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Lacan Seminar 1971 discourses

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVIII: On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance

Jacques Lacan

by Jacques Lacan

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Synopsis

Lacan's Seminar XVIII (1971), titled On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance, pursues a single, tightly wound argument: that every discourse is constitutively a semblance—not a semblance of something else but semblance as the very substance of discourse—and that this structure is grounded in the impossibility of writing the sexual relationship. Taking its departure from the Four Discourses elaborated the year before in Seminar XVII, the seminar asks whether a discourse could exist that is not a semblance, and answers that this question can only be posed from within discourse itself, since there is no metalanguage and no Other of the Other from which to judge. The seminar's central moves are: to theorize the phallus as the sole Bedeutung (denotation) that language gestures toward but never reaches; to introduce the concept of lituraterre—a neologism linking the letter, the literal, and the littoral—in order to distinguish the letter from the signifier and assign the letter to the register of the Real rather than the Symbolic; to demonstrate via Poe's "Purloined Letter" that writing produces castration effects structurally; and to develop the formulas of sexuation—the not-all (pas-toute) and the non-existence of "The Woman"—as logical consequences of the unwritability of the sexual relationship. Running through all of this is the proposition that surplus-jouissance is the Freudian analogue of Marxian surplus value, that it names the impossible-real gap around which every discourse circulates, and that it is this gap—not any biological or natural fact—that structures sexuality at the level of discourse.

Distinctive contribution

Seminar XVIII makes a contribution that is unique in the Lacanian corpus in the precision with which it locates the letter as a third term, irreducible to both the signifier (Symbolic) and the image (Imaginary), assigning it instead to the Real as that which "furrows" the signified without constituting a metaphor. The neologism lituraterre/litturaterrir, elaborated across the celebrated fifth and sixth sessions, is nowhere else developed at such length, and it performs a genuine theoretical function: it separates the question of writing from the question of language, and so from the standard Lacanian formula that "the unconscious is structured like a language," by showing that the letter—precisely insofar as it does not mean—is what supports the signifier and divides the subject between the register of speech and the register of writing. The analysis of Japanese writing (on-yomi/kun-yomi) and the experience of the Siberian landscape as "furrowing" are not ornamental but constitutive of this argument.

A second distinctive contribution is the systematic grounding of the formulas of sexuation in the failure of logical inscription. Where later seminars (XX, Encore) will present the sexuation formulas as a finished schema, Seminar XVIII shows them being derived—step by step from Aristotelian syllogistic, Fregean Sinn/Bedeutung, and Peircean quantifier logic—as consequences of the impossibility of writing "for every x" a function of sexual enjoyment. The demonstration that the Universal Affirmative of Woman cannot be written, and that what exists instead is only a "not-all," emerges here not as doctrine but as argument, making Seminar XVIII an indispensable genetic text for the later developed theory of sexuation. Finally, the seminar's sustained meditation on surplus-jouissance as both the operative term of discourse-as-semblance and the analog of Marxian surplus value offers a political-economic dimension—via the discourse of the Master and a pointed analysis of fascism and racism—that is more elaborated here than in any surrounding seminar.

Main themes

  • Discourse as semblance and the question of a discourse that might not be a semblance
  • The impossibility of writing the sexual relationship and its consequences for sexuation
  • The letter versus the signifier: lituraterre, furrowing, and the Real
  • Surplus-jouissance as the constitutive impossible of discourse, homologous to Marxian surplus value
  • The phallus as the sole Bedeutung of language and the paternal metaphor as a name rather than a presence
  • The not-all (pas-toute) and the non-existence of 'The Woman'
  • Writing as distinct from speech: the lapsus calami, the Écrits, and formalization
  • Hysteria as logical schema and the Oedipus complex as written myth
  • The Four Discourses as four arrangements of semblance around an impossible real
  • Topology, logic, and the limits of metalanguage

Chapter outline

  • Seminar 1: Wednesday 13 January 1971 — On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance — p.1-18
  • Seminar 2: Wednesday 20 January 1971 — Semblance, Woman, and Truth — p.19-36
  • Seminar 3: Wednesday 10 February 1971 — Language, Metaphor, and Surplus-Jouissance — p.37-54
  • Seminar 4: Wednesday 17 February 1971 — Writing, the Phallus, and the Sexual Law — p.55-76
  • L'achose — Writing, Topology, and the Absent Thing — p.77-96
  • Seminar 6 / Lituraterre: Wednesday 17 March 1971 — The Letter, the Purloined Letter, and Sexuation — p.97-135
  • Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971 — Writing is Jouissance; The Letter and Logical Failure — p.136-168
  • Seminar 9: Wednesday 9 June 1971 — The Act of Writing
  • Seminar 10: Wednesday 16 June 1971 — Semblance, Hysteria, and the Oedipus Myth — p.176-193

Chapter summaries

Seminar 1: Wednesday 13 January 1971 — On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance (p.1-18)

Lacan opens by revisiting and recontextualizing the theory of the Four Discourses from Seminar XVII. The key insistence is that discourse is not reducible to any speaking subject: it is a structure in which the subject is necessarily alienated and split, and the term intersubjectivity that Lacan had earlier used has been superseded by intersignificance—the subject is where it is not, represented by one signifier for another. The seminar title, 'On a discourse that might not be a semblance,' is thus immediately qualified: it can only be posed from within the artefact of discourse itself, since there is no metalanguage and no Other of the Other.

Lacan then establishes the central claim that every discourse is constitutively a semblance—not a semblance of something, but semblance as its proper substance. He traces this to the origins of scientific thinking in the observation of atmospheric phenomena (constellations, the rainbow, thunder), arguing that science has always started from semblances, and that the signifier is itself a form of semblance scattered throughout nature. The question of 'a discourse that will not be a semblance' thus cannot be answered by appealing to a referent outside discourse, because the referent is precisely what 'walks around' as the ungraspable real.

The third major move introduces surplus-jouissance. Lacan reframes Freud's pleasure-principle economy as a 'hyper-hedonism': jouissance is not a natural fact but an effect of discourse, and it is the Freudian discovery of the unconscious that first allows surplus-jouissance to appear as the impossible-real toward which discourse tends. The seminar closes with the proposition that it is precisely because a discourse is centered on an impossible effect that it has any chance of not being a semblance—a deliberately paradoxical formulation that will govern the rest of the year.

Key concepts: Discourse as semblance, Signifier, Surplus-jouissance, Four Discourses, Moebius strip, Splitting of the Subject Notable examples: Moebius strip; thunder as figure of the semblance; rainbow as atmospheric phenomenon

Seminar 2: Wednesday 20 January 1971 — Semblance, Woman, and Truth (p.19-36)

Lacan begins by responding to the audience's question 'what are you getting at?'—itself an example of the desire of the Other (che vuoi)—and clarifies that the semblance is not the contrary of truth but its strictly correlative dimension (demansion). He links this to the Freudian and Marxian promotions of the symptom as something that speaks even to those who do not know how to hear, arguing that this is the real revolutionary contribution common to both thinkers: they treated certain facts as symptoms, thereby opening a new dimension of the truth.

The seminar then develops a sustained analysis of the relationship between man and woman as structured through semblance and jouissance. Woman is posited as occupying, for man, the structural position of truth: she is the one who knows the disjunction between jouissance and semblance, and it is precisely this knowledge that the whole formation of masculine subjectivity is designed to evade. The 'castration complex' is identified as the domesticated label under which this truth is packaged and shelved. Lacan connects this structure to capitalist discourse through the figure of Hitler's 'little bit of surplus-jouissance'—arguing that racism is structurally enabled whenever a surplus-jouissance is made available for identification, a warning about what is 'in store in the years to come.'

Finally, Lacan specifies that sexuality at the level of discourse is constituted as semblance, with surplus-jouissance (not biology) as its operative term. The phallus functions as the signifier of sexual enjoyment precisely insofar as it is identical with the Name of the Father, and the Oedipus myth is described as the discourse's necessary fiction for designating the real of an impossible enjoyment.

Key concepts: Semblance, Truth, Jouissance, Surplus-jouissance, Phallus, Castration Notable examples: Hitler's moustache as crystallization of surplus-jouissance; Freud's Massenpsychologie; 'cherchez la femme'

Seminar 3: Wednesday 10 February 1971 — Language, Metaphor, and Surplus-Jouissance (p.37-54)

Opening with a mock-complaint about the university strike and a dig at linguistics departments whose expansion his own work unintentionally fuelled, Lacan draws a sharp distinction between linguistics (which he claims not to care about) and language (which is his actual object). He argues that linguists misunderstand his use of structural linguistics as merely metaphorical, without recognizing that all language is constitutively metaphorical: the referent is always real precisely because it is impossible to designate directly—every designation passes through the mediation of something else.

This leads to the central theoretical argument: language is irreducibly metaphorical; the referent is always real because it is ungraspable; and surplus-jouissance is supported by metonymy as the sliding object that keeps discourse in motion. The unconscious is structured like a language not because psychoanalysis borrows from linguistics, but because both move within the same constitutive metaphoricity. Lacan uses the Chinese concepts of hsing (nature/xing) and ming (heavenly decree) from Mencius/Meng-Tzu to triangulate the elusive status of surplus-jouissance: neither 'nature' nor 'decree' adequately locates what psychoanalysis must grasp as the symptom of discourse.

The broader methodological point is that linguistics—understood as a deliberately fabricated metaphor—models for psychoanalysis how to sustain a metaphor without neutralizing its action. Psychoanalysis does not colonize linguistics; it moves within the same constitutive metaphoricity, and it is surplus-jouissance that marks the point where the two discourses share their impossible ground.

Key concepts: Language, Metaphor, Surplus-jouissance, Signifier, Real, Symptom Notable examples: Chinese hsing (xing)/ming from Meng-Tzu; yang and yin; metalanguage and object-language

Seminar 4: Wednesday 17 February 1971 — Writing, the Phallus, and the Sexual Law (p.55-76)

Lacan opens by writing a formula from Mencius on the board—'Everywhere under the heavens, when one speaks about nature, what is meant are natural effects'—and uses it to argue that what emerges from effects of discourse is nothing other than the function of cause insofar as it is surplus-jouissance (li/profit). The session pivots to the function of writing in China and the claim that writing has played a pivotal role in the organization of knowledge—a claim that prepares the ground for the extended theory of the letter that will follow.

The discourse of the Analyst is glossed as 'the logic of action': its written form (objet a over S2 on the analyst's side, barred subject producing master signifiers on the analysand's side) was not heard precisely because it was written—illustrating that writing and speaking are fundamentally different modes, and that one can write a whole pile of things without any of it reaching an ear. Lacan explicitly links the Écrits to this logic, saying he named them that precisely because they were an attempt at writing culminating in graphs, and the graphs are only understandable in function of the style of the text.

The session then develops the argument that language occupies the gap left open by the phallus in place of the sexual relationship. The phallus is the organ insofar as it is feminine jouissance—the incompatibility of being and having. What is substituted for the sexual relationship is not a mathematical relation but a sexual law: the conjunction, even identity, of desire and prohibition, which is precisely what the demansion of truth is built on. The Oedipus complex is described as the maintenance in analytic discourse of a residual myth that designates this structural impossibility. Logical truth is introduced as a written enterprise—only logic, through writing, can take truth as a referent.

Key concepts: Writing, Phallus, Discourse of the Analyst, Sexual law, Oedipus Complex, Truth Notable examples: Mencian formula on nature and effects; Lacan's Écrits; the Graph of Desire as written topology

L'achose — Writing, Topology, and the Absent Thing (p.77-96)

Lacan writes l'achose on the board to theorize the thing-as-absent: the thing can only be approached through writing, not speech, because its place is always marked by the absence of the objet a (castration). When the objet a is removed from its place, only castration remains. This is linked to a critique of Derrida's 'archi-writing' (Of Grammatology) and Heidegger's Dasein ('being-there/presence'): both are accused of merely perpetuating a philosophical patter that only speaks about the thing by speaking of something else.

Topology is introduced as irreducibly a written form: the Graph of Desire, the Klein bottle, the Moebius strip—none of these can be substituted by the spoken word, and this is precisely what makes them necessary for psychoanalytic formalization. Lacan argues that writing is not the representation of speech but rather the material support that makes scientific and psychoanalytic formalization possible, and uses Newton's gravitational law as an example of a 'pure writing' to which no substantial or intuitive support has ever been given, yet which carries astronauts to the moon.

The famous argument about the lapsus follows: every lapse is fundamentally a written phenomenon—even the lapsus linguae is really a lapsus calami, because it is always the deviation from what is programmed (i.e., written) that constitutes a lapse. Lacan uses a clinical example of a patient who called his mother 'my wife' for five minutes to illustrate that the tongue 'knows very well what it has to do.' The critique of university discourse (Derrida is its target here) is that it conflates archi-writing with writing proper, turning the absence of the thing into a presence of the text.

Key concepts: Letter, Objet petit a, Topology, Writing, Castration, Discourse of the University Notable examples: l'achose on the board; Newton's gravitational formula as pure writing; clinical lapsus (mother/wife); Derrida's archi-writing

Seminar 6 / Lituraterre: Wednesday 17 March 1971 — The Letter, the Purloined Letter, and Sexuation (p.97-135)

This double session (the regular session plus the celebrated Lituraterre essay delivered within it) constitutes the theoretical heart of Seminar XVIII. The opening of Seminar 6 revisits the seminar on Poe's 'Purloined Letter' (pages 31–40 of the Écrits) and insists that what Lacan was doing there was speaking precisely about the function of the phallus as articulated in a certain discourse—a claim that reframes the whole essay as not primarily a theory of narrative but a theory of castration-effects produced by the circulation of the letter. The letter reaches its destination by reaching the police, who understand nothing about it; the tetrahedric structure of the Four Discourses is shown to be exceeded by the function of the letter, which belongs to a dimension beyond spatial intuition (requiring a fourth dimension beyond the tetrahedron).

Lacan then develops the structural claim about sexuation through the Oedipus complex as a 'written myth': the Oedipus complex is designed to highlight that 'the woman' is unthinkable because 'all the women' is only introduced in the myth as the Father's impossible possession—a sign of impossibility rather than a possibility. Woman is thus structurally the 'not more than one' (pas plus d'un), and sexual jouissance, from experience, cannot be written—this unwriteability is the structural condition from which the formulas of sexuation derive.

The Lituraterre essay develops the neologism through a double etymological-playful move (litura = erasure; littera = letter; terre = earth/furrowing), legitimized by Ernout and Meillet's Latin dictionary though Lacan explicitly overrides etymology. Joyce's slip from a letter to a litter is the starting point. Lacan recounts his flight over Siberia and the experience of the plain as streaming/furrowing to argue that writing belongs to the Real as the 'furrowing of the signified,' while the signifier belongs to the Symbolic—the letter is the littoral, the edge between two heterogeneous domains, not a frontier between knowledge and jouissance but the edge of the hole in knowledge.

Japanese writing (the distinction between on-yomi and kun-yomi readings of a character) is used to demonstrate that the letter—distinct from the sign—acts as support for the signifier while dividing the subject between the writing-register and the speech-register. The character can be read in two distinct pronunciations: neither is primary, because the letter here is not a sign but a structural support. This division exposes the impossibility of the sexual relationship as an 'impossible it is written.'

Key concepts: Letter, Lituraterre, Phallic Jouissance, Not-all, Sexuation, Real, Signifier, Name of the Father Notable examples: Poe, The Purloined Letter; Siberian landscape as furrowing; Japanese on-yomi/kun-yomi; Joyce: 'a letter/a litter'; Euclidean space and fourth dimension

Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971 — Writing is Jouissance; The Letter and Logical Failure (p.136-168)

Lacan opens with the abrupt proposition: 'writing is jouissance (l'écrit, c'est la jouissance).' This is a functional equivalence established within analytic discourse, not a metaphor, and it has a precise import: the written letter, in the discourse of the analyst, occupies the same structural position as jouissance. The Purloined Letter is revisited as the paradigm: the letter has a feminizing effect on all who handle it; no one knows its content; and what it circulates is not information but the distribution of jouissance (in the style of the Court, the sexual relationship is placed at the lowest rank).

The second movement develops the failure of symbolic logic as a demonstration that the sexual relationship cannot be written. Lacan traces Aristotelian syllogistic to Fregean/Peircean quantifier logic to show that the letter—by replacing terms with holes (variables)—is the condition for any logical articulation. The impossibility of logic to 'posit itself in a justifiable way' (the embarrassment of every introduction to a treatise of logic) is not a deficiency to be overcome but the structural mark of the unwriteability of the sexual relationship within language itself.

Lacan then introduces the proto-formulas of sexuation: 'it is not about every x that the function Φ of x can be written' (the not-all, woman's side) and 'there does not exist an x that satisfies the function Φ of x' (the exception, man's side, via Verneinung). The distinction between the forclusive negation (the function will not be written—foreclosure) and the discordant negation (it is not from an existing x that the function can be written) is developed, grounding the sexuation formulas in the logic of negation and inscription. The session closes by linking truth to half-saying and grounding the unconscious-structured-like-a-language thesis in the irreducible division between jouissance and semblance.

Key concepts: Writing, Jouissance, Sexuation, Not-all, Phallus, Letter, Splitting of the Subject, Truth Notable examples: Poe, The Purloined Letter; Aristotelian syllogistic; Frege's Sinn/Bedeutung distinction; Peirce's quantifier logic

Seminar 9: Wednesday 9 June 1971 — The Act of Writing

A brief but theoretically pointed session in which Lacan dwells on the fact that he is speaking from a written text—an act in its own right. The session underscores the distinction between saying and having-written: what is written carries a distinct theoretical import irreducible to the spoken utterance. This is not a merely performative remark but a direct application of the theory of the letter developed throughout the seminar: if writing is jouissance, then the act of writing (and of reading what has been written) is itself a form of the real that exceeds speech.

The session functions as a hinge between the logical demonstration of Seminar 8 and the concluding synthesis of Seminar 10, consolidating the claim that the seminar's own textual form enacts what it argues: that writing is not the representation of speech but an independent theoretical act.

Key concepts: Writing, Letter, Jouissance, Language

Seminar 10: Wednesday 16 June 1971 — Semblance, Hysteria, and the Oedipus Myth (p.176-193)

The final session offers an explicit retrospective of the year's argument: every discourse is a semblance, and analytic discourse is privileged not because it escapes this condition but because it is the one that allows the four fundamental arrangements to be articulated and the constitutive gap to be mapped. Lacan reviews the Freudian starting point in the discourse of the Master—the knowledge that illuminates the articulation of truth with knowledge—and insists that it was the neurotic (specifically the hysteric and the obsessional) who provided the overwhelming flash of light that travels the demansion conditioning language.

Lacan then delivers a pointed account of the phallus in relation to language: language has only one Bedeutung—the phallus—because it is constituted from the impossibility of symbolizing the sexual relationship. Writing provides the 'bone' that jouissance lacks; the semblance that structures discourse is irreducibly phallic, meaning sexual enjoyment forever remains barred from the field of truth. The Name of the Father is reframed via Frege: it is efficacious not as a signifier producing sense alone but as a name that summons someone to speak, revealing the Father as ultimately a numeral (a position in a series) rather than a presence, and castration as the reduction to number.

The session concludes by distinguishing the Oedipus myth (dictated by the hysteric's dissatisfaction, privileging law over enjoyment) from Totem and Taboo (an obsessional-neurotic construction placing enjoyment at the origin, then law). The hysteric's desire—structurally unsatisfied because it emphasizes the invariance of the unknown—functions as the logical schema for the not-all: a woman can only emerge by sliding beyond the hysteric's phallic semblance. Lacan insists that psychoanalytic discourse must move beyond mythic interpretation (and beyond Lévi-Strauss's mythologiques) toward a more rigorous combinatorial of desire's causation—the matriarchal line of descent (unnumberable, without a starting point) is contrasted with the paternal function (the 'not-more-than-one' that makes number possible) to ground the asymmetry of the sexuation formulas.

Key concepts: Discourse of the Master, Hysteria, Oedipus Complex, Phallus, Name of the Father, Sexuation, Not-all, Surplus-jouissance Notable examples: Freud, Totem and Taboo; Freud, Moses and Monotheism; Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques; Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship; Noah's genealogy in Genesis

Main interlocutors

  • Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
  • Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo
  • Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism
  • Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria
  • Karl Marx, Capital
  • Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
  • Poe, The Purloined Letter
  • Lacan, Écrits
  • Lacan, Seminar XVII
  • Aristotle, Prior Analytics
  • Gottlob Frege (Sinn/Bedeutung distinction)
  • Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
  • Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
  • Roland Barthes, L'empire des signes
  • Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques
  • Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship
  • Baltasar Gracián, El Criticón / Oráculo manual
  • Mencius (Meng-Tzu)

Position in the corpus

Seminar XVIII occupies a pivotal transitional position in the Lacanian corpus, situated between the discourse-theory of Seminar XVII (The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 1969–70) and the mature sexuation theory of Seminar XX (Encore, 1972–73). It presupposes the Four Discourses schema of Seminar XVII—readers unfamiliar with the algebra of the four discourses (Master, University, Hysteric, Analyst) will struggle with the opening sessions—and it should be read after at least the key essays in the Écrits ('The Function and Field of Speech and Language,' 'The Direction of the Treatment,' and the 'Seminar on "The Purloined Letter"'). It anticipates Seminar XX in deriving the formulas of sexuation and the not-all, but shows the derivation in process rather than as completed doctrine. The Lituraterre essay makes Seminar XVIII a necessary companion to any work on Lacan and literature, and the sustained engagement with logical formalization (Aristotle, Frege, Peirce) makes it essential background for the later Seminar XIX and for understanding Lacan's claim that the sexual relationship cannot be written.\n\nWithin the broader Lacanian-Žižekian corpus, Seminar XVIII shares ground with Žižek's treatments of surplus-jouissance and capitalist discourse (especially in The Sublime Object of Ideology and For They Know Not What They Do), and with Joan Copjec's work on sexuation and the logic of the not-all (Read My Desire). Its theory of the letter as littoral (Real) rather than symbolic is a correction of Derrida's reading of Lacan and has been a central reference point in the Lacan–Derrida debate. Readers primarily interested in Lacan's theory of writing and the letter should read this seminar alongside the Écrits essay on the Purloined Letter; those interested in sexuation should read it as a genetic prequel to Encore; those interested in the political dimension of discourse theory should read it alongside Seminar XVII.

Canonical concepts deployed