Lacan Seminar 1969 discourses

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis

Jacques Lacan

by Jacques Lacan

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Synopsis

Seminar XVII (1969–1970), delivered under the title "The Reverse Side of Psychoanalysis," constitutes Lacan's most sustained and systematic effort to theorize the social bond through the apparatus of the Four Discourses — Master, University, Hysteric, and Analyst. The seminar's central argument is that every stable social formation is organized by a specific arrangement of four terms (master signifier S1, knowledge S2, divided subject $, and objet petit a) rotating through four structural positions (agent, other, production, truth), and that the passage from one discourse to another — rather than any political revolution — marks the only genuine transformation available to speaking beings. Lacan grounds the Discourse of the Master in Hegel's master/slave dialectic while simultaneously critiquing it via Marx: surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir) is introduced as the structural homologue of Marxian surplus value, the extracted residue of jouissance that the slave's knowledge yields to the master's demand. Against Hegel's promise that slave-labor culminates in Absolute Knowledge, Lacan insists that knowledge is a means of jouissance, not of truth, and that it produces entropy rather than accumulation. The seminar uses the Dora case, Freud's "murder of the father" in Totem and Taboo, the Oedipus complex treated as "Freud's own dream," and an extended philological dialogue with biblical scholar André Caquot on Sellin's Moses to displace Freud's mythological constructions toward a structural reading. Throughout, the university crisis of 1968–70 provides a living laboratory: the student occupies the position of objet a in the Discourse of the University, produced as surplus and charged with generating a divided subject — making political revolt structurally legible. The Discourse of the Analyst, positioned as the exact inversion of the Discourse of the Master, is presented as the sole discursive form capable of a genuine "change of phase," even if it cannot abolish the master signifier.

Distinctive contribution

Seminar XVII is irreplaceable in the Lacanian corpus as the text in which the Four Discourses are fully articulated for the first time as a formal, rotating apparatus — not a loose typology but a combinatorial system governed by structural rules of impossibility and impotence. While Lacan had introduced elements of the discourse theory in Seminar XVI ("From an Other to the other"), it is here that the political, philosophical, and clinical stakes are brought to convergence. No other primary text in the corpus so directly theorizes the social bond as such: where Seminar XI theorizes the subject's constitution through separation and alienation, and where Écrits largely addresses clinical and linguistic structures, Seminar XVII asks what holds groups, institutions, and civilizations together — and identifies the Master Signifier's concealment at the place of truth as the answer. The Marx–Freud axis is developed with unusual explicitness: surplus-jouissance is not merely a metaphor for surplus value but a claim that Marx's discovery was itself a symptom of the deeper extraction of jouissance that the Discourse of the Master performs on the slave's knowledge, and that even socialist revolution — by nationalizing the means of production without understanding surplus-jouissance — cannot escape this circuit.

The seminar is also distinctive for its performative dimension. The two Vincennes "Analyticon" sessions are incorporated as theoretical demonstrations: the shouted interruptions, the students' demands, and the institutional resistance are all read in vivo through the Four Discourses schema, making the text itself an enactment of the theory it proposes. The extended sessions with André Caquot on Sellin's biblical exegesis of Hosea introduce a unique dimension not found elsewhere in the corpus: psychoanalytic epistemology confronting the philological problem of textual latency, unconscious inscription in written tradition, and the question of whether the "murder of Moses" can be sustained as anything more than Freud's own theoretical wish-fulfillment — i.e., Freud's dream requiring interpretation. This reflexive turn — treating Freud's own theoretical constructs (Oedipus, the father of the horde) as manifest content with latent content to be analyzed — is among the most methodologically radical gestures of Lacan's middle-to-late period.

Main themes

The Four Discourses as a structural theory of the social bond
Surplus-jouissance as the structural homologue of Marxian surplus value
The Discourse of the Master and its concealment of truth through the master signifier
Philosophy as the extraction of slave-knowledge into master-knowledge (episteme)
Revolutionary aspiration's structural reproduction of the Discourse of the Master
The Oedipus complex as Freud's own dream requiring interpretation
The Discourse of the Analyst as the inversion and sole counterpoint to the Master
University discourse, the student as objet a, and the 1968–70 political crisis
Jouissance, its prohibition, and the structural logic of surplus-jouissance
Truth as half-saying, castration as the concealed truth of the master

Chapter outline

Seminar 1: Wednesday 26 November 1969 — p.4-19
Analyticon 1: Vincennes, 3 December 1969 — p.20-36
Seminar 2 & 3: Wednesday 10 & 17 December 1969 — p.37-52
Seminars 4 & 5 (January–February 1970): Repetition, Jouissance, and Entropy — p.53-103
Seminar 7: Wednesday 18 February 1970 — The Master, the Slave, and Marx — p.104-122
Seminar 7 (cont.) & Seminar 8: Dora, the Oedipus Complex as Freud's Dream — p.110-142
Seminar 9: Wednesday 18 March 1970 — The Real Father, Castration, and the Impossible — p.143-158
Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970 — Revolution, Science, and Radiophonie — p.159-183
Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 April 1970 — Sellin, Hosea, and Freud's Moses — p.184-212
Seminar 12 (on the steps of the Pantheon): Wednesday 13 May 1970 — p.210-219
Seminar 13: Wednesday 20 May 1970 — Mathematics, Affect, and Lathouses — p.220-237
Analyticon 2: Vincennes, 4 June 1970 — p.238-250
Seminar 14: Wednesday 10 June 1970 — Hegel's Sleight of Hand, Impossibility, and Impotence — p.251-269
Seminar 15: Wednesday 17 June 1970 — Culture, Shame, and the Final Word — p.270-283

Chapter summaries

Seminar 1: Wednesday 26 November 1969 (p.4-19)

The opening session introduces the year's title — 'The Reverse Side of Psychoanalysis' — and stakes out the seminar's methodological orientation: psychoanalysis must be approached from its structural underside, not from its surface claims. Lacan presents the Four Discourses for the first time as a formal apparatus, anchoring the Discourse of the Master in the S1→S2 relation and tying it to the Freudian articulation of signifier, jouissance, and surplus-jouissance. The schema is explicitly linked to the master/slave dialectic from Hegel, but Lacan immediately introduces a fundamental complication: 'the enjoyment is the privilege of the Master' is precisely what is belied by closer examination. The slave, he argues, possesses something — a knowledge (savoir) embedded in know-how — that the master does not, and philosophy in its historical function is precisely the operation of extracting this knowledge, purifying it as episteme, and transferring it into the master's possession.

Lacan develops the concept of episteme etymologically ('putting oneself in the right position') and reads Plato's Meno as a scene of this philosophical 'robbery': the slave is questioned in such a way that the master's questions dictate the answers, and what is demonstrated is not the slave's knowledge but the master's right to appropriate it. This structural argument — that philosophy itself is a form of plunder — sets up the seminar's larger thesis about the relationship between the Discourse of the University (which elevates S2 to the commanding position) and the hidden master-signifier that governs it from the place of truth. The seminar closes by deferring the question of the slave's relation to jouissance, positioning it as the key problem to be developed in subsequent sessions.

Key concepts: Four Discourses, Discourse of the Master, Master Signifier, Knowledge, Jouissance, Master/Slave Dialectic Notable examples: Plato's Meno; Hegel's master/slave dialectic

Analyticon 1: Vincennes, 3 December 1969 (p.20-36)

The first Vincennes 'Impromptu' presents the Four Discourses under conditions of active institutional turbulence: the session is interrupted, students shout, and the theoretical argument unfolds in explicit confrontation with the demand for relevance. Lacan uses this confrontation as a live demonstration of the theory itself. He introduces the Discourse of the University as producing students as surplus-value objects (objet petit a), and argues that the Hysteric's discourse is the structural precondition for the Marxian discovery of historical symptoms — because it was through hysterical questioning of the master that Freud, and by extension Marx, could uncover the hidden logic of exploitation.

Lacan insists that what 'dominates' any society is not ideology in any naive sense but 'the practice of language' — a claim he grounds in psychoanalytic evidence. The USSR, he argues, is governed by the University discourse, not by any genuinely revolutionary transformation: knowledge has been crowned king, not abolished. Revolutionary aspiration, he contends, inevitably returns to the Discourse of the Master, because the mass-formation produces idealization — precisely what Freud's Massenpsychologie demonstrates. The session is also notable for a pointed remark: the student militants are unwittingly performing enjoyment for the very system they oppose, insofar as their 'revolt' remains within the University discourse's structure rather than breaking from it.

Key concepts: Discourse of the University, Discourse of the Hysteric, Surplus-jouissance, Objet petit a, Four Discourses, The big Other Notable examples: Vincennes Experimental University; USSR as University discourse; Freud's Massenpsychologie

Seminar 2 & 3: Wednesday 10 & 17 December 1969 (p.37-52)

Seminar 2 opens with Lacan's autobiographical remark that the protesting students confirm rather than disrupt his theory: 'this discourse situates me' and 'this discourse situates itself' amount to the same thing — the speaker of a discourse is always an effect of that discourse rather than its origin. This reflexive gesture grounds a key theoretical claim: the subject is produced by the structure, not the other way around. Lacan distinguishes knowledge (savoir) as a network of signifying relations from representation (connaissance), insisting that the unconscious is a knowledge that does not know itself — the S1→S2 relation that runs without a knowing subject.

Seminar 3 (17 December) elaborates the relationship between the Discourse of the Master and the Discourse of the Hysteric, positioning the latter as the structural engine that animated the master's 'desire to know.' The hysteric, Lacan argues, wants the master to know — but what she wants him to know is ultimately that language cannot exhaust the dimension of jouissance she opens up as a woman. This analysis connects the Discourse of the Hysteric to the foundation of analytic experience: the analyst 'hystericizes' his discourse by taking the position of objet a (cause of desire) rather than Subject Supposed to Know. The session thus establishes the clinical stakes of the discourse theory: interpretation operates through the logic of the 'half-said,' always indexed to the division of the subject by jouissance.

Key concepts: Discourse of the Hysteric, Discourse of the Analyst, Knowledge, Splitting of the Subject, Objet petit a, Subject Supposed to Know Notable examples: Philosophical discourse as 'the most sublime of hysteria'

Seminars 4 & 5 (January–February 1970): Repetition, Jouissance, and Entropy (p.53-103)

These sessions develop the structural analysis of repetition and jouissance through an extended reading of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Lacan argues that what makes repetition necessary is not the cycles of biological need but a seeking for jouissance that goes against life — thereby grounding the death drive in the structure of signification rather than biology. The unary trait is introduced as the minimal mark that simultaneously founds the signifier and introduces surplus-jouissance: each repetition produces a loss (entropy), and it is precisely at the site of this loss that objet petit a emerges as the 'lost object' that knowledge as a formal apparatus attempts to recover.

The claim that 'jouissance is grounded in loss' leads to the formal introduction of the Mehrlust (surplus-enjoyment) as what drives knowledge as a means of jouissance. Lacan insists that truth cannot be said whole — it can only be 'half-said' — and identifies the concealed content of the master's truth as castration/impotence. Phallic jouissance is analyzed as structurally excluded from the social-libidinal economy: not biological sexuality but this exclusion is what Freudian discourse is fundamentally about. The surplus-jouissance is positioned as the substitute system operating in place of prohibited phallic jouissance, with the Discourse of the Master generating this surplus as the extracted 'tithe' from the slave's knowledge — a prior extraction whose memorial is Marx's discovery of surplus value.

Key concepts: Repetition, Jouissance, Surplus-jouissance, Objet petit a, Death Drive, Unary trait, Castration Notable examples: Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Dora / butcher's wife dream; Marx, Capital

Seminar 7: Wednesday 18 February 1970 — The Master, the Slave, and Marx (p.104-122)

This session provides the most explicit political-economic theorization in the seminar. Lacan states directly: 'the reverse side of psychoanalysis is the very thing I am putting forward this year under the title of the discourse of the Master.' He argues that the Discourse of the Master 'accomplishes its revolution in the opposite direction to the circuit that completes itself' — meaning that what appears as revolution is structurally just the Master's discourse completing its own loop. The Discourse of the Analyst is positioned as the sole counterpoint: its symmetry with the Discourse of the Master is not across a line or plane but with respect to a point, making it the exact point-inversion of the master's structure.

Lacan uses an autobiographical clinical case — three Togolese doctors analyzed just after the war — to argue that colonized subjects' unconscious operated according to 'good old rules of the Oedipus complex': an unconscious 'sold to them' along with colonial discourse, demonstrating that the unconscious is not an archive of childhood memories but a retroactive construction within the master's discursive regime. He then maps the Four Discourses formally: Master-signifier → knowledge / subject → jouissance, with the splitting between S1 and S2 defining the fundamental structure. Against Hegel's teleology of Absolute Knowledge emerging from slave-labor, Lacan insists: 'no labor has ever generated knowledge'; knowledge is a means of enjoyment, and labor generates truth but not knowledge.

Key concepts: Discourse of the Master, Discourse of the Analyst, Master Signifier, Knowledge, Jouissance, Oedipus Complex Notable examples: Togolese doctors in analysis; Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit; Marx, Capital

Seminar 7 (cont.) & Seminar 8: Dora, the Oedipus Complex as Freud's Dream (p.110-142)

The analysis of the Dora case occupies a central position across these sessions as a demonstration of how the Discourse of the Hysteric operates. Lacan argues that Dora maintains an alienated relation to the master-signifier (the idealized father) precisely by refusing to surrender knowledge: what the hysteric wants is not the master's satisfaction but for the master to know that she is the 'supreme prize' of all his knowledge — a master 'over whom she reigns' without his governing. Dora's second dream is read to show that the symbolic father is the dead father: one only reaches him through an empty, uncommunicating place. The 'large book' (dictionary) that Dora finds in the empty apartment is positioned as a substitute for the father — knowledge about truth replacing the father's person, confirming that what is important for the hysteric is what the father produces in terms of knowledge. Crucially, Lacan argues that the truth the hysteric reveals — and that Freud defended against — is that 'the master is castrated from the start.'

Seminar 8 introduces what becomes one of the seminar's most provocative gestures: the proposal to treat the Oedipus complex as 'Freud's own dream,' requiring interpretation in terms of manifest and latent content rather than as a clinical universal. The manifest content is the myth of the murder of the father/enjoyment of the mother; the latent content is the structural operation of the paternal metaphor as Lacan had formalized it — something categorically different from Freud's quasi-historical literalism in Totem and Taboo. The surplus-jouissance is identified as the structural analogue of Marxian surplus value, and the Discourse of the Analyst is shown to uniquely situate knowledge at the place of truth — a position governed by the law of half-saying and occupied in ordinary discourse by myth.

Key concepts: Discourse of the Hysteric, Oedipus Complex, Truth, Surplus-jouissance, Discourse of the Analyst, Castration, Name of the Father Notable examples: Freud's Dora case; Totem and Taboo; Paternal metaphor

Seminar 9: Wednesday 18 March 1970 — The Real Father, Castration, and the Impossible (p.143-158)

This session elaborates the structural function of the Real Father as the operator of castration — defined not as a psychological fantasy but as 'the real operation introduced by the impact of any signifier at all on the sexual relationship.' Lacan distinguishes the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary registers of the father: castration is essentially symbolic (conceived from signifying articulation), frustration is imaginary, and privation is real. The Real Father is 'impossible' in the strict sense: there is no conceivable psychology of the original father, and his presentation in Freud's teaching as the one who 'enjoys all the women' provokes derision precisely because it gestures at an impossible real.

Lacan argues that 'the dead father is enjoyment' presents itself as the sign of the impossible itself — this is where the Real as impossible category arises, not as a simple obstacle but as the logical obstacle of what the symbolic declares impossible. The Master's Discourse is shown to produce surplus-jouissance through a structural mechanism: by giving the order (fulfilling his function as master) the master loses something, and it is through this loss that surplus-jouissance ought to be restored to him. The session also addresses the hysteric's structural question — 'what does a woman want?' — positioning it as the founding question that produces master-signifiers: Freud himself generated his master-signifiers (including 'Oedipus') precisely because he began from the hysteric's discourse and its questioning of the master.

Key concepts: Real, Castration, Master Signifier, Jouissance, Discourse of the Hysteric, Name of the Father, Objet petit a Notable examples: Freud, Totem and Taboo; Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit

Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970 — Revolution, Science, and Radiophonie (p.159-183)

Lacan presents his answers to questions posed for Belgian radio (the Radiophonie), structured around three topics: the relationship between psychoanalysis, ethnology, and linguistics under the heading of 'structure'; the meaning of 'revolution'; and the question of his relation to Jakobson's metaphor/metonymy. On structure, Lacan insists that it designates the coming-into-play of the effect of language in reality — not a function of a subject representing relations to himself, but the presence of formulae of relation already embodied in language, which determine difference by creating a barrier between the subject of statements and the stating subject. Saussure's concept of 'arbitrariness' is critiqued as the lapse produced by working within the Discourse of the University, whose hidden aspect is precisely the master-signifier of the arbitrary.

On revolution: the 'Copernican revolution' is reread not as a change of center but as the discovery that knowledge can be structured without a knowing subject — paralleling Newton's 'unthinkable' formula for gravity and Freud's discovery of the unconscious as a knowledge that escapes consciousness. Both point toward the impossible as the Real. Revolution acquires structural dignity not from heliocentrism but from Marx's discovery of surplus value as the foreclosed dimension in capitalist discourse. On Jakobson: Lacan categorically denies mere borrowing, insisting he was 'saying something completely different' — the metaphor/metonymy opposition was a deployment toward a psychoanalytic theory of the subject that has no counterpart in linguistics. The session ends with a meditation on Gödelian incompleteness as a formal analog to the structure of the unconscious, where the 'false' (falsus) is causally operative in the production of being through interpretation.

Key concepts: Four Discourses, Discourse of the University, Knowledge, Real, Metaphor, Signifier, Language Notable examples: Copernican revolution; Newton's formula for gravity; Marx, Capital; Gödel's incompleteness theorems

Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 April 1970 — Sellin, Hosea, and Freud's Moses (p.184-212)

This session is unique in the entire seminar in being organized around a sustained philological dialogue with André Caquot, Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Religieuses. The topic is Ernst Sellin's 1922 book Mose und seine Bedeutung, the text on which Freud relied for his thesis that Moses was murdered — the central pillar of Moses and Monotheism. Caquot demonstrates, through meticulous textual analysis of passages from Hosea chapters 5, 9, and 12, how Sellin systematically manipulated the Hebrew text — transposing words, re-vocalizing consonants, and forcing exegetical readings — to make it say what his prior thesis required. The structural argument Lacan extracts is that Sellin's textual procedure enacts 'extraordinary latency': the very method of hiding the event at Shittim (the alleged site of Moses' murder) under an 'unbelievable story' reveals how a pre-existing interpretive desire overdetermines the reading of the Other's text.

For Lacan, this session has dual significance. First, it stages in real time the epistemological problem of the subject's desire distorting the reading of a founding text — with direct implications for psychoanalytic practice and the transference. Second, it reinforces the central claim of Seminar 8: the Oedipus complex is Freud's dream requiring interpretation, and the 'murder of the father' is a theoretical construction rather than a historical-anthropological fact. Sellin's own later retraction of his thesis (dropping key exegeses in the 1929 K.A.T. edition) further confirms that what is at stake is the structure of theoretical wishfulness. The discussion of Hosea's conjugal metaphor (Yahweh as spouse/Baal) is read as an archaic precursor to the logic of the Other's desire and the formation of a community through symbolic substitution — with the prophet's fierce 'ignorance' of Yahweh positioned as a paradoxical figure of the Discourse of the Master.

Key concepts: Unconscious, Truth, Knowledge, Oedipus Complex, The big Other, Repression, Desire Notable examples: Sellin, Mose und seine Bedeutung; Freud, Moses and Monotheism; Book of Hosea; Deutero-Isaiah

Seminar 12 (on the steps of the Pantheon): Wednesday 13 May 1970 (p.210-219)

This informal Q&A, transcribed from a recording made on the steps of the Pantheon after the Law Faculty was closed, addresses several topics that clarify the seminar's theoretical architecture. Lacan defends the centrality of affect in his work by distinguishing his translation of Freud's Vorstellungsrepräsentanz as 'representative of representation' (where the representative is not a representation) from the 'ideational representative' reading — a translation that implies affect is displaced and unrecognizable through repression rather than suppressed. He insists that anxiety is the central affect around which everything is organized, retrospectively linking the Discourse of the Master to his 1962 Seminar on Anxiety.

On political questions — the proletariat, Maoist references to manual labor — Lacan reads the proletarian's position through the Four Discourses schema: in the Discourse of the Master, the proletarian occupies the position of the big Other, having been stripped not only of material goods but of the function of knowledge. He engages cautiously with the Maoist re-emphasis on manual knowledge, noting that it is 'very profoundly justified in the structure' but raises the genuine question of whether know-how at the level of manual work can carry enough weight to be a subversive factor in a world where science has been fully objectified. The session also clarifies anxiety's object: surplus-jouissance (objet petit a), not an absence of object — a correction of the received view that anxiety is 'without an object.'

Key concepts: Anxiety, Surplus-jouissance, Objet petit a, Repression, Knowledge, Discourse of the Master, The big Other Notable examples: Freud, Seminar on Anxiety (1962); Kierkegaard; Maoist reference to manual knowledge

Seminar 13: Wednesday 20 May 1970 — Mathematics, Affect, and Lathouses (p.220-237)

This session develops the formalization of affect through mathematics, specifically through the Fibonacci series and its limiting proportion (the golden number). Lacan argues that the golden number formalizes the structure of affect as cause and repetition: the repetition of the unary trait ('I am one') retroactively produces objet a as the cause — 'the bar is equal to o.' This is not a mere analogy but a structural claim: science, grounded in symbolic/combinatorial proof rather than perception, produces an 'unsubstance' that dissolves the imaginary male/female forming principles, leaving each subject determined as objet petit a, the cause of desire. The key philosophical point is that geometry (Euclid's Book 5 on proportion) provides a purely symbolic proof of proportion — not intuitive but combinatorial — and that this same logic governs the structure of affect.

Lacan then introduces the neologism 'lathouses' to name the small objects manufactured by capitalist-scientific discourse that populate the world as causes of desire — gadgets, commodities, media objects — which he distinguishes from the alethosphere (the field of formalized truth within which all speech operates). The lathouses are products of the same discourse that generates surplus-jouissance; their proliferation signals the completion of the Discourse of the University's dominance. The concept anticipates what Lacan will later call 'gadgets of the drive' and connects directly to the diagnosis of capitalist discourse as a fifth discursive formation that short-circuits surplus-jouissance by immediately offering commodity-objects as substitute satisfactions.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Surplus-jouissance, Repetition, Language, Real, Discourse of the University Notable examples: Fibonacci series / golden number; Euclid, Book 5; Apollo 13 astronauts; Lathouses as commodity-objects

Analyticon 2: Vincennes, 4 June 1970 (p.238-250)

The second Vincennes session begins with a confrontation over unauthorized publication of the first session, which Lacan uses to demonstrate in vivo the logic of the Discourse of the University and the politics of knowledge-reproduction. The theoretical core of this session concerns the relationship between revolution and the Discourse of the Master: drawing on Freud's Massenpsychologie, Lacan argues that what the mass produces is imaginary idealization — the re-emergence of the Discourse of the Master. This is why Freud-Marx syntheses fail: Freud's contribution is precisely something beyond Marx, showing why after the effect of Marx's discourse, nothing changed in the stability of the Discourse of the Master.

Lacan then introduces the distinction between impossibility and impotence as the two structural limits corresponding to two different registers. Impossibility is aligned with the Real — demonstrated in Freud's three 'impossible professions' (governing, educating, analysing) — and is the domain of mathematical logic's undecidables. Impotence is the practical limit of each discourse from within: the University discourse is structurally impotent to produce a genuine subject (its production is a divided subject charged to the student-as-objet-a). The analytic discourse uniquely enables a 'change of phase' in the circuit of the Master Signifier — not its abolition, but a structural transformation of the subject's relation to the impossible-real. This is the closest Lacan comes in Seminar XVII to defining what psychoanalysis can actually accomplish politically.

Key concepts: Discourse of the Master, Four Discourses, Jouissance, Real, The Act, Discourse of the Analyst, Master Signifier Notable examples: Kronstadt sailors; Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; Three impossible professions

Seminar 14: Wednesday 10 June 1970 — Hegel's Sleight of Hand, Impossibility, and Impotence (p.251-269)

The penultimate seminar provides a recapitulative theorization of the relationship between Hegel's master/slave dialectic and the Four Discourses, now reading Hegel as performing a 'sleight of hand': Hegel's truth is that the relationship of the master to the real is 'properly speaking impossible,' but he presents this impossibility as the engine of a dialectical progress that culminates in Absolute Knowledge — a claim Lacan treats as seductive but structurally false. The master signifier (S1) is identified with death in Hegel's system because nothing else can signify absolute mastery; the slave's truth is that through labor he arrives at knowledge — but, Lacan insists, this labor does not generate knowledge, it generates entropy and surplus-jouissance.

Lacan draws on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics to show that even the most rigorous ancient thought could not resolve what the master 'receives' in terms of surplus-jouissance from the slave's work — a blind spot that Aristotle himself sensed but could not theorize. The distinction between impossibility and impotence is formally clarified: impossibility belongs to the Real (what cannot be demonstrated in any system, per Gödel) while impotence belongs to each discourse's internal structural limit — the University discourse, for instance, is structurally impotent to produce a master of knowledge, though it endlessly charges its students with that impossible task. The session confirms that the Four Discourses apparatus is not merely a sociological typology but a formalization of structural limits that are mathematically demonstrable.

Key concepts: Discourse of the Master, Master/Slave Dialectic, Surplus-jouissance, Real, Knowledge, Four Discourses Notable examples: Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics; Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel; Gödel's incompleteness

Seminar 15: Wednesday 17 June 1970 — Culture, Shame, and the Final Word (p.270-283)

The final session of the seminar opens with an extended meditation on 'dying of shame' as the only affect whose genealogy can be traced with certainty to a signifier — it is a degeneration of the signifier in the face of death, or more precisely, the only sign guaranteed to descend from a signifier rather than being a 'pure sign' (obscene). This functions as a final meditation on the relationship between signifier, affect, and the subject's being-for-death, connecting back to the seminar's opening concern with what 'the reverse side' of psychoanalysis reveals.

Lacan presents a fragment of writing ('thrown into a corner') that theorizes the relationship between truth, knowledge, and the real at the level of the Four Discourses: 'the effect of truth is only a fall of knowledge,' and 'it is this fall that constitutes production soon to be taken up again.' Revolution's only genuine benefit is the momentary 'lustre' it restores to truth — but people have 'always been hoodwinked by this lustre.' The locus of the Other is designed for truth to be inscribed, including the false and the lie, which only exist on the foundation of truth. The session closes with a wry self-assessment: what the seminar has accomplished, if anything, is to make the audience 'ashamed — not too much but precisely enough' — positioning shame as the minimal affective marker of an encounter with the real that the Master's discourse structurally forecloses.

Key concepts: Truth, Signifier, Real, Discourse of the Master, Language, The big Other, Jouissance Notable examples: Diderot, Le neveu de Rameau; Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit; Lacan's Écrits as 'worst-seller'

Main interlocutors

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Karl Marx, Capital
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism
Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Descartes, Meditations
Pascal, Pensées
André Caquot (biblical scholar)
Ernst Sellin, Mose und seine Bedeutung
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
Lacan, Écrits
Lacan, Seminar XVI (From an Other to the other)
Lacan, Seminar X (Anxiety)

Position in the corpus

Seminar XVII stands at the center of Lacan's 'discourses period' (roughly Seminars XVI–XX) and should be read after Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts) and Seminar XVI, which introduce the formal apparatus of the subject and objet a that Seminar XVII reconfigures into a social theory. It is the direct predecessor of Seminar XVIII (D'un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant) and Seminar XX (Encore), which extend the discourse theory toward questions of sexuation and the non-existence of the sexual relation. Readers who have worked through the Écrits — especially 'The Direction of the Treatment,' 'Subversion of the Subject,' and 'The Function and Field of Speech and Language' — will find Seminar XVII radicalizing those formulations by submitting them to a structural-political analysis. The Marx connection makes this seminar essential reading for anyone interested in Lacan's relationship to Althusserian Marxism and the theoretical conjuncture of post-1968 French thought.\n\nWithin the broader corpus of Lacanian secondary literature, Seminar XVII is most directly engaged by Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology and The Plague of Fantasies, where the surplus-jouissance/surplus value homology is developed at length, and by Fink's The Lacanian Subject for the clinical implications of the discourse theory. It is also the founding text for what became 'discourse theory' in Lacanian political philosophy (as in Stavrakakis, Laclau/Mouffe via Žižek). Readers coming from the clinical side should read it alongside Lacan's later remarks on the pass (passe) and the end of analysis, since the Discourse of the Analyst as presented here is both a structural category and a clinical telos.", "canonical_concepts_deployed_note": "see below"