From an Other to the other, Book XVI

Le Séminaire #16

by Jacques Lacan, Bruce Fink (Translator)

Sollers once wrote that, to him, Claudel was first and foremost the man who wrote, “Paradise is around us at this very moment, all its forests attentive like a great orchestra that invisibly adores and implores. The whole invention of the Universe with its notes falling vertiginously one by one into the abyss where the wonders of our dimensions are written.”

 Well, Lacan is, to me, the one who says in this Seminar, “We are all familiar with hell, it is everyday life.”

 Is that the same thing? No, I don't think so. Here there is no adoration, no invisible orchestra, no vertigo or wonders. Let us begin by the Lacan “evacuated” from the rue d’Ulm along with his audience, not without resistance or an uproar. The episode was in all the papers. What had he done to deserve such a fate? He had spoken not only to psychoanalysts, but also to young people who were still fired up by the events of May 1968, who nevertheless accepted him as a master of discourse at the same time as they dreamt of subverting the university system. What did he tell them? That “Revolution” means returning to the same place. That knowledge now imposes its law on power and has become uncontrollable. That thought is censorship itself. He spoke to them about Marx, but also about Pascal's wager―which became in his hands a new version of the master/slave dialectic―not to mention the foundations of set theory. He moved on to a discussion of perversion, and models of hysteria and obsession. All of that is connected, scintillates, and captivates.

 Between the lines, the dialogue between Lacan and himself continues regarding the subject of jouissance and the relationship between jouissance and speech and language.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Theory, France

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and doctor, who made prominent contributions to the psychoanalytic movement. His yearly seminars, conducted in Paris from 1953 until his death in 1981, were a major influence in the French intellectual milieu of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly among post-structuralist thinkers.

Lacan's ideas centered on Freudian concepts such as the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego, focusing on identifications, and the centrality of language to subjectivity. His work was interdisciplinary, drawing on linguistics, philosophy, mathematics, amongst others. Although a controversial and divisive figure, Lacan is widely read in critical theory, literary studies, and twentieth-century French philosophy, as well as in the living practice of clinical psychoanalysis.

Reviews

[Billie Pritchett]

I'm at a loss for what's going on in this seminar of Lacan's. After going through the whole thing, I fail to see the takeaway. Perhaps this. In Lacan's framework, every human being is born with this essential feeling of lack or deficiency, which in ordinary life we seek to satisfy through the desire of certain people and things. Matters go off the rails for folks when they find in their lives a dissatisfaction toward what they want or else they set up impossible, unachievable goals.

There are other cases but let's stick to two categories of neuroses. In the Lacanian framework, the hysteric wants someone else to tell him or her what to want, to guide him or her on the right path. The obsessive, on the other hand, wants things he or she could never have. An obsessive might buck authority, for instance, and wish that there were no authority figures, but so long as he or she makes that his or her personal goal and that goal dominates his or her life, the obsessive will naturally be frustrated because everybody's got to serve somebody.

Now the therapist's role in all this is to allow the patient (typically a neurotic, either hysterical or obsessive) to unload his or her baggage onto the therapist while the therapist works to get the patient to break out of some of his or her bad patterns.

This kind of stuff I've just put into words is better put in more summary form by Lacanian psychoanalyst Bruce Fink in his great book The Lacanian Subject . Sure, you might be able to glean several of the above points from this, Lacan's seminar From an Other to the other, but you'd best get it elsewhere.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

This translation hasn’t been published in America yet. I picked it up in England on a visit. I may be the first American to have read it, which excites me. Good seminar, but I need to know more about set theory and I want the rest of his seminars translated damn it!

[Owlseyes]