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Lacan Seminar 1968 discourses

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVI: From an Other to the other

Jacques Lacan

by Jacques Lacan

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Synopsis

Seminar XVI, delivered at the École Normale Supérieure across the academic year 1968–1969 under the title "From an Other to the other," pursues a single, sustained argument: that the objet petit a is the structural hinge between the field of the big Other (as locus of knowledge) and the irreducible remainder of jouissance that discourse necessarily produces but can never absorb. Lacan opens by announcing a strict homology — not mere analogy — between Marx's concept of surplus value (Mehrwert) and his own concept of surplus-jouissance (Mehrlust/plus-de-jouir), establishing that both name the effect of a renunciation of enjoyment within a discourse that is constituted by that very renunciation. He then works through a sequence of formal registers — Pascal's wager, the Fibonacci series and the golden ratio, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, set theory, projective topology — in order to demonstrate that the objet petit a is not an empirical object but a structural effect generated by the entry of the subject into the signifying order: the lost remainder that, precisely because it is lost, organises desire, knowledge, and truth. The second half of the seminar turns clinical, moving from the general topology of the Other's inconsistency to the specific structures of perversion, phobia, hysteria, and obsessional neurosis, always asking how each structure handles the impossible sexual relation and the subject-supposed-to-know. The seminar closes with a sustained account of the psychoanalytic act as itself constituted around failure and the evacuation of the o-object: the analyst "plays the master" in the double sense — both pretending to be the subject-supposed-to-know and, at analysis's end, ensuring that this supposition collapses, leaving the subject with the o-object as cause rather than as prop.

Distinctive contribution

Seminar XVI occupies a unique transitional position in Lacan's corpus: it is the seminar in which the algebraic and topological apparatus accumulated across the 1960s is put to work for the first time in an explicitly political-economic register. No other seminar in the corpus performs the Marx–Freud homology with the same formal rigour and philosophical ambition. Whereas Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) had introduced das Ding and jouissance in relation to the moral law, and Seminar XI had formalised the four fundamental concepts, Seminar XVI is the first place where Lacan binds jouissance, knowledge, and the capitalist form of social production into a single structural account of the subject's division, anchored in the concept of surplus-jouissance as the psychoanalytic analogue of surplus value. The political events of May 1968 permeate the seminar not as digression but as evidence: the "strike of truth" manifested in May is read as the symptomatic eruption of surplus-jouissance from within a social order that has commodified knowledge, confirming the seminar's central claim that the disjunction between knowledge and power is structural, not historical accident.

A second distinctive contribution is the seminar's elaboration of the objet petit a through mathematical and logical formalisms that go beyond anything in Lacan's previous teaching. The sustained development of the golden ratio and the Fibonacci series as formal indices of the proportion between the subject's division and the o-object, the deployment of Gödel's incompleteness theorems as the logical analogue of castration, and the use of set theory's empty set and "additional one" (un-en-plus) to formalise the emergence of subjectivity within the Other — these constitute a coherent formal programme for the o-object that is not replicated in the same concentrated form elsewhere in the corpus. The golden-ratio formula (o/1-o = 1/o) is presented as inscribing the relationship of knowledge to truth — knowledge over (truth minus knowledge) equals truth over knowledge — which ties the mathematical treatment directly to the clinical stakes of psychoanalysis: what truth lacks is precisely knowledge, and what knowledge produces is the o-object. This tight integration of formal mathematics, philosophy of logic, and clinical theory is Seminar XVI's most singular achievement.

Main themes

  • Surplus-jouissance as structural homologue of surplus value: the political economy of enjoyment
  • The objet petit a as effect of discourse and cause of the subject
  • The inconsistency and incompleteness of the big Other
  • Pascal's wager as matrix for the subject's relation to the o-cause
  • Gödel's incompleteness theorems as logical analogue of castration
  • The golden ratio and Fibonacci series as formal indices of the subject's division
  • The disjunction of knowledge and power under capitalism
  • Phobia, hysteria, and obsessional neurosis as staging grounds of the sexual non-relation
  • The psychoanalytic act as constituted by failure and the evacuation of the subject-supposed-to-know
  • Topology (Möbius strip, Klein bottle, projective plane) as the proper structure of jouissance and the subject

Chapter outline

  • Seminar 1: Wednesday 13 November 1968 — The Discourse Without Words; Surplus-Jouissance and Surplus Value — p.2-17
  • Seminar 2: Wednesday 20 November 1968 — Topology, Mathematical Logic, and the Conditions of the Subject — p.18-31
  • Seminar 3: Wednesday 27 November 1968 / Seminar 4: Wednesday 4 December 1968 — The Big Other, Set Theory, and the Ordered Pair — p.32-69
  • Seminar 5: Wednesday 11 December 1968 — Gödel, Castration, and the Signifier of the Lack in the Other — p.70-83
  • Seminar 6–9: Wednesday 8 January – 29 January 1969 — Pascal's Wager, the Golden Ratio, and the O-Object as Cause — p.84-142
  • Seminar 10–11: Wednesday 5 February – 12 February 1969 — Coherence, the Name of the Father, and Pascal's Moral Implications — p.145-172
  • Seminar 12: Wednesday 26 February 1969 — Ethics of Psychoanalysis Revisited; Knowledge, Truth, and the Golden-Ratio Formula — p.179-215
  • Seminar 13: Wednesday 5 March 1969 — Sexuality, Identification, and the Missing Signifier — p.196-228
  • Seminar 15–16: Wednesday 19 March – 26 March 1969 — Sublimation, the O-Object, Perversion, and the Scopic Drive — p.229-257
  • Seminar 17–18: Wednesday 23 April – 30 April 1969 — Idealism, the Subject-Supposed-to-Know, and the Scopic Field — p.258-295
  • Seminar 19: Wednesday 7 May 1969 — Anxiety, Lack, Counting, and the Cosmos — p.296-311
  • Seminar 20: Wednesday 14 May 1969 — The Signifier, the Subject, and the Phallic Signifier as Missing — p.312-333
  • Seminar 21: Wednesday 21 May 1969 — Jouissance, Capitalism, and the Historical Stakes of Psychoanalysis — p.334-347
  • Seminar 22: Wednesday 4 June 1969 — The Psychoanalytic Act, the Subject-Supposed-to-Know, and Failure — p.348-366
  • Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969 — The Empty Set, the Additional One, and the Hysteric as Psychoanalysand — p.367-384
  • Seminar 25: Wednesday 25 June 1969 — Knowledge, the Subject, and the Conclusion — p.385-399

Chapter summaries

Seminar 1: Wednesday 13 November 1968 — The Discourse Without Words; Surplus-Jouissance and Surplus Value (p.2-17)

Lacan opens the year by writing on the board the thesis that will govern the entire seminar: 'The essence of psychoanalytic theory is a discourse without words.' He immediately distances psychoanalysis from structuralism as a worldview or anthropology, insisting that the entry of castration into the constitution of the human couple is not a cultural thesis but a structural one: there is no union of man and woman without castration, which operates as fantasy for the partner for whom it is impossible and as concealed truth for the partner from whom it is spared.

The core theoretical move of the opening session is the introduction of surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir, Mehrlust) in strict homological relation to Marx's surplus value (Mehrwert). Lacan is explicit that this is not analogy but homology — the same stuff is at stake, the 'scissors' mark of discourse.' Both surplus value and surplus-jouissance arise from the renunciation of enjoyment within a discourse; both only become visible once knowledge has been unified and marketised under capitalist logic. The analyst, Lacan argues, is him- or herself an effect of this turning point in the history of knowledge — a symptom of the moment when the o-object became retrievable as such.

Lacan then opens the figure of the schema: it is around the fantasy ($ ◇ a) — the reiteration of the signifier representing the subject in relation to the o-object — that surplus-jouissance is produced. He closes by noting that perversion is the site where surplus-jouissance appears in naked form, and that the transmission from the holy woman to the perverse son exemplifies the discourse-level operation through which o circulates.

Key concepts: Surplus-jouissance, Objet petit a, Signifier, Jouissance, Discourse of the Master, Castration Notable examples: 'A child is being beaten'; Pascal's wager (first mention); Marx's surplus value / Mehrwert

Seminar 2: Wednesday 20 November 1968 — Topology, Mathematical Logic, and the Conditions of the Subject (p.18-31)

In the second session Lacan returns to the claim that 'structure' means the real itself, not a metaphor: the topological diagrams he draws on the board are not illustrations but claims about the actual constitution of the subject. He insists on the necessity of mathematical logic — not as ornament but as the only discourse adequate to the structural effects that psychoanalysis encounters — and distinguishes Aristotelian from mathematical logic by the latter's interest in mathematics as a field of consistent, non-equivocal inscription.

Lacan then introduces the reading of May 1968 that will recur throughout the year: the events were the 'strike of truth,' a collective manifestation of surplus-jouissance erupting from within the social organisation of labour. The 'speaking out' (prise de parole) of May was not the taking of a Bastille but the manifestation of the truth inherent in the collective relation to labour — the truth that is always paid below its use value, generating the symptomatic suffering that is the Mehrlust mocking those who do not know where it is lodged.

The session ends with a first sketch of the topological argument: the big Other, represented as a set containing signifiers, cannot contain itself, and the effort to close the circuit of the Other — making it a complete code — ends in indefinite withdrawal. This 'ungraspable character' of the Other is identified with the locus of Urverdrängung (primal repression), and Lacan gestures toward the projective plane as the figure adequate to this topology.

Key concepts: Topology, Surplus-jouissance, Signifier, Mathematical logic, Big Other, Symptom Notable examples: May 1968 events as 'strike of truth'; Projective plane; Althusser and structuralism

Seminar 3: Wednesday 27 November 1968 / Seminar 4: Wednesday 4 December 1968 — The Big Other, Set Theory, and the Ordered Pair (p.32-69)

These two sessions develop the formal elaboration of the big Other through set theory. Lacan uses the function of the ordered pair to demonstrate that the Other, precisely because it cannot contain itself as an element (Russell's paradox is the structural analogue), necessarily fails to close as a universe of discourse. The subject, defined as the subset of all signifiers that are not elements of themselves, cannot be assembled into a totalising set: S(Ø) — the signifier of the lack in the Other — names precisely this impossibility.

Lacan argues that the 'subversion of knowledge' is not his slogan: the Other simply does not contain absolute knowledge, and the pretension that it does has always been laughable. The witticism (Witz) is introduced as the paradigm of the fault inherent in knowledge: laughter is produced precisely because the joke exposes the structural flaw in any claim to totality. The 'famillionairely' example from Freud's jokes book is worked through to show that the subject is always functioning in a triple register — there is a witticism only with respect to a third — which anticipates the later formulas of discourse.

The argument closes with the distinction between the demand and desire at the level of assertion: the flaw that logical analysis can demonstrate in pure assertion — where castration is the analogous notion — is what allows the analyst to circumscribe, in the flaw of demand, what is involved in the flaw of desire. Castration is formalised as the structural analogue of incompleteness or undecidability in a consistent system.

Key concepts: Big Other, Objet petit a, Signifier, Topology, Splitting of the Subject, Lack Notable examples: Russell's paradox / set containing itself; Freud's 'famillionairely' witticism (Hirsch Hyacinth); Gödel's incompleteness theorem (first formal appearance)

Seminar 5: Wednesday 11 December 1968 — Gödel, Castration, and the Signifier of the Lack in the Other (p.70-83)

Lacan opens from the formula 'I am what I is' as a translation of the divine Name (Eyeh asher Eyeh), establishing that the Ten Commandments are nothing other than the laws of 'I speak' — the consequences of the subject's constitution through the signifier. He moves from this to the question of what can be articulated in logic about the signifier that names the lack inherent in signifying articulation itself: the signifier that a subject can identify with as identical to the very lack of discourse.

This leads to the central formulation of the session: Gödel's incompleteness theorems provide the logical parallel for castration. Just as Gödel showed that for the arithmetical system, a statement can be constructed that is true but not provable within the system — a 'completeness' or 'decidability' that the system cannot achieve by its own resources — so the castration complex marks the point where the signifying system cannot close upon itself. The 'Gödel number' device, by which each statement of a system is assigned a number, is taken as the formal achievement that makes the structural incompleteness visible; analogously, castration is what makes visible the constitutive flaw in the field of the Other.

The session announces the direction of the next several meetings: Pascal's wager will be the matrix through which the relation of the subject to the o-cause will be formally examined, with the 'existence of the I' (not the existence of God) as the true stake of the wager.

Key concepts: Castration, Signifier, Big Other, Splitting of the Subject, Knowledge, Incompleteness Notable examples: Gödel's incompleteness theorems; Divine Name / 'I am what I is'; Pascal's Pensées (announced)

Seminar 6–9: Wednesday 8 January – 29 January 1969 — Pascal's Wager, the Golden Ratio, and the O-Object as Cause (p.84-142)

This cluster of four sessions constitutes the mathematical heart of Seminar XVI. Lacan takes Pascal's wager not as a theological argument but as a structural matrix for the subject's relation to the o-cause. His key displacement is from the question 'does God exist?' to the question 'does I exist?' — the wager, he argues, is about the uncertainty of the I, and its true structure hinges on the objet petit a as cause of the subject. The stake in the wager is not life as empirical possession but life 'reduced to an element of value,' which is precisely what the o-object accomplishes: it is neither use value nor exchange value but what animates the subject's relationship to the word and to the act.

Lacan then develops the formal proportion I/o = 1/(1-o) = 1+o as arising from the simplest logical operation on the unary trait and the lost object. The Fibonacci series (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8...) is shown to generate the golden ratio (o ≈ 0.618) in the limit, and this is read as the mathematical expression of the original division of the subject: whether one takes as starting point the o-object or the division of the subject, both generate the same proportion. The series is not merely illustrative but is claimed to have the same formal status as the structure it describes — 'one thing or the other: either what we are talking about has no kind of existence, or... it is exactly constructed like that.'

The Fibonacci/golden-ratio analysis is doubled by a reading of mysticism (Angelus Silesius) and the desert-island thought experiment (language as company in itself, against the myth of the self-sufficient Robinsonian subject). Lacan insists that the subject is, from the outset, an effect of the signifier — 'before being thinking, he is first of all o' — and that no amount of revolutionary disruption can overturn the 'real gaming table' constituted by the subject's inscription in discourse.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Pascal's Wager, Splitting of the Subject, Jouissance, Knowledge, Repetition Notable examples: Pascal's Wager / Pensées; Fibonacci series and golden ratio; Angelus Silesius, Le Pèlerin Chérubinique; Robinson Crusoe / desert island myth

Seminar 10–11: Wednesday 5 February – 12 February 1969 — Coherence, the Name of the Father, and Pascal's Moral Implications (p.145-172)

Lacan returns to the Fibonacci series as a starting point not for its mathematical properties per se but for what it demonstrates about repetition: the unary trait, by attempting to rediscover a primordially lost enjoyment, already alters what it marks. The first One produces difference by the very act of marking something that was originally unmarked — a mechanism identified as fundamental to confrontation with Plato's reminiscence and to Freud's account of the lost object.

The Name of the Father is introduced through Freud's Totem and Taboo: the father has always already been dead, and the murder of the father means precisely that he cannot be killed. What turns around the Name of the Father is not biological paternity — which is always uncertain — but the purely symbolic pivot around which subjectivity and the transmission of castration are organised. The enjoyment of the mother is primordially forbidden, and it is from this prohibition that 'everything is organised': the Oedipus complex is not a myth in any ethnological sense but the structural articulation of the point where enjoyment is absolutely distinguished from the law.

The session closes on a 'moral note': Lacan reads the epistolary request from students wanting stylistic tricks as symptom of a broader condition in which truth always generates lying ('the pearl of the lie is the secretion of the truth'), and in which the belief in progress (progressisme) constitutes a fundamental form of theoretical cretinisation. The law of the heart and the delusions of presumption (Hegel) are cited as the diagnostic category.

Key concepts: Name of the Father, Jouissance, Knowledge, Truth, Repetition, Objet petit a Notable examples: Freud, Totem and Taboo; Oedipus complex; Letter from students

Seminar 12: Wednesday 26 February 1969 — Ethics of Psychoanalysis Revisited; Knowledge, Truth, and the Golden-Ratio Formula (p.179-215)

Lacan takes the occasion of returning to his Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) to mark the progress his discourse has made since then and to locate the 'title' of the year — 'From an Other to the other' — within a retroactive illumination of the path. He reads the golden-ratio formula (o/1-o = 1/o) as directly translatable into the relation of knowledge to truth: 'knowledge over (truth minus knowledge) equals truth over knowledge.' This formula is not merely elegant but has structural content: it inscribes the fact that knowledge and truth can never be fully aligned, and that what truth lacks is precisely knowledge, while what knowledge produces is the o-object.

The session develops the analysis of the Freudian dream of the burning child as an exemplar of analytic method: the analytic question is not 'what does the dream mean?' but 'where is the flaw (desire) in what is said?' The dream is a 'wild interpretation' that fails as a sentence — and it is precisely at the point of this failure that desire is located, in the field of the Other, addressed to the father whose flaw with respect to his beloved dead son is what the dream both protects against and reveals.

Sublimation is then approached through Freud's formulations in the Three Essays and Group Psychology: sublimation is zielgehemmt (diverted from its aim), but this does not mean it is non-sexual in its drive basis; rather, it is a mode of satisfaction of the drive outside its sexual goal. Lacan begins to pose the question of what the o-object's topological structure contributes to understanding how the work of art can function as equivalent to jouissance, preparing the extended treatment of sublimation in subsequent sessions.

Key concepts: Knowledge, Truth, Objet petit a, Repetition, Sublimation, Graph of Desire Notable examples: Freud's dream of the burning child; Seminar VII: Ethics of Psychoanalysis; Freud's Three Essays on Sexuality; Foucault, 'What is an Author?' (allusion)

Seminar 13: Wednesday 5 March 1969 — Sexuality, Identification, and the Missing Signifier (p.196-228)

This session continues the analysis of the sexual relation at the level of logic rather than biology. Lacan insists that psychoanalysis is not a 'knowledge about the sexual': it is not a technique for handling one's wife or improving one's erotic practice. What psychoanalysis articulates is the fundamental impossibility of the sexual relation as a logical relation — a relation that could be symbolised — and the wandering objects that fill the place of the missing sexual signifier.

Deleuze's Logic of Sense is cited (twice, per the extractions) in the context of what structuralism actually means: the essential is the blank, the lack in the signifying chain, and the wandering objects (the 'little balloon with eyes and moustache' standing in for Woman) that result. The prehistoric Venus statuette is invoked as the pre-Oedipal imaginary support for femininity, contrasted with the phallocentrism of Freudian logic: Woman appears in Freudian logic only through two movements — the inadequate representative (phallus) and the negation of that representative (she doesn't have it). This double inadequacy is what Lacan calls the structural absence of the sexual signifier.

The drive and its relationship to sublimation close the session: unlike repression, which creates an obstacle to the drive's satisfaction, sublimation is a mode of drive satisfaction — with the drive, zielgehemmt. Lacan poses the question that will occupy the following sessions: how can the o-object function as equivalent to jouissance in the work of art, and how does this relate to the structure of neurosis?

Key concepts: Signifier, Identification, Jouissance, Lack, Knowledge, Language Notable examples: Deleuze, Logic of Sense; Prehistoric Venus statuette; Freud's logic of femininity (phallus/negation)

Seminar 15–16: Wednesday 19 March – 26 March 1969 — Sublimation, the O-Object, Perversion, and the Scopic Drive (p.229-257)

Lacan uses the occasion of illness and a session without formal lecture (Seminar 15) to reflect on his seminar as a form of productive work — an assembly-line of discourse — and to position the subversive function of knowledge as something that capitalist and revolutionary power alike cannot master. He draws on his personal history with surrealism and Sartre to argue that genuine novelty lies not in political agitation (which merely repeats the system it contests) but in the function of knowledge at its most radically subversive, accessible only through the analytic discourse.

Seminar 16 develops the topology of the o-object in relation to sublimation and the scopic drive. The work of art has a commercial value, but what gives it this privileged relation to value is the topological structure by which the o-object functions as equivalent to jouissance: enjoyment is evacuated from the field of the Other (establishing the Other as locus of the word as such), and the o-object occupies the place of this evacuation. Lacan traces the asymmetry between exhibitionism and voyeurism: the exhibitionist aims to make the look appear in the field of the Other — to evoke there the topological relation of the flight of jouissance from the Other — while the voyeur questions in the Other what cannot be seen, making the phallus the structuring absence in the visible field.

The neurotic's problem is then articulated: the neurotic cannot integrate the o-object onto the imaginary plane alongside the narcissistic image. Primary narcissism is retrospectively produced by secondary (imaginary) narcissistic capture — it is a 'deferred, imaged effect.' The fantasy formula ($ ◇ a) is positioned at the level of sublimation, while neurosis is diagnosed as a structural failure of sublimation: the neurotic wants to be the One in the field of the Other, which is why identification plays a primordial logical role in neurotic structure.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Sublimation, Gaze, Jouissance, Fantasy, Neurosis Notable examples: Surrealism / Sartre digression; Courtly love (sublimation); Exhibitionism and voyeurism; Freud, 'Remarks on Narcissism'

Seminar 17–18: Wednesday 23 April – 30 April 1969 — Idealism, the Subject-Supposed-to-Know, and the Scopic Field (p.258-295)

Seminar 17 opens after the Easter break with a continuation of the account of perversion: the pervert supplies for the flaw in the Other, covering over the Other's constitutive lack with the o-object as imaginary moulding of signifying structure. Lacan distinguishes this from the neurotic, who cannot perform this supplementation but is caught in the impossible demand that the Other be complete.

Seminar 18 introduces the question of idealism versus realism as a philosophically unresolved problem that psychoanalysis can address from a different angle. The hidden theological core of idealism is identified as the subject-supposed-to-know: idealism holds up only by presupposing that knowledge is already organised somewhere, already there as a totality. The critique of ideology (Althusser's materialism) only displaces this presupposition — it still relies on a real that, as the ground of correct thinking, functions as the hidden subject-supposed-to-know.

Lacan then performs an extended analysis of the scopic field using commodity, money, Berkeley's idealism, and Aristotle's optics. The camera obscura model of representation — the classical optical model that has governed analytic ideology (introjection, projection, inner/outer) for two centuries — is dismantled by introducing the objet petit a as a third term missing from both ancient and modern accounts of vision. The stain (tache) — the point of lack in vision, the blind spot — is structural, not accidental: it is what attaches the subject (as sexed being, as lacking being) to the visible field. The look qua subjective does not see; it functions as censorship, and it is precisely as censorship that it can be articulated metaphorically as a stain in logical discourse.

Key concepts: Subject Supposed to Know, Gaze, Objet petit a, Topology, Imaginary, Knowledge Notable examples: Berkeley, idealism; Aristotle, Sense and Sensibilia; Camera obscura / optical model; S(Ø) — signifier of the lack in the Other

Seminar 19: Wednesday 7 May 1969 — Anxiety, Lack, Counting, and the Cosmos (p.296-311)

This session elaborates the logical prerequisites for the concept of lack and its relation to the three registers. Lacan argues that 'lack' is not a natural or biological category — the animal dying of hunger lacks nothing, it is simply undergoing organic reduction — but a category that presupposes a symbolic order capable of counting. For something to be lacking, it must be possible to say 'it does not add up.' The emergence of lack as such is therefore tied to the first copulations of counting with the image, which generate the harmonies (musical, mathematical) that ancient science held to be the natural order of the cosmos.

The modern disjunction between knowledge and power — knowledge is no longer vested in the same person or institution as power — is identified as the broader historical context within which the structural analysis of the o-object and surplus-jouissance gains its urgency. This disjunction is what makes it possible for psychoanalysis to occupy the position it does as a discourse about the subject's dependency on discourse.

The session closes with the announcement that phobia is not a discrete clinical entity but a 'turntable' (plaque tournante): by elucidating phobia's relations with hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and perversion, and by examining its junction with the structure of perversion, one can re-examine the disjunction of knowledge and power from a clinical vantage point. Little Hans is implied as the paradigm case.

Key concepts: Lack, Symbolic, Real, Imaginary, Objet petit a, Jouissance Notable examples: Little Hans (anticipated); Musical harmony as first coupling of counting with image; Aristotle on cosmology

Seminar 20: Wednesday 14 May 1969 — The Signifier, the Subject, and the Phallic Signifier as Missing (p.312-333)

Lacan reorients the discussion around the primacy of the signifier as the only element analysis gives certainty about. He critiques the psychoanalytic literature on the subject for its incoherence: subjects are described as radically mobile — able to occupy any position — without any logical account of what constitutes the subject's structure. The only real progress in psychoanalysis is structural: understanding the subject as an effect of the signifying articulation, retroactively posited by interpretation.

The phallus is defined as the 'missing signifier' — not because the phallus is simply absent but because sexual enjoyment (jouissance) is radically foreclosed from symbolisation. Enjoyment is nowhere symbolised in the subject's system, and cannot be symbolised; this is why there is necessarily, in Freud's remarks, 'this enormity that disturbs no one' — the Oedipus complex as a myth that does not resemble any ethnological myth (Kroeber, Lévi-Strauss both note this). The myth of the primordial father is the one who confuses in enjoyment all the women; feminine enjoyment remains an enigma.

The turning point from which neurosis emerges is located with precision: it is the positive intrusion of auto-erotic enjoyment (onanism) in the child that correlatively produces the positivation of the subject as dependent — anaclitic — on the desire of the Other. At this precise juncture, the structure of the subject 'becomes a drama.' The o-object is shown retrospectively to have constituted the whole structure of the subject before this drama erupts.

Key concepts: Signifier, Phallus, Jouissance, Castration, Neurosis, Objet petit a Notable examples: Little Hans and the phobic 'paper tiger'; Kroeber and Lévi-Strauss on the Oedipus myth; Freud's Oedipus complex as non-ethnological myth

Seminar 21: Wednesday 21 May 1969 — Jouissance, Capitalism, and the Historical Stakes of Psychoanalysis (p.334-347)

Lacan returns to the triad that structures the second half of the seminar: jouissance (excluded from the symbolic, thereby realised as the Real), the Other as locus of knowledge (where the exclusion is registered), and the objet petit a (the effect of the fall that results from the signifier's aiming at jouissance). He illustrates with his fountain pen as o-object — a preferred apparatus whose inconvenience is precisely what makes it precious, since the o-object is defined not by use or exchange value but by its relation to a topological structure that makes it function as equivalent to jouissance.

Lacan then argues for the historical specificity of psychoanalysis's stakes: under capitalism, the relationship of knowledge to enjoyment takes a characteristic form — exploitation does not consist simply in excluding enjoyment from work but in producing the structural aporia through which the word 'revolution' takes on a new sense entirely bound to the capitalist system that carries it (Marx's point). Psychoanalysis has something to say at this joint — it knows about the circle at which it can open — and this is precisely what it 'must totally fail at' in the dimension of biography and therapy.

The neurotic's choice — between the approach to the point of impossibility (the sexual contact as point at infinity) and the alibi of inadequacy (taking impossibility for inability) — is described as the clinical axis along which the direction of the cure must orient itself. Psychoanalysis is justified not by the benefit it confers but by the testimony it extracts from neurosis about the structure of human enjoyment under capitalism.

Key concepts: Jouissance, Knowledge, Surplus-jouissance, Neurosis, Symptom, Real Notable examples: Fountain pen as o-object; Marx on revolution and capitalism; Point at infinity / sexual impossibility

Seminar 22: Wednesday 4 June 1969 — The Psychoanalytic Act, the Subject-Supposed-to-Know, and Failure (p.348-366)

Lacan resumes the account of the psychoanalytic act that was interrupted by the May 1968 events during the previous year (Seminar XV on The Psychoanalytic Act). He notes that no one had named 'the psychoanalytic act' as such before him — which is itself a sign that the question had not been posed. The relationship between the May events and the analysts' avoidance of the question of the act is not causal but structural: both share a field defined by the o-object and its relationship to the field of the Other.

What knowledge produces is the o-object: it comes to substitute for the gap designated in the impasse of the sexual relationship, duplicating the division of the subject by giving him a cause where castration had left only an absent cause. The psychoanalyst takes on the charge of being the subject-supposed-to-know — not because the Other is One (it is not), but because this is the necessary position from which the analytic work proceeds. The paradox of the psychoanalytic act is therefore acute: the psychoanalyst knows that the subject-supposed-to-know does not exist, yet must induce the analysand onto the path of meeting it.

The formula 'the psychoanalyst plays/makes the master' (fait le maître) in the double sense of faire is introduced: the analysand produces the psychoanalyst as an effect of the work of analysis, and the psychoanalyst plays the master in the sense of pretending — occupying the position of the subject-supposed-to-know so that, at analysis's end, this supposition can be evacuated, leaving the o-object as cause rather than as support. The masochist is introduced as the structurally inverted figure: he is 'the master of the real game,' the one who forces the Other to be the agent of his jouissance, succeeding where the psychoanalyst formally fails.

Key concepts: Psychoanalytic act, Subject Supposed to Know, Objet petit a, Castration, Transference, Discourse of the Master Notable examples: Seminar XV on the Psychoanalytic Act (previous year); The masochist as 'true master'; Pascal's wager (recapitulated)

Seminar 24: Wednesday 18 June 1969 — The Empty Set, the Additional One, and the Hysteric as Psychoanalysand (p.367-384)

In one of the final sessions, Lacan formalises the structure of the Other through set theory: the inclusion of the first signifier (the unary trait, '1') into the Other necessarily generates a second term — the empty set — and this structure can be repeated indefinitely. The o-object is defined as identical to this indefinitely repeated structure: the 'additional one' (un-en-plus) designates the surplus that is always already generated by the entry of the 1 into the Other. This formal derivation shows why the Other was 'taken for 1 for a long time' — the perverse structure is precisely the imaginary restoration of the Other's apparent integrity through this moulding of the signifying structure by the o-object.

Lacan then turns to Anna O and the hysteric as paradigm cases. The hysteric is structurally constituted as a psychoanalysand before any analysis: she already embodies the subject-supposed-to-know in her flesh — the neurotic symptom (the hysterical paralysis named 'arm' because it is called arm, with no anatomical basis) is the body serving as support for a signifying unit. Freud, at the place of the '1' in the set-theoretic schema, functions as the listener whose presence enables the talking cure, but who has not yet distinguished between the hysteric's 'models' (master/woman) as unconscious structures rather than lived identifications.

The critical operation of analytic treatment is specified as the 'cut': the analyst must practice the cut between the subject-supposed-to-know (which the hysteric already constitutes in herself, transference ante litteram) and the unconscious structure (the formalised sets of '1, 1, empty set' at the level of master and woman). This cut is what allows the neurotic to stop 'representing truth in the flesh.' The obsessional's structure is indicated in parallel: his desire is constitutively impossible, structured around the master whose death he both desires and depends upon.

Key concepts: Big Other, Objet petit a, Subject Supposed to Know, Identification, Hysteria, Splitting of the Subject Notable examples: Anna O and the talking cure; Dora (two dreams); Little Hans (revisited); Freud, Studies on Hysteria

Seminar 25: Wednesday 25 June 1969 — Knowledge, the Subject, and the Conclusion (p.385-399)

The final session returns to the schema of the Other as empty set and unary trait to conclude the year's argument. Lacan recapitulates: the o-object arises as in-form of the empty set, generated by the deferred repetition (Nachträglichkeit) of the unary trait in its aim at a repetition of enjoyment. The formula 'knowledge serves the master' (the Hegelian slave produces knowledge for the master) is now supplemented: 'knowledge serves the woman, because it makes her the cause of desire.' This doubles the political-economic analysis (surplus value/surplus-jouissance) with a sexual-structural analysis: knowledge is always already in service of something that exceeds it.

The reading of May '68 and the student revolt is revisited: a revolt becomes a revolution only if the attack is directed at the level of the subject's relation to knowledge — not at particular professors but at the structure by which knowledge constitutes subjects as masters on paper ('paper tigers'). Since psychoanalysis insists that every knowledge implies a subject, it is potentially the discourse that could enable this structural attack. But the unconscious — the paradigm of 'a knowledge the subject is unaware of' — is not a concept but a paradigm, the starting point from which Freudian concepts (the o-object, the subject) are generated.

Lacan closes with the formula: the neurotic is s(Ø) — the subject of the barred Other — which means he teaches us that the subject is always another and that this other is not the right one to know what causes the subject. Psychoanalysis stops at the point of reconnecting the lower line of the Graph of Desire (s(O)) with the upper left (S(Ø) — the signifier of the lack in the Other), which is precisely where structural work must begin rather than end.

Key concepts: Knowledge, Splitting of the Subject, Objet petit a, Unconscious, Hysteria, Signifier Notable examples: Oedipus / Sphinx (hysteric's game); Graph of Desire (lower/upper lines); May '68 student revolt revisited

Main interlocutors

  • Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
  • Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
  • Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo
  • Karl Marx, Capital
  • Blaise Pascal, Pensées
  • Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
  • Kurt Gödel (incompleteness theorems)
  • Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense
  • Louis Althusser
  • Aristotle, Sense and Sensibilia
  • Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
  • Georg Cantor / set theory
  • Lacan, Écrits
  • Lacan, Seminar VII (Ethics of Psychoanalysis)
  • Lacan, Seminar X (Anxiety)
  • Lacan, Seminar XV (The Psychoanalytic Act)
  • Lacan, Seminar V
  • Fibonacci / golden ratio mathematics
  • Berkeley (idealism)
  • Michel Foucault (allusion, 'What is an Author?')

Position in the corpus

Seminar XVI occupies a pivotal position in the Lacanian corpus, sitting between the formalisation of the four fundamental concepts in Seminar XI (1964) and the full elaboration of the four discourses in Seminar XVII (1969–1970). It is the immediate predecessor of the discourse theory: the concepts of surplus-jouissance, the master signifier, and the structural division between knowledge and truth that are formalised in Seminar XVII's mathemes are all developed here in their pre-mathemic form. Readers coming from Seminar XI will find Seminar XVI deepening the account of repetition, the drive, and the objet petit a; readers preparing for Seminar XVII should read Seminar XVI as the conceptual laboratory in which the Marx–Freud homology is first rigorously worked through and the topology of knowledge/jouissance is established. Seminar VII is extensively recalled and extended: the ethics of psychoanalysis is now grounded not in the approach to das Ding but in the structural account of surplus-jouissance and the political economy of knowledge. Seminar X (Anxiety) is alluded to as the prior treatment of 'anxiety is not without an object,' which Seminar XVI now frames within the symbolic logic of lack and counting.\n\nWithin the broader Lacanian-influenced corpus, Seminar XVI is the essential reference for anyone working on the Lacan–Marx relation (developed further by Žižek, Badiou, and the tradition of 'Lacanian left' political theory), on the formalism of the objet petit a (which is here given its most mathematically explicit treatment), and on the epistemology of psychoanalysis as it relates to science and knowledge. It should be read alongside Écrits (particularly 'Kant with Sade,' 'Subversion of the Subject,' and the 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache') and in close conjunction with Seminar XVII (The Other Side of Psychoanalysis), to which it is the direct prologue. For readers of Todd McGowan, Mladen Dolar, or Alenka Zupančič on jouissance and political economy, Seminar XVI is the primary Lacanian source.

Canonical concepts deployed