The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIV: L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre

by Jacques Lacan

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Synopsis

Seminar 24, delivered by Lacan during the academic year 1976–77 under the title L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre, pursues a unified argument that the unconscious—renamed une-bévue to capture its essential character as a structural stumbling of language rather than a hidden depth—cannot be adequately conceptualized without topological formalization, and specifically without the Borromean knotting of the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary. Lacan opens by proposing une-bévue as a superior translation of Unbewusst, linking it immediately to lalangue and the witticism as sites where the unconscious shows itself as an equivocal exchange-value rather than a repressed content. The central technical labor of the seminar is an intensive working-through of toric topology—the torus, the double Möbius strip, the Borromean knot approached via plaiting (tresse/quatresse) and tetrahedra—by means of which Lacan seeks to reformulate identification, the relations among RSI, the structure of the inside/outside distinction, and the question of what a completed analysis actually does to the subject. A sustained set of sessions is ceded to Alain Didier Weill, who develops the figure of "Bozef" as a re-reading of Poe's "Purloined Letter" in terms of the Passe and Absolute Knowledge, arguing that the condition for genuine analytic transmission is not speech alone but a topological writing that articulates the locus of enunciation. The seminar concludes by insisting that analytic interpretation must abandon logical beauty in favor of poetic equivocation and the witticism, that the Real is defined by impossibility (what does not cease not to be written), and that psychoanalysis produces only a semblance of truth—with the sinthome (now spelled s.i.n.t.h.o.m.e.) identified as the mental as such, the sign-formation that is all we have.

Distinctive contribution

Seminar 24's most singular contribution to the Lacanian corpus is its sustained attempt to ground the une-bévue—the structural error or mis-hearing that is the unconscious—within a fully topological account of the subject, rather than within a merely linguistic or philosophical one. Where earlier seminars (especially Seminars XI and XX) developed the linguistic and logical dimensions of the unconscious, and Seminar XXIII developed the sinthome in relation to the Borromean knot through the figure of Joyce, Seminar XXIV pushes further by asking what happens to the three registers when topology is no longer used as analogy but as structure proper: the torus is not like the body, it is the structural truth of the body. The seminar's agonistic tone—Lacan repeatedly speaks of "banging his head against walls of his own invention," of wanting to close the floodgates of his own teaching—enacts this: the formalization is not triumphant but genuinely exploratory and at times self-critical, which makes it a rare document of Lacanian theory in process.

A second distinctive feature is the extended collaboration with Alain Didier Weill, whose multi-session construction of the "Bozef" figure elaborates a game-theoretic dialectic of knowledge (I know that he knows that I know...) that culminates at S(Ø), the signifier of the barred Other, as the only site from which genuine transmission—the Passe—can be attempted. This is not merely a clinical application but a theoretical argument that the Passe is itself a topological problem: the locus of enunciation cannot be said but can only be written (graphed, knotted), which is why Lacan's seminars and topological diagrams are themselves the form that transmission must take. No other seminar in the corpus develops this reflexive argument—that the seminar itself is a topology of transmission—with such explicitness. Finally, the closing sessions offer a stark reformulation of interpretation: the criterion for analytic truth is not logical consistency or aesthetic beauty but the capacity to extinguish a symptom, and this extinction operates through the witticism, through poetic equivocation grounded in lalangue—a position that integrates the late theory of the sinthome with an explicitly anti-hermeneutic theory of clinical practice.

Main themes

• Une-bévue as the topological unconscious: structural misfire over hidden depth
• Toric topology as the proper model of the body, identification, and RSI
• Lalangue as obscene maternal substrate and the communal character of the symptom
• The Passe as topological problem: the locus of enunciation cannot be said, only written
• Knowledge and Truth have no relation: psychoanalysis as 'scientific delusion' awaiting its science
• The Real as impossibility: what does not cease not to be written
• Analytic interpretation as witticism and poetic equivocation, not logical beauty
• The sinthome (s.i.n.t.h.o.m.e.) as the mental as such: sign, negation, and undecidability
• Borromean knotting and the quatresse: topology as structure not analogy
• The reflexive problem of transmission: the seminar itself as topological writing

Chapter outline

• Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1976 — p.1-12
• Seminar 2: Wednesday 14 December 1976 — p.13-25
• Seminar 3: Wednesday 21 December 1976 — p.26-28
• Seminar 3–4 (transition): Structure vs. form; Klein bottle; invocatory drive and music — p.29-41
• Seminar 4: Wednesday 11 January 1977 — p.42-49
• Seminar 5: Wednesday 18 January 1977 — p.50-59
• Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 February 1977 (Parts 1–3: Alain Didier Weill on the Passe) — p.60-82
• Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 February 1977 (Part 4: The Passe as topological writing) — p.78-82
• Seminar 7: Wednesday 15 February 1977 — p.83-97
• Seminar 8: Wednesday 8 March 1977 — p.98-101
• Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977 — p.102-117
• Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 May 1977 — p.118-122
• Seminar 12: 17 May 1977 — p.123-127

Chapter summaries

Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1976 (p.1-12)

Lacan opens the seminar by presenting his title—L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre—and unpacking its key neologism: une-bévue, which he proposes as a superior translation of Freud's Unbewusst. The unconscious, he argues, has nothing to do with unconsciousness; it is better captured by the notion of a structural blunder, a mis-hearing built into the very fabric of language. The link to lalangue is immediate: the witticism demonstrates this most clearly, because one recognizes oneself in it—the slip into the witticism is not accidental but structural, a function of the acquisition of lalangue itself. Lacan also questions the standard analytic rule of restricting dream-analysis to the previous day's residue, suggesting that the 'fabric of the unconscious' runs much deeper.

The session then turns to the topology of identification. Lacan notes he had forgotten that he devoted an entire seminar to Identifizierung, and returns to Freud's three modes—loving (paternal), hysterical, and identification to a single/any trait (einziger Zug)—now proposing that these can be mapped topologically onto three distinct operations of turning the torus inside out. The result of one such operation is the 'torus-rod': an object that is literally still a torus but presents itself as a rod, produced by two cuts and their folding. Lacan leaves as an open question for his audience how to homologously distribute paternal, hysterical, and trait-identification across these three topological inversions, establishing the seminar's method: topology is not illustration but the formal medium of the concepts themselves.

Key concepts: Une-bévue, Lalangue, Unconscious, Torus, Identification, Möbius Strip Notable examples: Freud's three modes of identification; Torus-rod construction

Seminar 2: Wednesday 14 December 1976 (p.13-25)

Lacan opens by insisting that science—and psychoanalysis in particular—is not a progress but goes in circles; the toric structure is itself evidence of this. He develops the notion of the une-bévue through the logic of the signifier as exchange value: the une-bévue is a 'false whole,' something that is exchanged despite not being worth its unit. The signifier is paradigmatically such a false whole; materiality (as corps-sistance, a portmanteau of 'body' and 'consistency') is what founds the 'same,' while the une-bévue is the lie that enables exchange. This grounds a theory of the signifier in topology rather than semiology: what holds together as a unit is always already susceptible to the structural blunder.

The session's most consequential move is the question of what happens when the Symbolic torus is turned inside out. Lacan works through the topology of two tori nested within each other, showing how folding back both cuts concentrically produces an inside-outside reversal. Applied to the three registers—Real, Imaginary, Symbolic—the question becomes: what does it mean topologically to 'turn the Symbolic inside out,' as psychoanalysis claims to do with the unconscious? Lacan concludes, alarmingly, that this operation produces a completely different arrangement than the Borromean knot: the Symbolic comes to totally envelop the Real and Imaginary. This raises the structural problem that haunts the rest of the seminar—a completed analysis that succeeds in 'exteriorizing the unconscious' may produce an arrangement in which the Symbolic dominates absolutely, which is itself a structural pathology.

Key concepts: Torus, Borromean Knot, Symbolic, Real, Imaginary, Une-bévue Notable examples: Nested tori and inside-out inversion of the Symbolic

Seminar 3: Wednesday 21 December 1976 (p.26-28)

This shorter session centers on the topological construction of the double Möbius strip from a systematic cutting of the torus. Lacan demonstrates that a double cut of the torus produces a double Möbius strip—an object that is not two Möbius strips but a single redoubled one. The crucial property of this object is that front and back (inside and outside) become structurally indeterminate from any fixed point of view: one cannot tell, from a given vantage, whether the strip passes in front of or behind the following loop. This structural indeterminacy is precisely what Lacan links to the une-bévue: the unconscious as a systematic inability to fix the difference between two topologically equivalent but locally distinguishable configurations.

Lacan provides a practical construction—cutting an 'S'-shaped figure from a double sheet of paper—as a way of making this tangible. The session ends with the explicit question: can this topological indeterminacy be resolved, and if so, by what means? The answer to be pursued is that only the discovery of a dominant or asymmetric viewpoint—an asymmetry of the signifier over the signified—can stabilize the distinction. This asymmetry, which has its truth in the body, is what grounds both the symptom and the une-bévue as structural rather than contingent.

Key concepts: Möbius Strip, Torus, Une-bévue, Topology, Unconscious Notable examples: Double Möbius strip construction from S-cuts on paper

Seminar 3–4 (transition): Structure vs. form; Klein bottle; invocatory drive and music (p.29-41)

These sessions, which straddle the transition between the third and fourth seminars, address two related problems. First, Lacan presses the distinction between shape and structure: the Klein bottle, he argues, has been systematically falsified by its name, which implies a vessel with an inside and outside, whereas its structural truth—that it joins front to back without remainder—is only legible when it is drawn in its 'green' form rather than corrected into the familiar bottle shape. The primacy of structure over phenomenal presentation is Lacan's methodological axiom, and the question of whether the asymmetry of signifier and signified is of the same nature as that of container and contained is posed as the year's central question.

A guest intervention by Alain Didier elaborates a four-moment circuit of the invocatory drive using music as its privileged case. The subject begins by hearing the music of the Other (the music 'sings of love'), then discovers that this love is radically impossible, then identifies with both the speaker and the hearer simultaneously (the Ulysses/Sirens structure), and finally undergoes a desexualizing 'evaporation' of the object that transmutes ordinary surplus-jouissance into sublimation—Other jouissance. This is framed as a dialectic in which repeated failure to encounter the object confirms its radical impossibility, enabling a leap 'through the fantasy' toward a terminal point that Lacan identifies with the end of analysis. The structure of transference love—postulating that the Other loves the subject—is mapped precisely onto the second moment of this circuit.

Key concepts: Topology, Symbolic, Objet petit a, Transference, Sublimation, Desire Notable examples: Ulysses and the Sirens; Klein bottle; Music as invocatory drive circuit

Seminar 4: Wednesday 11 January 1977 (p.42-49)

Lacan opens this session with a characteristic act of self-distancing: he rereads his own Radiophonie (Scilicet 2–3) with 'astonishment,' noting that he could not imagine he had said those things. The central claim retrieved from that text is that Knowledge and Truth have no relation to one another—a thesis Lacan here connects to the structural definition of the unconscious as signifier-effects rather than as a domain of meaning. He explicitly dissociates himself from philosophy ('La philosophie en effet') while acknowledging the permanent risk of sliding back into it.

The session then pivots to Lacan's ambivalence about his own teaching. He expresses dismay at having 'opened the floodgates'—mentioning Derrida's preface to Abraham and Torok's Verbier de l'homme aux loups as an example of degenerate offspring—and at what the institution of teaching has done to his ideas. Theoretically, this is not merely autobiographical: it is connected to the figure of l'âme à tiers (the soul-of-the-third), which names the Real as that with which we explicitly have no relation, and to S(Ø) as the non-response of the Other. The subject talks alone; what emerges from this solitary talking is the Ego, which Lacan aligns with the possibility of delirious speech. The session thus situates psychoanalysis between madness and mental debility as the only available practical choice, while insisting that its founding Knowledge is neither philosophical nor scientific in the established sense.

Key concepts: Knowledge, Truth, Unconscious, Signifier, Real, The big Other Notable examples: Derrida's preface to Abraham and Torok, Verbier de l'homme aux loups; Radiophonie (Scilicet 2-3)

Seminar 5: Wednesday 18 January 1977 (p.50-59)

This session is organized around Lacan's exhausting (literally: he reports spending 48 hours on it) construction of the quatresse—a four-stranded plait—as the generative principle of the Borromean knot. The standard three-element Borromean knot arises from a sixfold plaiting operation; a twelve-fold plaiting produces a second Borromean knot with different crossing properties. Lacan then attempts to extend this to four elements by working with tetrahedra (six edges rather than four faces), distributing physical balls with the knot outlines among the audience. The goal is to show that all Borromean knotting is fundamentally toric and that the four-element quatresse maps onto RSI plus Symptom—with the Real singled out as specially 'suspended' on the body.

The session includes a question-and-answer exchange in which a painter challenges Lacan's account of art as necessarily passing through language. Lacan's response is unequivocal and theoretically important: art is not pre-verbal but hyper-verbal—saturated by the symbol and the signifier to a higher power. The painter's notion of a 'preverbal' continuity between Real and Imaginary that bypasses the Symbolic is rejected: what looks like a filament or toffee-thread connection is 'profoundly' verbal. Art represents a form of savoir-faire (know-how) that goes beyond discursive symbolism and carries more truth than elaborated discourse—but this is precisely because it operates at the level of the signifier's overdetermination, not beneath it.

Key concepts: Borromean Knot, Topology, Real, Imaginary, Symbolic, Symptom Notable examples: Tetrahedra and Borromean knotting; Painter's question on preverbal art; Quatresse (four-stranded plait)

Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 February 1977 (Parts 1–3: Alain Didier Weill on the Passe) (p.60-82)

Lacan introduces this session by ceding the floor to Alain Didier Weill, who deploys a game-theoretic allegory centered on a figure he names 'Bozef'—introduced as an intrusion into the logic of Poe's Purloined Letter. The Bozef/King chess-position schema traces a dialectic of knowledge across four positions (B1–B4, R1–R4): at each stage, an additional loop of meta-knowledge ('I know that he knows that I know that he knows') escalates until the King reaches R3—a position of Absolute Knowledge—at which point Bozef is completely dispossessed of his cogito. The signifier S2, which had been primally repressed as the condition of the subject's accession to speech, re-emerges in the Real: this is Weill's account of fading ($◊D) and of what Lacan elsewhere calls aphanisis.

The theoretical pivot is the construction of S(Ø)—the signifier of the barred Other—as the only possible exit from this deadlock. Bozef, at B4, can only address the locus of the Other by uttering 'It is you'—a pure metaphor, a statement that sustains speech as an act anchored in desire rather than merely keeping one's word. Weill argues that this movement—from the position of possession (the miser and his moneybox) to the position of radical dispossession—constitutes the Passe. An analyst who has not undergone this dispossession maintains a 'split' relationship to theory: he says yes to Knowledge while refusing the locus from which that Knowledge is emitted, producing the pathological structure of flat denial. The 'heretic' (identified with Lacan himself) is the one who accepts the duplicity of the Other and can therefore transmit it.

Key concepts: Borromean Knot, Graph of Desire, Subject Supposed to Know, Passe, Splitting of the Subject, The big Other Notable examples: Bozef and the King (chess allegory); Poe, The Purloined Letter; Jakobson's aphasic who cannot say 'no'

Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 February 1977 (Part 4: The Passe as topological writing) (p.78-82)

The final segment of Seminar 6 presses the Passe to its formal limit. Weill argues that even if Bozef has reached the position of S(Ø) and can sustain the 'It is you,' he is not thereby a passant capable of transmitting this locus to a jury. The locus of enunciation from which S(Ø) is emitted cannot itself be said—it can only be written, graphed, knotted. This is the key: the passage through the Passe produces a locus that is structurally unspeakable from within speech, which is why no speaking passant can adequately testify to it. Only a topological writing—such as the graphs and knots that structure Lacan's own teaching—can function as the true passeur, articulating the split between the subject of the enunciated and the subject of enunciating in a transmissible form.

This conclusion has a reflexive dimension that Lacan endorses: his seminars are themselves the topology of transmission. The question 'from where does Lacan speak?' cannot be answered by any passant who merely quotes him, because the locus of that enunciation is exactly what the topological writing is designed to transmit without saying. The session closes with the observation that the Passe, properly understood, is not a clinical procedure among others but the structural test of whether enunciation corresponds to enunciating—and that this correspondence can never be certified by speech alone.

Key concepts: Passe, Splitting of the Subject, Topology, Letter, Enunciation, The big Other Notable examples: Poe, The Purloined Letter (Bozef figure); Lacanian seminar as topological transmission

Seminar 7: Wednesday 15 February 1977 (p.83-97)

Lacan explains why he invited Weill to speak: his own entanglement in the Borromean chain—specifically the question of how four tetrahedra can be knotted in a Borromean fashion—had left him blocked. He reports that Pierre Soury immediately solved the problem and that the solution is toric, not spherical. This confirms the structural claim that all Borromean knotting is fundamentally a toric relation, not a spherical one, and that topology here is structural (not merely analogical).

The session then addresses the distinction between metalanguage and semblance. Rereading L'étourdit, Lacan acknowledges he 'almost' produced a metalanguage there—but emphasizes that the almost marks the impossibility: what results is only a s'emblant (semblance) of metalanguage. The Real is distinguished from what is knotted to it by an aspect (face)—a term Lacan uses carefully, noting it must carry semantic weight. He insists that the Real, to be put forward consistently, must be genuinely consistent (not merely asserted). He then offers a striking anecdote: his grandson's acquisition of language illustrates the Unconscious as the intrusion of words one does not understand—language as parasitic. This reframes the une-bévue not as a failure of the subject but as the structural condition of any speaking being (parlêtre): to speak is always already to be inhabited by words that precede and exceed comprehension.

Key concepts: Borromean Knot, Real, Torus, Metaphor, Unconscious, Lalangue Notable examples: L'étourdit; Lacan's grandson and language acquisition; Pierre Soury's solution for four tetrahedra

Seminar 8: Wednesday 8 March 1977 (p.98-101)

This session develops the claim that the Real cannot constitute a universe on its own but only through its knotting with the Imaginary and Symbolic via the Borromean structure. The logic of the One and the universal is pressed: 'there exists a One' is only coherent if it is followed by 'that satisfies the function'—logic is always function-logic, and the universal is always function-dependent. But the Other—written S(Ø)—is Other than the Real: the Other is sense, not the Real. This makes the Other structurally different from the Real even as the two are knotted.

Lacan offers his most precise definition of the Real in this seminar: the Real is the impossible, defined as what does not cease not to be written. The possible, by contrast, is what one interrupts in writing—one can always stop writing it, one can always give up. The Real is the limit of this interruption: it is what can never simply be written or resolved into a written form. Lacan recounts a visit to the particle physics facility at Saclay, where he watched apparatuses trace undulating lines representing magnetic fields—a concrete image of the Real as that which leaves traces in material inscription without ever being present as such. The torus (as a form whose structure can be traced but whose topology cannot be directly seen) is the formal correlate of this Real.

Key concepts: Real, Symbolic, Imaginary, Universal, Torus, The big Other Notable examples: Saclay particle physics laboratory visit; S(Ø) as signifier of the absent Other

Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977 (p.102-117)

Lacan opens by responding to critics who called his previous session's slip about the analytic discourse a mere bévue. The defense is structural: a bévue in written material is different from a spoken slip, and the error was one of direction (sens)—the letters were inverted. This is itself an illustration of the une-bévue as structural misdirection rather than contingent mistake. Lacan then engages with Roman Jakobson (mediated through a correspondent from German radio who approached him on Jakobson's advice) and with Julia Kristeva (whose Polylogue he praises), asserting that linguisterie—his term for the linguistics that psychoanalysis requires—passes through linguistics but is not reducible to it.

The session turns to lalangue as the true substrate of the analytic session. Lalangue is designated as 'an obscenity'—identified with Freud's l'obrescène (the other stage, the obscene stage)—and characterized as the elementary structure of kinship as it inhabits the analysand's speech. What the analyst actually reads is not truth but the sinthome: the symptom as sign-formation rooted in lalangue's communal character. Lacan coins varité—a portmanteau of vérité (truth) and variété (variety)—to name the only accessible approximation of truth, making psychoanalysis structurally an 'autism à deux' redeemed only by lalangue's communal nature. The closing pages develop the theory of analytic interpretation as witticism: interpretation must abandon logical articulation and aesthetic beauty in favor of the poetic-equivocal resonance that can extinguish a symptom. The criterion of truth is clinical effectiveness grounded in economy, not value—a practice without value is what must be established.

Key concepts: Lalangue, Sense, Symptom, Sinthome, Anxiety, Interpretation Notable examples: Julia Kristeva, Polylogue; Roman Jakobson on poetics; Chinese tonic counterpoint as analogy for poetic interpretation

Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 May 1977 (p.118-122)

This session opens with Gödel's undecidability theorem as its organizing reference: just as arithmetic—the most 'mental' of mental domains—contains undecidable propositions, the mental as such is constituted by what cannot be decided from within. Lacan maps this onto the Freudian identification of the unconscious with the mental: the unconscious is woven of words between which bévues are always possible, which is precisely why the Real can only be defined negatively—as what does not cease not to be written.

The central move is the identification of the sinthome (s.i.n.t.h.o.m.e.) with the mental as such: every mental content is a sign-formation, and the sinthome is the sign. Lacan then presses the question of negation as a sign: following Freud's Verneinung (negation presupposes a prior Bejahung—affirmation), he asks whether the sign of negation can be written and what it means to deny. The congruence of the sign with the Real is what was at stake in his earlier 'agency of the letter.' The upshot is that psychoanalysis produces only a semblance of truth—S1 never fully represents the subject for S2—and that the Real lies (ment) only in the sense that analysis is a chemine-ne-mente (the journey does not lie), a heuristic path through the liar's field rather than a direct access to truth.

Key concepts: Sinthome, Real, Unconscious, Negation, Sign, Undecidability Notable examples: Gödel's undecidability theorem; Freud's Verneinung (negation); Frege's sign for negation

Seminar 12: 17 May 1977 (p.123-127)

The final session sampled begins with Lacan's amused discovery that his teaching has reached the pages of L'Echo des Savanes (a satirical porno magazine), which he takes as a perverse mark of success. He notes Julia Kristeva's Polylogue and queries whether it constitutes a polylinguisterie—a linguistics that has passed through psychoanalysis—to which Kristeva responds that it passes through linguistics but is other than it.

Lacan returns to the fundamental question of the seminar: what makes psychoanalysis hold up as a practice? He rejects the 'effect of suggestion' account, since that presupposes language depends on man rather than the reverse. The Unconscious, he insists, is not amenable to awakening or to metalanguage (no metalanguage exists, only semblances of it). Psychoanalysis functions through what he calls a 'hole-effect'—through poetic and equivocal operations that open onto the Real rather than representing it. The une-bévue as new translation of Unbewusst is itself a performative demonstration of this metatongue operation: by substituting une-bévue for Unbewusst, Lacan shows how a new signifier—one that bypasses the usual semantic investment in 'unconscious'—can function as an opening toward the Real that ordinary conceptual language forecloses. The seminar thus closes as it opened: with the claim that the most important theoretical work is not synthesis but the invention of sense-free signifiers that can do clinical and structural work.

Key concepts: Unconscious, Une-bévue, Metalanguage, Real, Signifier, Lalangue Notable examples: Julia Kristeva, Polylogue; L'Echo des Savanes (satirical journal); Une-bévue as metatongue operation

Main interlocutors

• Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
• Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
• Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious
• Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
• Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXIII (The Sinthome)
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII (The Other Side of Psychoanalysis)
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts)
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar II
• Jacques Lacan, Écrits
• Jacques Lacan, L'étourdit
• Jacques Lacan, Radiophonie (Scilicet 2-3)
• Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter
• Roman Jakobson
• Julia Kristeva, Polylogue
• Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Cryptonymie / Le verbier de l'homme aux loups
• Jacques Derrida (preface to Verbier)
• Dante, De vulgari eloquentia
• Dante, Divine Comedy
• Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
• Charles Sanders Peirce
• Jean-Claude Milner, Réflexions sur la référence
• Pierre Soury (topologist)
• Alain Didier Weill
• Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics

Position in the corpus

Seminar 24 belongs to the final Borromean-topological phase of Lacan's teaching and should be read as a direct continuation of Seminar XXIII (The Sinthome, 1975–76), which introduced the sinthome through the figure of Joyce and the four-ring knot. Where Seminar XXIII's topological work is organized around a case study (Joyce's relationship to language and the Name-of-the-Father), Seminar XXIV is more formally exploratory and reflexive—it pushes the topology harder and more openly stages Lacan's own uncertainty. Readers should have prior familiarity with the Borromean knot as developed in Seminar XX (Encore) and Seminar XXII (RSI), and with the Graph of Desire from Seminar V and the Écrits (especially the 'Subversion of the Subject'). The sessions on the Passe and the Bozef figure are best understood against the background of Seminar XI's account of alienation and separation and Seminar VIII (Transference) on the agalma and the subject supposed to know. The theory of analytic interpretation as witticism and poetic equivocation dialogues directly with the Freudian joke-work, but also anticipates concerns developed in later reception of Lacan by clinicians working on the sinthome (e.g., in the work of Jacques-Alain Miller's post-Lacanian elaborations).\n\nWithin the topology-Borromean tier of the corpus, Seminar 24 is unique in its sustained reflexivity about teaching and transmission—it asks not only what the Borromean knot is but why the seminar itself must take the form it takes. Readers who find Seminar XXIII's Joyce-focus too singular will find Seminar 24 more structurally general. Those approaching the late Lacan for the first time should begin with Seminar XX for the algebraic and linguistic background, then Seminar XXIII for the sinthome, before tackling the topology of Seminar 24. For the Passe material, pairing with Lacan's 'Proposition of 9 October 1967' (the institutional text founding the Passe) is essential context that the seminar presupposes rather than provides.

Canonical concepts deployed

• Une-bévue (structural unconscious as misfire)
• Lalangue
• Borromean Knot
• Real (as impossibility: what does not cease not to be written)
• Torus and toric topology
• Möbius Strip and double Möbius strip
• Sinthome (s.i.n.t.h.o.m.e.)
• Symbolic / Imaginary / Real (RSI)
• Signifier and signifier-effects
• The big Other and S(Ø)
• Subject Supposed to Know
• Passe (analytic passage and transmission)
• Splitting of the Subject ($)
• Objet petit a
• Parlêtre
• Metaphor vs. metonymy
• Master Signifier (S1) and Knowledge (S2)
• Graph of Desire
• Transference
• Four Discourses (Discourse of the Analyst)