Lacan Seminar 1975 topology borromean

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII: The Sinthome

Jacques Lacan

by Jacques Lacan

→ Concept index for this source → Author profile

Synopsis

Lacan's Seminar XXIII (1975–76), dedicated to "Joyce and the Sinthome," introduces and elaborates the neologism sinthome — an archaic spelling of symptôme that simultaneously evokes sin, saint, and the Joycean injection of lalangue — as the conceptual pivot by which Lacan rethinks the Borromean knot's topology, the function of the father, and the very possibility of holding the three registers (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary) together when the paternal tie fails. Taking James Joyce's literary practice as a sustained clinical-theoretical case, Lacan argues that Joyce's art — from Ulysses through Finnegans Wake — operates as a sinthome that compensates for a de facto foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, using the ego's reparatory function as a fourth ring that re-knots RSI where the standard Oedipal structure would ordinarily hold them. The seminar systematically recast topology not as metaphor but as the only available "writing of the Real," grounding philosophical claims about truth, writing, and the subject in the concrete manipulability of the Borromean chain. Throughout, Lacan subordinates the Oedipus complex itself to the status of a sinthome — a historically contingent symptomatic formation — while defending père-version (perversion-as-father-orientation) as the universal structure of the drive. The book culminates in a series of consequences: that the psychoanalyst, not psychoanalysis as such, is a sinthome; that "woman" is the sinthome for man while man is a "devastation" for woman; and that the Borromean knot, once written rather than merely thought, constitutes the first genuinely philosophical writing — a "logic of sacks and cords" — that supplants both Freudian energetics and Derridean grammatology.

Distinctive contribution

No other text in the Lacanian corpus performs the complete theoretical migration from the Name-of-the-Father as master-signifier to the sinthome as a topological fourth ring that replaces, supplements, or corrects the paternal function. Where Seminar III founds psychosis on the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father and Seminar XI articulates the four fundamental concepts, Seminar XXIII goes further by treating the Oedipus complex itself — and the Name-of-the-Father within it — as merely one possible sinthome among others, one that can be dispensed with "provided one makes use of it." This move is unique in the primary corpus: the father-function is de-transcendentalized and re-inscribed as a symptomatic convenience rather than a structural necessity, with Joyce's ego-writing serving as the proof of concept. The seminar is also exceptional in locating the Real not in the register of trauma or drive alone but in the written topology of the knot itself — "the Real is the knot" — so that the act of correctly drawing and manipulating the Borromean chain becomes, for Lacan, a form of access to the Real that rivals mathematical formalization.

The seminar's treatment of Joyce is without parallel in the corpus: it is neither a psychobiography nor an application of pre-formed concepts to a literary text, but rather a genuinely bidirectional exchange in which Joyce's textual practice (the deliberate disarticulation of English, the epiphany structure, the ego-as-writing in Finnegans Wake) actively generates new theoretical propositions — about the ego's imaginary function, about what the body is when affect "drains away like a fruit-skin," about the difference between analysability and the unanalysable sinthome. Jacques Aubert's interpolated seminars on the Name-of-the-Father in Ulysses further distinguish this text as a collaborative philological-psychoanalytic reading unprecedented in the published seminars. The seminar also contains Lacan's most explicit formulation of the dit-mension (the dimension of the said, which implies that what is said is not obligatorily true), his critique of Derrida's privileging of the signifier's precipitation over topology, and his invention of the infinite straight line as the simplest support of the hole — all doctrines not systematically developed elsewhere.

Main themes

The sinthome as fourth Borromean ring compensating for failed paternal knotting
Joyce's literary practice as privileged clinical-theoretical case for the sinthome
Topology as writing of the Real rather than metaphor or model
De-transcendentalization of the Name-of-the-Father: Oedipus as symptomatic convenience
Père-version (perversion-as-father-orientation) as universal structure of the drive
Lalangue, equivocation, and the letter as weapons against the sinthome
The ego as reparatory imaginary function when the bodily-imaginary knot fails
Sexual non-relation and the asymmetry of the sinthome: woman as sinthome for man
Topology against philosophy: the Borromean knot as the first supportable philosophy
The psychoanalyst (not psychoanalysis) as sinthome — a 'help against'

Chapter outline

Seminar 1: Wednesday 18 November 1975 — p.3-20
Seminar 2: Wednesday 9 December 1975 — p.21-39
Seminar 3: Wednesday 16 December 1975 — p.40-52
Seminar 4: Wednesday 13 January 1976 — p.53-68
Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976 (including Jacques Aubert's intervention) — p.69-99
Seminar 6: Wednesday 10 February 1976 — p.100-114
Seminar 7: Wednesday 17 February 1976 — p.115-128
Seminar 8: Wednesday 9 March 1976 — p.129-143
Seminar 9: Wednesday 16 March 1976 — p.144-157
Seminar 10: Wednesday 13 April 1976 — p.158-190

Chapter summaries

Seminar 1: Wednesday 18 November 1975 (p.3-20)

Lacan opens the seminar by announcing the archaic spelling sinthome, tracing its orthographic history to the injection of Greek into French — a move he parallels with Joyce's Hellenising injection into English as documented in the opening chapter of Ulysses. The neologism immediately operates on several registers at once: it designates an old form of the word symptom, evokes sin and the saint, and names the particular know-how by which Joyce 'disarticulated' English so thoroughly that, as Philippe Sollers observed, the English tongue 'no longer exists.' Finnegans Wake is cited as the extreme expression of this l'élangues — a manic substantialisation of writing that Lacan will spend the year theorizing. Nature is declared 'not-one,' and it is precisely from this non-unity that Lacan deduces the logical impossibility of the natural sexual relationship, positioning the sinthome as what addresses — without filling — this constitutive gap.

The structural topology is introduced early: the sinthome is a logical-phallic supplement capable of reaching the Real, and the Borromean knot is proposed as the formal device adequate to the tripling of RSI (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary). Lacan demonstrates topologically that a 'false hole' can be converted into a genuine Borromean hole by inserting an infinite straight line, thereby allowing the knot to subsist. He invokes Hegel's circle as a philosophical precursor that grasped circularity's function but missed the Borromean stakes entirely. The session ends on this topological threshold, announcing that equivocation — the only weapon against the sinthome — operates by making 'something in the signifier resonate,' because drives are 'the echo in the body of the fact that there is a saying,' and the ear, alone among sense organs, cannot be closed.

Key concepts: Sinthome, Lalangue, Borromean Knot, Symptom, Name of the Father, Not-all Notable examples: Joyce, Ulysses; Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Seminar 2: Wednesday 9 December 1975 (p.21-39)

Opening with a report from his American trip, Lacan uses the audience's difficulty in thinking the knot — 'you cannot find your bearings in it' — as a methodological point: the Borromean knot resists imagination precisely because it is not a surface geometry but a topology of cords. He differentiates the knot from a model, insisting that it must be thought of as concrete even though it is abstract, and that it alone constitutes 'the conceivable support of a relationship between anything whatsoever and something else.' The knot's three-fold structure captures the subject as constitutively divided by language, which 'makes a hole in the Real' — positioning psychoanalysis against both science's objectivism and Chomsky's organicist linguistics, which, Lacan argues, confuse the symptom with the Real by assimilating language to a biological organ.

The Q&A section sharpens the theoretical stakes. In response to a question about body and word, Lacan clarifies that the Real is a third pole mediating between body and language, neither reducible to biological substance nor to the signifier's precipitation. He insists that a fourth term — the sinthome — is always required to prop up the subject, a claim he grounds by announcing that Joyce's art is 'aimed in a privileged way at substantialising the fourth term.' The session also introduces the key formula about the parlêtre: its bodily status depends entirely on the knot, and the knot 'qualifies as Borromean' precisely in that cutting any one ring liberates all the others — making the Borromean structure the formal equivalent of the analytical dissolution of initiation, of the 'supposition' that is the subject.

Key concepts: Borromean Knot, Real, Symbolic, Imaginary, Parlêtre, Symptom Notable examples: Joyce's art as fourth term; Chomsky, organicist linguistics

Seminar 3: Wednesday 16 December 1975 (p.40-52)

Lacan recounts with unambiguous enthusiasm the proof, brought to him by Soury and Thomé, that a Borromean knot of four — consisting of four knots of three — does indeed exist, vindicating his 'stubbornness' after two months of failed attempts to construct it himself. The importance is not merely mathematical: the four-fold Borromean knot furnishes the topological grounding for the sinthome as the fourth ring that holds RSI together when the three-ring knot would otherwise dissolve. Lacan distributes the registers: consistency belongs to the Imaginary, the hole to the Symbolic, and ex-sistence to the Real — a triad of properties that are structurally equivalent yet functionally differentiated, each requiring the others to be what it is.

The most conceptually striking move of the session is Lacan's reinterpretation of paranoid psychosis. He revisits his doctoral thesis (Paranoid Psychosis in Its Relations with the Personality) to argue that paranoia and personality are 'not two things but the same thing': in so far as a subject knots together RSI, it is 'supported only by their continuity,' and this undifferentiated continuity is the structure of paranoia. The sinthome, as a distinct fourth term, is what introduces difference into this continuity — it is what makes the knot of three a knot of four, and thereby what distinguishes neurotic personality from psychotic merger. The session closes with the first explicit formulation that the sinthome 'specifies itself by being symptom and neurotic' — that is, by introducing the fourth term that makes subjectivity possible as more than paranoid consistency.

Key concepts: Borromean Knot, Sinthome, Real, Imaginary, Symbolic, Paranoid Psychosis Notable examples: Borromean knot of four (Soury and Thomé proof); Lacan's thesis on paranoid psychosis

Seminar 4: Wednesday 13 January 1976 (p.53-68)

Lacan opens with a statement of 'first truths': one is responsible only in the measure of one's savoir-faire (know-how), and there is no Other of the Other to adjudicate the Last Judgement. This grounds the analyst's ethics not in a transcendent law but in an art — the art of the knot, which supports the Real precisely by excluding meaning. He then argues that every outline of thinking, 'everything that produces meaning once it shows the tip of its nose,' gravitates toward the sexual act; knowledge (connaissance) is always already contaminated by the active-passive polarity of the sexual relation, which is why it is false. Writing, by contrast — specifically the writing of little mathematical letters — is what supports the Real by allowing us 'to cease to imagine.'

The session's most vivid illustration is Joyce's riddle from Ulysses — the fox burying its grandmother — which Lacan reads as an exemplar of the analytic response: necessarily 'stupid' relative to the poem-like symptom it addresses. Meaning is produced by suturing the Imaginary to the Symbolic (the riddle's answer), while simultaneously splicing the sinthome to the 'parasitic Real of enjoyment.' Lacan goes further to suggest that a knot, when written as an S-curve, has a 'considerable relationship with The Agency of the Letter,' and that beauty — Hogarth's double inflection — may be nothing other than writing, the only beautiful thing being what attaches beauty to the Real rather than to the obscene. This suggests a theory of the aesthetic grounded in topology rather than in imaginary captivation.

Key concepts: Knowledge, Real, Truth, Sinthome, Jouissance, Letter Notable examples: Joyce, Ulysses (Stephen's riddle, the fox burying his grandmother); Hogarth on beauty; R.M. Adams, Surface and Symbol

Seminar 5: Wednesday 20 January 1976 (including Jacques Aubert's intervention) (p.69-99)

Lacan cedes the floor to Jacques Aubert, whose extended intervention constitutes the philological core of the seminar. Aubert begins with a close reading of the Circe episode of Ulysses, focusing on the exchange between Bloom and the ghost of his father Rudolph. He shows how the father's name change — by deed poll, a document that is 'cut back' and belongs to one party alone — enacts a structural logic of the Name-of-the-Father as a self-poisoning signifier: Virag (Hungarian for 'flower') slides into virago (the woman named from man's rib in the Vulgate), reversing the paternal vector toward the maternal-imaginary. The suicide of the father ('the father's name that poisoned himself') makes the genitive ambiguous: is it the name that poisoned itself, or the father who bore that name? This ambiguity — 'the name of the father' as a signifier that self-destructs — is presented as Joyce's sustained dramatization of what Lacan will theorize as the sinthome.

Aubert's second strand traces what he calls the 'deserving to exist' motif across multiple Joyce texts: the carved initials in the anatomy theatre (Portrait), the question of artistic legacy in The Dead (Milton's wish to 'leave to future centuries an oeuvre they will not willingly let die'), and the maternal-religious imaginary that frames Joyce's entire symbolic economy. He rereads the epiphany not as a transcendent revelation but as a structural redoubling that liquidates the poetic dimension: it arises precisely after the dialogue between Stephen and his mother about priests, sliding from religious authority to the woman-priest relation to the beloved — a chain of substitutions rather than a fixed signification. Aubert also traces the signifier 'Fox' (Parnell's pseudonym, dissimulation, the fox of Stephen's riddle) as a mobile placeholder for paternal authority that simultaneously names and undermines it.

Lacan closes the session by taking up Aubert's findings topologically: the proper name is the privileged site where the signifier's function and phonation intersect, and it is from the proper name that the question of significance (la signifiance) as written — as distinct from mere phonation effects — must be posed. The Borromean knot, he insists, 'only begins to exist beyond the triple relation,' but the question of what grants the triple relation its privilege remains suspended for the following session.

Key concepts: Name of the Father, Signifier, Voice, Paternal Function, Proper Name, Epiphany Notable examples: Joyce, Ulysses (Circe episode, Rudolph Bloom / Virag); Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Stephen Hero, epiphany, initials/foetus); Joyce, Dubliners (The Dead, Gabriel Conroy)

Seminar 6: Wednesday 10 February 1976 (p.100-114)

Lacan opens with the question that will organize the session: 'From what point on is one mad? Was Joyce mad?' Rather than diagnosing Joyce, he proposes to orient himself by the distinction between 'the true' and 'the Real' — in Freud, the true gives pleasure, while the Real does not inevitably do so. This leads Lacan into what he acknowledges is a distortion of Freud: jouissance belongs to the Real, and masochism is 'the major part of the enjoyment the Real gives,' something Freud discovered but did not foresee. Joyce's enormous archive of letters and scribbledehobble notes is read not as documentation of intention but as evidence that his writing was inspired — that the question of what 'inspired' his writing is the same as the question of his madness or otherwise.

The session develops the concept of père-version (perversion-as-father-orientation) as the structural condition of the drive: the imaginary relationship to the father (redeemer-figure) is the prototype of the son-to-father relation that structures the drive more generally. Lacan uses a topological diagram — an infinite straight line penetrating a torus — to show that sadism (for the father) and masochism (for the son) have 'strictly no relationship' between them despite being paired, dismantling the active-passive polarity of sadomasochism. Castration is reframed: the phallus is transmitted from father to son through a symbolic transition that 'cancels out the phallus of the father before the son has the right to bear it,' and it is here that the relationship between the Symbolic and the Real becomes most ambiguous in Freud. Lacan closes by staging the broader claim that Joyce's artistic ambition functions as topological compensation for a de facto Verwerfung by the father — foreclosure not as clinical psychosis but as structural absence of the knotting function the father would ordinarily supply.

Key concepts: Real, Truth, Jouissance, Foreclosure, Père-version, Castration Notable examples: Joyce, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (scribbledehobble, letters); Torus topology; Sadomasochism and castration in Freud

Seminar 7: Wednesday 17 February 1976 (p.115-128)

Lacan returns to the mechanics of the Borromean knot after a detour through Hélène Cixous's theatrical Portrait of Dora — a production he judges affectionately, reading the actor-Freud's embarrassment as unwitting hysterical mimicry. The theoretical core of the session is the claim that the knot's three rings (RSI) constitute both meaning (at the conjunction of Symbolic and Imaginary) and phallic jouissance (at the conjunction of Symbolic and Real), with the sinthome emerging as the fourth term required precisely when the three rings would 'come apart.' Lacan gives a topological demonstration: a 'slip' in the knot (an error in the crossing-over) can be repaired by attaching a sinthome at the point of the transgression, but crucially, repairing the same slip at either of the two other points produces a structurally different knot — the nature of the sinthome depends on its precise topological placement.

This topological argument has a clinical corollary: it is 'at the place where the knot fails' that the witticism, the slip, and the unconscious are grounded. The session links the Joycean 'first transgression' — a beating that Joyce makes so much of in his autobiographical writings — to the question of the slip in the knot, asking whether this constitutive transgression is 'of the order of a slip' or something more structural. Lacan notes that in wanting to correct the slip 'at the very point where it happens,' what one actually produces is a compensatory loop that can be inverted — the sinthome and the spontaneous loop are capable of being exchanged, which is what gives the compensatory structure its formal dexterity.

Key concepts: Borromean Knot, Sinthome, Imaginary, Symbolic, Real, Unconscious Notable examples: Hélène Cixous, The Portrait of Dora; Knot error and sinthome repair

Seminar 8: Wednesday 9 March 1976 (p.129-143)

Presented as an improvisation during a strike, this session is nonetheless one of the most technically precise of the seminar. Lacan returns to the dispute with Soury and Thomé over whether there are one or two distinct Borromean chains, opposing their combinatorial method (exhaustion of colourings and orientations) with his own representational approach using infinite straight lines. He argues that the infinite straight line is 'an equivalent of the circle' for purposes of the chain — both being equivalent as regards the hole — and that by combining two infinite straight lines with one circle, one obtains the essential of the Borromean knot. The use of infinite straight lines, Lacan insists, allows him to prove that there are indeed two different objects in the chain, provided that a pair is coloured and a third is oriented.

The broader conceptual point is that the Real is constituted not by a single ring but by the knot-relation itself — the chain's topology rather than any element in isolation. Lacan introduces the geometric distinction between turning a ring inside-out (which inverts its orientation) and colouring it (which marks it as a type), using this to argue that orientation cannot be expressed in the Symbolic and that the indistinguishability of the knot's rings without colouring is what makes the Borromean knot's 'ambiguity' irreducible. This has implications for the logic of the not-all: the circle's hole — not its closure — is what founds set theory's not-all and the chain's supple geometry against any rigid, formal demonstration.

Key concepts: Borromean Knot, Topology, Real, Imaginary, Orientation, Phallus Notable examples: Soury and Thomé, Borromean chain proof; Desargues on infinite straight lines

Seminar 9: Wednesday 16 March 1976 (p.144-157)

This session crystallizes several key moves. Lacan argues that the Borromean knot's essential property is the 'false hole' produced when two circles conjoin, and that the Phallus — as the 'verifier' of this false hole — is what constitutes the Real. The phallus is positioned as 'the sole signifier that creates every signified,' thereby verifying the Real not by filling it but by marking the place of its constitutive incompleteness. This is articulated alongside a distinction between a more radical foreclosure than that of the Name-of-the-Father, and the Death Drive is tied to the Real itself rather than to any particular signifier.

Lacan distinguishes the unanalysable from what analysis can address: the sinthome, precisely in so far as it is not a formation of the unconscious but a repair of the knot's failure, is resistant to analysis by equivocation. Joyce is declared 'unanalysable' — not because of a personal quality but because his sinthome is already at the level of lalangue itself, at the place where phonation becomes writing and where the collective unconscious (Jung's concept, which Lacan critiques) shows itself to be nothing other than a sinthome. The session also develops Peirce's triadic logic as a near-cousin to Lacan's own trinitary structure, while the discussion of a Japanese film (Empire of the Senses) serves to illustrate feminine jouissance as carried 'to its extremes' — including the fantasy of killing the man — which feeds into the later formulation of woman as sinthome.

Key concepts: Real, Sinthome, Phallus, Lalangue, Death Drive, Knowledge Notable examples: Joyce, Finnegans Wake (the dream and Jung's collective unconscious); Peirce, triadic logic; Japanese film (Empire of the Senses)

Seminar 10: Wednesday 13 April 1976 (p.158-190)

The final session is Lacan's most synthetic and self-reflexive. He opens by claiming authorship of the Borromean knot as a 'writing of the Real' — 'I invented something' — and situates this invention as a response to the absence of any Other of the Other. The Borromean chain is declared a metaphor, but a figured metaphor (a metaphor of number) that transcends mere rhetorical substitution. Lacan argues explicitly that his invention of the knot constitutes a 'forcing' — a traumatic inscription of a new symbolic form — that simultaneously responds symptomatically to Freud's energetics (which he shows to be an unsustainable metaphor of constant stimulus-response) and exposes the absence of any guaranteeing Other. The Real is identified as Lacan's own sinthome rather than a spontaneous idea.

The session then addresses the written character of the knot: 'it must be written to see how it functions.' Writing, on this occasion, 'completely changes the meaning of writing' — it grants an autonomy irreducible to the signifier's precipitation, which is Derrida's domain. Lacan introduces the dit-mension (the dimension of the said, written as mension du dit) to mark that what is said is 'not at all obligatorily true,' and argues that the noeud bo furnishes the first supportable philosophy — a 'logic of sacks and cords' that is prior to the philia of wisdom. In the Q&A, he distinguishes the sinthome from psychoanalysis proper: it is the psychoanalyst (not psychoanalysis as an institution or body of knowledge) who functions as a sinthome, 'a help against' in the Genesis sense — a reversal that makes possible the hypothesis of the Unconscious.

The seminar closes with the topology of Joyce's ego. Lacan argues that when the imaginary register fails to knot properly — when 'affect drains away like a fruit-skin' after a beating, the imaginary 'slips away' — the ego takes on a special reparatory function that writing fulfils in Joyce's case. This is père-version in its strictest sense: the noeud bo is the sanction of Freud's making everything depend on the function of the father, but now recoded as the structure of love — 'love is what is referred back to the function of the father' — and perversion is declared the universal structure of the drive, in Freud's own sense. All human sexuality is, in this conclusion, perverse.

Key concepts: Borromean Knot, Sinthome, Real, Writing, Père-version, Ego, Psychoanalyst Notable examples: Joyce, Finnegans Wake (ego as reparatory writing); Derrida, Of Grammatology (critiqued); Genesis (help against); Freud, Totem and Taboo

Main interlocutors

James Joyce, Ulysses
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo
Sigmund Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology
Jacques Aubert (Joyce scholar, seminar interlocutor)
Philippe Sollers
Lacan, Seminar XX (Encore)
Lacan, The Agency of the Letter
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
Noam Chomsky (linguistics)
Carl Jung, collective unconscious
Charles Sanders Peirce, semiotics
Aristotle, De Anima
Hélène Cixous, The Portrait of Dora
Soury and Thomé (topologists)

Position in the corpus

Seminar XXIII sits at the apex of Lacan's topological-Borromean period and is best approached after Seminar XX (Encore, 1972–73), which establishes the sexual non-relation and the not-all, and after Seminar XIX (…ou pire, 1971–72) and Seminar XXI (Les non-dupes errent, 1973–74), which develop the transition from the Name-of-the-Father to the more pluralized noms-du-père and the earliest uses of Borromean topology. The Écrits piece "The Agency of the Letter" (1957) and "On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis" (1958) provide the doctrinal background for the Name-of-the-Father and foreclosure that Seminar XXIII simultaneously presupposes and transforms. Readers coming to Seminar XXIII should also be familiar with Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts) for its account of the drive, repetition, and the subject of the unconscious — all of which are tacitly at stake when Lacan argues that the sinthome replaces the Oedipal symptom. The Television (1973) text provides a compact version of several themes (the Real, jouissance, the subject's relation to the signifier) that Seminar XXIII extends into full topological elaboration.\n\nWithin the broader Lacanian-theoretical corpus, Seminar XXIII is the essential companion to Žižek's engagement with the sinthome (especially in The Sublime Object of Ideology and The Plague of Fantasies), where the concept is extended to political and ideological analysis; readers of those texts should return to Seminar XXIII to see how differently Lacan himself deploys the sinthome — not as a master-signifier of ideological identification but as a topological repair of failed knotting. Bruce Fink's Lacanian Subject and Colette Soler's work on jouissance provide useful secondary scaffolding. For the Joyce-specific argument, Jacques Aubert's scholarship and Jean-Michel Rabaté's Joyce upon the Void are natural companions. Seminar XXIII should be read before attempting the later, posthumously assembled seminars (XXIV, XXV, XXVI) that continue the topology-sinthome research, as it provides the clearest and most sustained exposition of the framework those later seminars presuppose."