écrits
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar XIV (Logic of Fantasy)
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI
  • Jacques Lacan, Seminar X

Position in the corpus

Seminar XV occupies a pivotal transitional position in the Lacanian corpus, serving as the direct sequel to Seminar XIV (The Logic of Fantasy, 1966–67) and the immediate predecessor to Seminar XVI (From an Other to the other, 1968–69). It presupposes the alienation-and-separation structure elaborated in Seminar XI and the fantasy formula ($◇a) developed across Seminars X and XIV, and it consolidates those structures by asking what happens after the traversal of fantasy: what act does the analysand perform, and what does the analyst become? Readers should approach Seminar XV after Seminar XI and XIV; Seminar XVI and Seminar XVII (The Other Side of Psychoanalysis) extend its institutional and logical arguments, particularly the discourse theory that responds to the May 1968 impasse. The sexuation formulae of Seminar XX (Encore) develop the not-all logic sketched in Seminars 12–14 of this volume. Within Lacan's own writings, the 'Proposition on the Psychoanalyst of the School' (1967, included in Scilicet) is the institutional document that runs parallel to this seminar, and readers of Seminar XV are strongly advised to read them together.\n\nIn the broader Lacanian-inflected secondary literature, Seminar XV is the essential reference for debates about the passe and the ethics of the end of analysis — questions central to Colette Soler's clinical writings, Bruce Fink's A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, and Slavoj Žižek's theorisation of the act (notably in The Ticklish Subject and The Parallax View). Žižek's notion of the political act as the one that 'dismisses the subject that establishes it' draws directly on this seminar's formulations, though he rarely cites it explicitly. For readers interested in Lacan's engagement with formal logic, Seminar XV should be read alongside Lorenzo Chiesa's Subjectivity and Otherness and Alain Badiou's Theory of the Subject, both of which engage the logical structures that Lacan is developing here.

Canonical concepts deployed