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Le Séminaire #20
Le Séminaire. Encore
Vous n'avez qu'à aller regarder à Rome la statue du Bernin pour comprendre tout de suite qu'elle jouit, sainte Thérèse, ça ne fait pas de doute. Et de quoi jouit-elle ? Il est clair que le témoignage essentiel des mystiques c'est justement de dire qu'ils l'éprouvent, mais qu'ils n'en savent rien.
Ces jaculations mystiques, ce n'est ni du bavardage, ni du verbiage, c'est en somme ce qu'on peut lire de mieux. Tout à fait en bas de page, note - Y ajouter les Ecrits de Jacques Lacan, parce que c'est du même ordre. Ce qui se tentait à la fin du siècle dernier, au temps de Freud, ce qu'ils cherchaient, toutes sortes de braves gens dans l'entourage de Charcot et des autres, c'était de ramener la mystique à des affaires de foutre. Si vous y regardez de près, ce n'est pas ça du tout. Cette jouissance qu'on éprouve et dont on ne sait rien, n'est-ce pas ce qui nous met sur la voie de l'ex-sistence ? Et pourquoi ne pas interpréter une face de l'Autre, la face Dieu, comme supportée par la jouissance féminine ?
Ces jaculations mystiques, ce n'est ni du bavardage, ni du verbiage, c'est en somme ce qu'on peut lire de mieux. Tout à fait en bas de page, note - Y ajouter les Ecrits de Jacques Lacan, parce que c'est du même ordre. Ce qui se tentait à la fin du siècle dernier, au temps de Freud, ce qu'ils cherchaient, toutes sortes de braves gens dans l'entourage de Charcot et des autres, c'était de ramener la mystique à des affaires de foutre. Si vous y regardez de près, ce n'est pas ça du tout. Cette jouissance qu'on éprouve et dont on ne sait rien, n'est-ce pas ce qui nous met sur la voie de l'ex-sistence ? Et pourquoi ne pas interpréter une face de l'Autre, la face Dieu, comme supportée par la jouissance féminine ?
132 pages, Softcover
First published January 1, 1975
91 people are currently reading
2770 people want to read
About the author
Jacques Lacan
182 books1,217 followersJacques-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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 56 reviews
February 19, 2019
I read this very quickly so I could hasten a re-reading, hopefully mouthing every syllable into the flesh of my loved One. It's arch-Lacan--what's not to love, hate, or ignore?
Someday some "I" will enunciate a realer review below. That one will convince [convaincre] you to vanquish [vaincre] the asshole [con] who doesn't read Lacan. It's too condign that this stage of Lacan's teaching overlaps with Pynchon's enticing barb: "this is not a disentanglement from but a progressive knotting into."
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Someday some "I" will enunciate a realer review below. That one will convince [convaincre] you to vanquish [vaincre] the asshole [con] who doesn't read Lacan. It's too condign that this stage of Lacan's teaching overlaps with Pynchon's enticing barb: "this is not a disentanglement from but a progressive knotting into."
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November 17, 2017
I tried reading this several times and couldn't make head or tail of it
EDIT: Having read numerous secondary sources on Lacan now (chiefly Bruce Fink's books) I think I understand this a bit better and I have to say it's really good. Lacan's schema of sexuation is just genius and a maybe step forward in how we think sexual difference, not to mention his musings on language, knowledge, and jouissance. I'm gonna dock a star cuz it's just so hard to read but damn this is a wonderful seminar.
EDIT: Having read numerous secondary sources on Lacan now (chiefly Bruce Fink's books) I think I understand this a bit better and I have to say it's really good. Lacan's schema of sexuation is just genius and a maybe step forward in how we think sexual difference, not to mention his musings on language, knowledge, and jouissance. I'm gonna dock a star cuz it's just so hard to read but damn this is a wonderful seminar.
July 1, 2017
On reading Lacan, people offer a lot of advice. They say you must read him twice, or that perhaps you must know of what he speaks before you read. These are adequate suggestions, but far from exhaustive. My advice is to always keep in view the unholy alliance between Lacanian psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and surrealism.
With that aside, this seminar offers three crucial points that I can outline although they are far from exhaustive. Encore offers the most sustained meditation on Lacan's well known mantra: "Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel" (often translated as: "there is no sexual relation" or "sexual relationship"). Encore also outlines the theory of sexuation and Lacan's theories of masculine and feminine jouissance. And, finally, this seminar portends of things to come with the theorization of lalangue (a play on one of the two French words for language, "la langue" literally translating into "the tongue," erroneously translated here as "llanguage"). Lalangue will come to be immensely important in Lacan's future seminars, namely Seminar XIII called The Sinthome.
Such a roadmap might help a prospective reader on the score of knowing of what Lacan speaks before reading his lecture. And yet, explicating what Lacan says sidesteps the jouissance of reading his work, a Barthesian pleasure if there ever was one. Lacan speaks with elastic humor and razor-sharp turn-of-phrase. Most, as I have suggested above, conceptualize his texts as difficult. But a difficulty describes something that inhibits the achievement of a particular goal. It is, in fact, a mistake to approach Lacan's teachings with a predetermined goal in mind. Understanding should be the least of the worries of a reader of Lacan.
To spend time with Lacan and his work is to begin to love the man, but of course the Other's jouissance is not a sign of love. And it is precisely Lacan's jouissance we experience here, despite his disavowal. At the end of the text Lacan says of delivering his seminars, "There are many who believe they know me and who think that I find herein an infinite satisfaction. Next to the amount of work it involves, I must say that it seems pretty minimal to me." And yet, Lacan also says of the truth, "The goal is that jouissance be avowed, precisely insofar as it may be unavowable. The truth sought is the one that is unavowable with respect to the law that regulates jouissance." Then, we know that a truth of the matter is that a jouissance ceases to be so when it is avowed. If that's true, then I'll admit I find reading Lacan quite unpleasant.
With that aside, this seminar offers three crucial points that I can outline although they are far from exhaustive. Encore offers the most sustained meditation on Lacan's well known mantra: "Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel" (often translated as: "there is no sexual relation" or "sexual relationship"). Encore also outlines the theory of sexuation and Lacan's theories of masculine and feminine jouissance. And, finally, this seminar portends of things to come with the theorization of lalangue (a play on one of the two French words for language, "la langue" literally translating into "the tongue," erroneously translated here as "llanguage"). Lalangue will come to be immensely important in Lacan's future seminars, namely Seminar XIII called The Sinthome.
Such a roadmap might help a prospective reader on the score of knowing of what Lacan speaks before reading his lecture. And yet, explicating what Lacan says sidesteps the jouissance of reading his work, a Barthesian pleasure if there ever was one. Lacan speaks with elastic humor and razor-sharp turn-of-phrase. Most, as I have suggested above, conceptualize his texts as difficult. But a difficulty describes something that inhibits the achievement of a particular goal. It is, in fact, a mistake to approach Lacan's teachings with a predetermined goal in mind. Understanding should be the least of the worries of a reader of Lacan.
To spend time with Lacan and his work is to begin to love the man, but of course the Other's jouissance is not a sign of love. And it is precisely Lacan's jouissance we experience here, despite his disavowal. At the end of the text Lacan says of delivering his seminars, "There are many who believe they know me and who think that I find herein an infinite satisfaction. Next to the amount of work it involves, I must say that it seems pretty minimal to me." And yet, Lacan also says of the truth, "The goal is that jouissance be avowed, precisely insofar as it may be unavowable. The truth sought is the one that is unavowable with respect to the law that regulates jouissance." Then, we know that a truth of the matter is that a jouissance ceases to be so when it is avowed. If that's true, then I'll admit I find reading Lacan quite unpleasant.
September 15, 2017
I don't know what the big deal is. I feel like I was reading the ramblings of a timeshare salesman.
November 3, 2008
Let me jump into the text at one of many critical points.
For every speaking being, the cause of its desire is, in terms of structure, strictly equivalent, so to speak, to its bending, that is, to what I have called its division as subject. (114-115)
If each pair of the following set of interpretations is not quite mutually-implying, at least each is linked to the entire set, Borromean-fashion. Perhaps, this is not a defect when it comes to a reading of a text whose central formal inspiration lies in pointing out the nonlocality of judgments of identity and difference in topological structures.
-For Fink's "bending", I suggest that we read "torsion", i.e., the result, on a transcendental surface, or a manifold which is thought, of an alteration in the dimensional space in which it is embedded. Whether in the present Lacanian form, or in Deleuze's meditation on the Riemannian effects of the addition and subtraction of dimensions of thought (N-1 / N+1, the former being particularly a matheme for torsion, in contrast with the permanent drive toward reflective disambiguation through the multiplication of dimensions; but as Deleuze makes admirably clear at points to which he is not entirely faithful, only understandable through the latter, subtraction through reflection) we can recognize the torsion of thought as a form (even an Idea) on which contemporary French philosophy converges with increasing intensity and explicitness. Moreover, it is a pure metamatheme, if one may assign this name to formalisms that require a metamathematical standpoint to be understood, with the caveat, of course, that we recognize, since Godel's fateful mathematization of metamathematics, that every metamatheme is also a matheme, that mathematics is not only a first-order theory, but the locus of a dizzying assortment of potentially reflexive morphsisms.
The prototype of Lacanian torsion is surely the Mobius. The question that faces a philosopher, in contemplating the Mobius, is whether the fatal twist that defines its being affects only an empirical manifold, or the very fabric of thought. That is to say, does an event, contrary to the law of transcendental usage, befall the concepts of identity and difference when the Mobius is twisted, to just the extent that a physical force is exerted on a ring of paper? Contrary to popular usage, it is not a Platonist who is forced to the former deflationary analysis - at least not if the author of the Sophist is a Platonist.
-To be equivalent "in terms of structure", is, on the well-established Lacanian thesis that structure is topology, to be topologically equivalent. We can understand this, at a first pass, in terms of the ordinary distinction between sense and reference. That is, the object-cause of desire (objet petit a) is seen
The payoff of this first translation is that it, rightly, transposes reference out of the zone of the model theory of first-order logic and into mathematics proper (even if mathematics, in the Lacanian text, is limited to topology for the sake of preserving a role for the psychoanalytic supplement.)
-By "subject" I understand that dimension of what is usually called a "mind" that is not reducible to the function of knowledge.
This definition of a subject would call for two further remarks.
First, I invoke that identification that I am proposing to make explicit in these remarks - which is partly supporting of / supported by the Lacanian text (the usual circularity of coherent discourse), but also partly critical of it - is that knowledge in the particular form of first-order theory is fantasy or ideology. Of course, this thesis implies that science, as first order theory, is blind to its own political status, a claim entirely in line with Zizek's fusion of Lacanian topology with Critical Theory. But also, and perhaps more significantly, this identification implies that it is specifically qua first-order theory that science is ideology. Given that FOT's only effective function (like that of Plato's Sophist) is to use the tacit metatheory of mimesis to deceive its subject into thinking that fantasy / ideology has a contentual relation to the real, that it reaches a referent other than itself, all of the actually effective work of science, as something distinct from its self-understanding (the metatheory of first-order theory as FOL-plus model theory), could never have been first-order theory. Maintaining this thesis requires only the recognition that 1) the mathematical content of science is effective, and 2) mathematics cannot be cast without remainder as a first-order theory. This second thesis recasts finally in a clear way what provided mathematics with its fatal attraction for Plato, and also what Kant sought in it under the heading of a
Nevertheless, its source is not dependent on any philosophical system, but on the purely negative pronouncement of Godel's First Incompleteness Theorem, which, if I may use a Lacanian idiom, couldn't care less about knowledge.
Thus it is the matheme, as against the fantasy of knowledge, that is "integrally transmissible", according to Lacan's oracular pronouncement. Or as Badiou puts it perhaps with greater clarity, "The non-ideological content of science is mathematics." And this criterion functions as much as a limit to the power of Critical Theory to displace scientific discourse - or indeed even to hermeneutical philosophy's self-appointed mission, whether in its Heideggerian or Wittgensteinian modes, to interpret the matheme - as it does to validate the criticism of first-order thought. It would be no accident that by virtue of dealing themselves unlimited powers of interpretation, both Heideggerians and Wittgensteinians find it necessary to make ambivalent recourse to an equally sweeping hesychasm. For Heidegger, philosophy's status as "useless but masterful knowing" is finally expressed in Gelassenheit, while for Wittgensteinians, having pointed out that meaning is use, philosophy subsequently "leaves everything as it is." Just as Meno (and Schmitt) would have it, thought's governing moves are made outside the game of thought. But a criterially-based metalogical reflection does not vacillate between omnipotence and impotence in this way. If it is true that the only legitimate target for actual philosophical criticism is a structure which is that of illusion, namely first-order thought, nevertheless, as Lacan never tires of pointing out, the function of this illusion in the real, that is, at the level of its signifier, is perfectly positive. Thus if - as Badiou states and Lacan performs - there is a sense in which first-order theory does indeed capture the content of what can be finitely represented of our everydayness, thus of what can be made into a conscious representation / knowledge in it, then this is quite enough work for philosophy to do.
For every speaking being, the cause of its desire is, in terms of structure, strictly equivalent, so to speak, to its bending, that is, to what I have called its division as subject. (114-115)
If each pair of the following set of interpretations is not quite mutually-implying, at least each is linked to the entire set, Borromean-fashion. Perhaps, this is not a defect when it comes to a reading of a text whose central formal inspiration lies in pointing out the nonlocality of judgments of identity and difference in topological structures.
-For Fink's "bending", I suggest that we read "torsion", i.e., the result, on a transcendental surface, or a manifold which is thought, of an alteration in the dimensional space in which it is embedded. Whether in the present Lacanian form, or in Deleuze's meditation on the Riemannian effects of the addition and subtraction of dimensions of thought (N-1 / N+1, the former being particularly a matheme for torsion, in contrast with the permanent drive toward reflective disambiguation through the multiplication of dimensions; but as Deleuze makes admirably clear at points to which he is not entirely faithful, only understandable through the latter, subtraction through reflection) we can recognize the torsion of thought as a form (even an Idea) on which contemporary French philosophy converges with increasing intensity and explicitness. Moreover, it is a pure metamatheme, if one may assign this name to formalisms that require a metamathematical standpoint to be understood, with the caveat, of course, that we recognize, since Godel's fateful mathematization of metamathematics, that every metamatheme is also a matheme, that mathematics is not only a first-order theory, but the locus of a dizzying assortment of potentially reflexive morphsisms.
The prototype of Lacanian torsion is surely the Mobius. The question that faces a philosopher, in contemplating the Mobius, is whether the fatal twist that defines its being affects only an empirical manifold, or the very fabric of thought. That is to say, does an event, contrary to the law of transcendental usage, befall the concepts of identity and difference when the Mobius is twisted, to just the extent that a physical force is exerted on a ring of paper? Contrary to popular usage, it is not a Platonist who is forced to the former deflationary analysis - at least not if the author of the Sophist is a Platonist.
-To be equivalent "in terms of structure", is, on the well-established Lacanian thesis that structure is topology, to be topologically equivalent. We can understand this, at a first pass, in terms of the ordinary distinction between sense and reference. That is, the object-cause of desire (objet petit a) is seen
The payoff of this first translation is that it, rightly, transposes reference out of the zone of the model theory of first-order logic and into mathematics proper (even if mathematics, in the Lacanian text, is limited to topology for the sake of preserving a role for the psychoanalytic supplement.)
-By "subject" I understand that dimension of what is usually called a "mind" that is not reducible to the function of knowledge.
This definition of a subject would call for two further remarks.
First, I invoke that identification that I am proposing to make explicit in these remarks - which is partly supporting of / supported by the Lacanian text (the usual circularity of coherent discourse), but also partly critical of it - is that knowledge in the particular form of first-order theory is fantasy or ideology. Of course, this thesis implies that science, as first order theory, is blind to its own political status, a claim entirely in line with Zizek's fusion of Lacanian topology with Critical Theory. But also, and perhaps more significantly, this identification implies that it is specifically qua first-order theory that science is ideology. Given that FOT's only effective function (like that of Plato's Sophist) is to use the tacit metatheory of mimesis to deceive its subject into thinking that fantasy / ideology has a contentual relation to the real, that it reaches a referent other than itself, all of the actually effective work of science, as something distinct from its self-understanding (the metatheory of first-order theory as FOL-plus model theory), could never have been first-order theory. Maintaining this thesis requires only the recognition that 1) the mathematical content of science is effective, and 2) mathematics cannot be cast without remainder as a first-order theory. This second thesis recasts finally in a clear way what provided mathematics with its fatal attraction for Plato, and also what Kant sought in it under the heading of a
Nevertheless, its source is not dependent on any philosophical system, but on the purely negative pronouncement of Godel's First Incompleteness Theorem, which, if I may use a Lacanian idiom, couldn't care less about knowledge.
Thus it is the matheme, as against the fantasy of knowledge, that is "integrally transmissible", according to Lacan's oracular pronouncement. Or as Badiou puts it perhaps with greater clarity, "The non-ideological content of science is mathematics." And this criterion functions as much as a limit to the power of Critical Theory to displace scientific discourse - or indeed even to hermeneutical philosophy's self-appointed mission, whether in its Heideggerian or Wittgensteinian modes, to interpret the matheme - as it does to validate the criticism of first-order thought. It would be no accident that by virtue of dealing themselves unlimited powers of interpretation, both Heideggerians and Wittgensteinians find it necessary to make ambivalent recourse to an equally sweeping hesychasm. For Heidegger, philosophy's status as "useless but masterful knowing" is finally expressed in Gelassenheit, while for Wittgensteinians, having pointed out that meaning is use, philosophy subsequently "leaves everything as it is." Just as Meno (and Schmitt) would have it, thought's governing moves are made outside the game of thought. But a criterially-based metalogical reflection does not vacillate between omnipotence and impotence in this way. If it is true that the only legitimate target for actual philosophical criticism is a structure which is that of illusion, namely first-order thought, nevertheless, as Lacan never tires of pointing out, the function of this illusion in the real, that is, at the level of its signifier, is perfectly positive. Thus if - as Badiou states and Lacan performs - there is a sense in which first-order theory does indeed capture the content of what can be finitely represented of our everydayness, thus of what can be made into a conscious representation / knowledge in it, then this is quite enough work for philosophy to do.
June 26, 2022
"Thus, I am leaving you to your own devices on this bed. I am going out, and once again I will write on the door so that, as you exit, you may perhaps recall the dreams you will have pursued on this bed. I will write the following sentence: "Jouissance of the Other," of the Other with a capital O, "of the body of the Other who symbolizes the Other, is not the sign of love."
What is jouissance? Here it amounts to no more than a negative instance. Jouissance is what serves no purpose (ne sert à rien).
***
It's amusing sometimes to read the psychoanalysts, especially this one when Lacan tells me I don't exist as soon as page 7. His impatience with this non-subject bleeds on the entire page, dismissing Woman deep into the bowels of her gene pool, I imagine some spittle coming out as he's barking at his students:
"- I said, "said to be" - the corporal sex (sexe corporel) or sexual organ (sexe) of woman - I said, "of woman," whereas in fact woman does not exist, woman is not whole.
Don't talk to me about women's secondary sexual characteristics because, barring some sort of radical change, it is those of the mother that take precedence in her".
(but isn't the mother also a Woman? Is it only the mother who is Woman? But if this is valid, she wouldn't exist. Is a young girl a Woman and does she pass into non-existence when she comes of age into womanhood, giving her Womanhood to the mother? Who becomes non-existent by having been bestowed the Womanhood? And what of Lacan's own mother? Does the salvatory radical change only involve giving birth to boys? )
His obvious impatience is mere disguise for insecurity (per Lacan himself in Anxiety - The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book X) and I see why Lacan would prefer to aggressively (disguise for insecurity per Lacan himself in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) dissolve an entire gender into non-existence simply because it couldn't, anatomically speaking, fit into his theory of phallic castration anxiety.
Yet... even if he denies me existence, I will not deny myself Lacan's contributions to the psychoanalytic movement. He has some decent insight, even if back in his day it was chic to hate Women.
What is jouissance? Here it amounts to no more than a negative instance. Jouissance is what serves no purpose (ne sert à rien).
***
It's amusing sometimes to read the psychoanalysts, especially this one when Lacan tells me I don't exist as soon as page 7. His impatience with this non-subject bleeds on the entire page, dismissing Woman deep into the bowels of her gene pool, I imagine some spittle coming out as he's barking at his students:
"- I said, "said to be" - the corporal sex (sexe corporel) or sexual organ (sexe) of woman - I said, "of woman," whereas in fact woman does not exist, woman is not whole.
Don't talk to me about women's secondary sexual characteristics because, barring some sort of radical change, it is those of the mother that take precedence in her".
(but isn't the mother also a Woman? Is it only the mother who is Woman? But if this is valid, she wouldn't exist. Is a young girl a Woman and does she pass into non-existence when she comes of age into womanhood, giving her Womanhood to the mother? Who becomes non-existent by having been bestowed the Womanhood? And what of Lacan's own mother? Does the salvatory radical change only involve giving birth to boys? )
His obvious impatience is mere disguise for insecurity (per Lacan himself in Anxiety - The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book X) and I see why Lacan would prefer to aggressively (disguise for insecurity per Lacan himself in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) dissolve an entire gender into non-existence simply because it couldn't, anatomically speaking, fit into his theory of phallic castration anxiety.
Yet... even if he denies me existence, I will not deny myself Lacan's contributions to the psychoanalytic movement. He has some decent insight, even if back in his day it was chic to hate Women.
August 19, 2017
I'm incredibly disappointed with how inaccessible this seminar is...
A lot of my experience reading this started to feel arbitrary considering that I had no clue why Lacan was using so many self-created terms without entirely explaining them. This text failed to inspire questions considering the psyche and instead only inspired the reader to question "what the fuck is Lacan saying"?
Still, there are few gems to be found in this seminar. One in particular is the idea of sexual relationship's inability to exist in speech and writing. However, the reader is left the ethical imperative to decide if Lacan speaks of this as a challenge to heteronormative ideologies or if this is all in support of cis-heteronormative sexuality while upholding all other sexualities as illness.
A lot of my experience reading this started to feel arbitrary considering that I had no clue why Lacan was using so many self-created terms without entirely explaining them. This text failed to inspire questions considering the psyche and instead only inspired the reader to question "what the fuck is Lacan saying"?
Still, there are few gems to be found in this seminar. One in particular is the idea of sexual relationship's inability to exist in speech and writing. However, the reader is left the ethical imperative to decide if Lacan speaks of this as a challenge to heteronormative ideologies or if this is all in support of cis-heteronormative sexuality while upholding all other sexualities as illness.
February 21, 2017
Libro de magia y alquimia del cual entendí alrededor del 35%, debido a distracciones innombrables en los últimos días y a falta de mejores herramientas teóricas. Seré buena y no mencionaré demasiado que la oralidad de Lacan bordea lo insoportable y lo obtuso. Luego de leer Reading Seminar XX: Lacan's Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality y algunos seminarios previos, volveré.
(2.5*? - calificación irrelevante en este estado larval)
(2.5*? - calificación irrelevante en este estado larval)
July 3, 2017
"Εάν η σεξουαλική συνεύρεση με το σώμα του Άλλου δεν προσδιορίζει κάποια "σχέση" μεταξύ των φύλων, μήπως αυτή η σχέση μπορεί ν΄αναζητηθεί στο δεσμό που δημιουργεί η αγάπη; Μήπως ο έρωτας επιτρέπει στο Ένα να έχει πρόσβαση στο Άλλο φύλο;"
September 9, 2008
Didn't finish it. Barely remember much of it at all. Was frustrated with it.
November 24, 2014
A 'poet and mathematician' here gives the most elliptical, polysemic text I've probably ever read (of prose).
November 23, 2025
Dunno why I’m doing this to myself
Read
June 18, 2024UPDATED REVIEW: Saturday, June 15, 2034
Here's a charitable reading, without the Lacanian jargon.
Lacan believes that sex and love make for peculiar, puzzling phenomena for us. Regarding both, we entertain romantic notions of completion but what really happens among romantic partners is that they do not love each other in their whole being but only under some aspect. In Lacan's just-so story, early stereotypical identifications, like the mother as provider of food and comfort or the father as lawgiver, extend to other sorts of identifications people inevitably make throughout the course of their lives. No one can decide in advance what sorts of specific identifications people will make with respect to romantic partnership. They can be as specific and diverse as there are people.
And yet Lacan believes the most general categories of identification have to do with persistent stereotypes about men and women. Lacan sees heterosexism and male chauvinism as cultural and institutional. There is, for instance, the injunction to "Act like a man," or the injunction to "Be more of a lady," injunctions that assume some ideal essence for terms such as man and lady. The network of ideas around the use of such terms places men in dominant roles and women in submissive roles. Because of this bifurcation of masculine/feminine, and assumptions related to these roles that even pervade non-heteronormative and non-monogamous relationships, it is, Lacan believes, virtually impossible for partners to see one another except under these sorts of partial aspects.
At the most basic level, Lacan believes the way around this problem involves partners constantly reminding themselves and one another that we as babies came into this world too early for survival, and even after overcoming physiological lack, we all continue to have a social/emotional lack, which cannot be made complete by another person, but which can be recognized in and by another person. "I don't have what I wish I could give you, but I'll do my best to try." It's easy to forget this basic desire toward a partner. Which is why the constant reminders. They are constant interruptions of bad patterns we can't fail to have just on account of being human.
ORIGINAL REVIEW: March 7, 2024
What to make of this? The more I read Lacan, the more I see how true his statement was to the public about his adoring fans: "I hear there are Lacanians. Fine. You be Lacanians. I'm a Freudian." Lacan has gone a long way in reinvigorating some of Freud's concepts and developed several of his own, but as a Freudian, he is stuck in the Freudian paradigm.
Take this provocative statement of Lacan's: "The Woman doesn't exist." He explains that he means that there is no real category Woman as understood historically and used to offload prejudices, there are only women. Fine. But then he says to the extent that there exists the category Woman, the category is "barred," subject to erasure. "She is not-Whole," he writes. Is he just reifying stereotypes men attached to women as being not-Whole? Is he speaking metaphorically, or does he think he's speaking descriptively? Or is he making an evaluation? It's this slipperiness to Lacan's language that is so maddening, and I wonder how fruitful it all really is.
To the extent Lacan is painting a picture of stereotypical male-female relations in order to appraise the stereotypes and make therapeutic judgments about them in order to help patients, maybe this is all fine. But you never know quite how serious to take the man, or if he even takes himself seriously.
On another note, without doubt, whenever he gets to talking about math and set theory and Borromean knots, it's clear he doesn't know what he's talking about.
This is late Lacan. The later, the more incoherent.
Here's a charitable reading, without the Lacanian jargon.
Lacan believes that sex and love make for peculiar, puzzling phenomena for us. Regarding both, we entertain romantic notions of completion but what really happens among romantic partners is that they do not love each other in their whole being but only under some aspect. In Lacan's just-so story, early stereotypical identifications, like the mother as provider of food and comfort or the father as lawgiver, extend to other sorts of identifications people inevitably make throughout the course of their lives. No one can decide in advance what sorts of specific identifications people will make with respect to romantic partnership. They can be as specific and diverse as there are people.
And yet Lacan believes the most general categories of identification have to do with persistent stereotypes about men and women. Lacan sees heterosexism and male chauvinism as cultural and institutional. There is, for instance, the injunction to "Act like a man," or the injunction to "Be more of a lady," injunctions that assume some ideal essence for terms such as man and lady. The network of ideas around the use of such terms places men in dominant roles and women in submissive roles. Because of this bifurcation of masculine/feminine, and assumptions related to these roles that even pervade non-heteronormative and non-monogamous relationships, it is, Lacan believes, virtually impossible for partners to see one another except under these sorts of partial aspects.
At the most basic level, Lacan believes the way around this problem involves partners constantly reminding themselves and one another that we as babies came into this world too early for survival, and even after overcoming physiological lack, we all continue to have a social/emotional lack, which cannot be made complete by another person, but which can be recognized in and by another person. "I don't have what I wish I could give you, but I'll do my best to try." It's easy to forget this basic desire toward a partner. Which is why the constant reminders. They are constant interruptions of bad patterns we can't fail to have just on account of being human.
ORIGINAL REVIEW: March 7, 2024
What to make of this? The more I read Lacan, the more I see how true his statement was to the public about his adoring fans: "I hear there are Lacanians. Fine. You be Lacanians. I'm a Freudian." Lacan has gone a long way in reinvigorating some of Freud's concepts and developed several of his own, but as a Freudian, he is stuck in the Freudian paradigm.
Take this provocative statement of Lacan's: "The Woman doesn't exist." He explains that he means that there is no real category Woman as understood historically and used to offload prejudices, there are only women. Fine. But then he says to the extent that there exists the category Woman, the category is "barred," subject to erasure. "She is not-Whole," he writes. Is he just reifying stereotypes men attached to women as being not-Whole? Is he speaking metaphorically, or does he think he's speaking descriptively? Or is he making an evaluation? It's this slipperiness to Lacan's language that is so maddening, and I wonder how fruitful it all really is.
To the extent Lacan is painting a picture of stereotypical male-female relations in order to appraise the stereotypes and make therapeutic judgments about them in order to help patients, maybe this is all fine. But you never know quite how serious to take the man, or if he even takes himself seriously.
On another note, without doubt, whenever he gets to talking about math and set theory and Borromean knots, it's clear he doesn't know what he's talking about.
This is late Lacan. The later, the more incoherent.
September 8, 2021
I will say two things about this book: one is that, unsurprisingly, it only makes any sense (when it does) because I’ve read some of Fink’s secondary literature. And specifically Fink’s, not whatever else I’ve come across. So, I recommend Fink’s book The Lacanian Subject. It’s pretty easily read and really helps untie the knots of this (which is an uninentional joke, I realised, because Lacan spends the longest and most boring part of this talking about and making knots for whatever reason). The second thing I’ll say, finally, is that the main points everyone cites from this - “There is no sexual relation,” “Woman does not exist,” and so on - can also be found in early Levinas, regretted perhaps by later Levinas, likely because of Beauvoir’s attack (check Time and the Other and Ethics and Infinity). It’s interesting to see how Lacan basically takes these ideas and complicates them a bit while trying to dodge the accusations that could (and probably do) arise. I haven’t read enough feminist responses to Lacan to know, but I can guess. Levinas tried the same game before but it didn’t work out for him, clearly. And his solution much later in his career was to speculate that perhaps he should have said that both feminine and masculine principles coexist in the same subject, which is maybe a bit of a cop-out. Anyway, the 20th Seminar is really interesting reading, but I recommend Fink’s introductory book first, and I also recommend reading Levinas for some similarities and contrasts if those strike readers as interesting (as if I can ever convince anyone to read Levinas….).
April 2, 2015
Lacan's Seminar XX is one of the most fascinating of his seminars, and I think that the term "fascination" is a very accurate way to describe this seminar. Throughout the reading, the accurate reader will notice this fascination, gently interwoven in the words. On the one hand, this fascination makes this seminar very appealing, on the other - it is a fascination which one should consider its implications.
One thing is sure - it is another brilliant seminar, which contributes to psychoanalysis great subjective knowledge.
One thing is sure - it is another brilliant seminar, which contributes to psychoanalysis great subjective knowledge.
January 14, 2008
the theory is fascinating and of course pivotal for the development of lit theory, but the style became at times impossible to negotiate, because Lacan's playfulness and enactment of ideas took precedence over communicating meaning.
October 14, 2012
Interesting , well organized , clear thoughts without losing the magic of a psychoanalytic perspective.
The limits of love is not an appropriate title in my opinion because it is not clarified inside the book. However who am I to tell what are the true limits of love.
The limits of love is not an appropriate title in my opinion because it is not clarified inside the book. However who am I to tell what are the true limits of love.
June 21, 2007
this book taught me how to have a way with the ladies.
September 1, 2007
the part of sexuation is a must-read if you don't have time to go through the whole book.
March 26, 2009
I give this a five not because I agree with all the claims, but because it's such a joy to engage with (and much more of an invitation to engage than, say, Ecrits).
July 13, 2011
Very difficult book for me to read. I read it like poetry, putting each sentence in my own words. It is Freudian theory.
Read
December 9, 2015Very important book. I would wish to elaborate the jouissance de l'Autre. However, I learned more from commentators such as Joan Copjec.
October 27, 2018
I don't get it and I don't want to.
March 18, 2018
Inbitable.
July 4, 2020
Hardest but the most beautiful 146 pages
August 30, 2020
Five stars to the part when Lacan says, “God is a woman.”
June 12, 2023
“to know what your partner will do is not a proof of love”
March 14, 2025
In Book XX, Lacan coins the concept of feminine jouissance. Relatedly, Lacan contentiously claimed that the sexual relationship that has so occupied the minds of philosophers and scientists does not exist. However, what is feminine jouissance and what does it have to do with Lacan’s positing of the non-existence of the sexual relationship?
To answer this question, it must first be restated that per Lacanian psychoanalysis, there is “there’s no such thing as a knowing subject” (114). For example, Lacan asks why Freud elected Oedipus as the paradigmatic subject for psychoanalysis when there were seemingly many myths available that portrayed a primal killing of the father. For Lacan, Freud’s election of Oedipus as exemplary was precisely because Oedipus did not know what he was doing—he is the perfect psychoanalytic subject.
To further understand how Lacan excavates feminine jouissance and the sexual relationship, it should be said that he used linguistics as a way to purge psychoanalysis of both fantasies of wholeness between the sexes and illusions of a subject who knows and acts in a determined manner. As a result, Lacan’s obsession with prescientific and premodern ideas of knowledge in this work is derivative of his hope to ground psychoanalysis on something other than “the fantasy of an inscription of the sexual link” that characterized these other discourses (82). While there is much to say regarding Lacan’s use and misuse of linguistics—i.e., his focus on enunciation, how his formalization of linguistics develops a non-representational science, and his argument regarding “the sign’s subordination to the signifier” (101)—his situating of feminine and phallic jouissance is grounded in both this unknowing subject and his attempt to establish psychoanalysis as a science.
“What I, strictly speaking,” writes Lacan, “call ‘jouissance of the Other,’ insofar as it is merely symbolized here, is something else altogether [than phallic jouissance]—namely, the not-whole that I will have to articulate” (24). Men and women, as Lacan speaks of them, are not connected to our ideas biological sex, gender, or orientation—“men, women, and children are but signifiers” (33). Rather, they are connected to the type of jouissance that one can obtain. As such, phallic jouissance is fallible, it is that which fails and disappoints. Why? Because phallic jouissance reduces the partner, as Other, to an object a that serves to the end of fulfilling what one supposes they desire. To enjoy in this way is to enjoy like a man, even if one is neither a biological man nor socialized as a man. To enjoy by way of phallic jouissance is to enjoy what culminates in failure and let down. On the other hand, woman’s jouissance, the not-whole jouissance, is found through a sacrifice of the object a that phallic jouissance centers. Through this sacrifice or deferral, woman’s jouissance (what Lacan at times designates as ‘Other jouissance’) is thought to not be spoken. That is, it is not articulated in signifiers because it would then categorically function as a phallic jouissance capable of missing the mark of articulated desire. Importantly, women—again, this term is not functioning biologically—can obtain both jouissances while men can only have one or the other. Feminine jouissance, as Lacan explicates in “A Love Letter,” distinguishes Lacan from Freud insofar as Lacan disagrees with Freud’s argument that there is only a masculine libido.
To answer this question, it must first be restated that per Lacanian psychoanalysis, there is “there’s no such thing as a knowing subject” (114). For example, Lacan asks why Freud elected Oedipus as the paradigmatic subject for psychoanalysis when there were seemingly many myths available that portrayed a primal killing of the father. For Lacan, Freud’s election of Oedipus as exemplary was precisely because Oedipus did not know what he was doing—he is the perfect psychoanalytic subject.
To further understand how Lacan excavates feminine jouissance and the sexual relationship, it should be said that he used linguistics as a way to purge psychoanalysis of both fantasies of wholeness between the sexes and illusions of a subject who knows and acts in a determined manner. As a result, Lacan’s obsession with prescientific and premodern ideas of knowledge in this work is derivative of his hope to ground psychoanalysis on something other than “the fantasy of an inscription of the sexual link” that characterized these other discourses (82). While there is much to say regarding Lacan’s use and misuse of linguistics—i.e., his focus on enunciation, how his formalization of linguistics develops a non-representational science, and his argument regarding “the sign’s subordination to the signifier” (101)—his situating of feminine and phallic jouissance is grounded in both this unknowing subject and his attempt to establish psychoanalysis as a science.
“What I, strictly speaking,” writes Lacan, “call ‘jouissance of the Other,’ insofar as it is merely symbolized here, is something else altogether [than phallic jouissance]—namely, the not-whole that I will have to articulate” (24). Men and women, as Lacan speaks of them, are not connected to our ideas biological sex, gender, or orientation—“men, women, and children are but signifiers” (33). Rather, they are connected to the type of jouissance that one can obtain. As such, phallic jouissance is fallible, it is that which fails and disappoints. Why? Because phallic jouissance reduces the partner, as Other, to an object a that serves to the end of fulfilling what one supposes they desire. To enjoy in this way is to enjoy like a man, even if one is neither a biological man nor socialized as a man. To enjoy by way of phallic jouissance is to enjoy what culminates in failure and let down. On the other hand, woman’s jouissance, the not-whole jouissance, is found through a sacrifice of the object a that phallic jouissance centers. Through this sacrifice or deferral, woman’s jouissance (what Lacan at times designates as ‘Other jouissance’) is thought to not be spoken. That is, it is not articulated in signifiers because it would then categorically function as a phallic jouissance capable of missing the mark of articulated desire. Importantly, women—again, this term is not functioning biologically—can obtain both jouissances while men can only have one or the other. Feminine jouissance, as Lacan explicates in “A Love Letter,” distinguishes Lacan from Freud insofar as Lacan disagrees with Freud’s argument that there is only a masculine libido.
June 18, 2025
Finishing this on a 12-hour trainride >>
Lacan's work on love, the formula's of sexuation, desire, jouissance, knowledge and the body. On why jouissance is in what serves no purpose (p. 3). On why the One and the sexual relation do not exist. On why love is narcissistic at the core. On the difference between impotence (masculine) and impossibility (feminine) (p. 7). On the difference between phallic and feminine jouissance, and how both fail to establish a sexual relationship. On why psychoanalysis is eventually about the body enjoying (jouissance) itself (23). On the contingency of the phallus. How love always relates to failure and surprise. On a non-substantial understanding of the world. Why writing love letters is often narcissistic too (p. 57). On why negation is a positive thing for Lacan (what a cutie he is) (p. 59). Why making love is like making poetry (p. 72). Why feminine jouissance being there in full, and then having a little more (and why this jouissance is the most existential) (p. 74, 77). "The unconscious is the fact that being, by speaking, enjoys, and wants to know nothing about it" (p. 105). "I speak without knowing it. I speak with my body and I do so unbeknownst to myself. Thus I always say more than I know" (p. 119). "[...] the subject turns out to be - and this is only true for speaking beings - a being whose being is always elsewhere, as the predicate shows. The subject is never more than fleeting and vanishing" (p. 142).
How should we love according to Lacan? We should recognise that "all love is based on a certain relationship between two unconscious knowledges" (p. 144). Then, we should realize that sexual relations always fail, but that "[...] in a sort of poetic flight, in order to make myself understood, I called courage - courage with respect to this fatal destiny" (p. 144). And, lastly, "to know what your partner will do is not a proof of love" (p. 146).
Lacan's work on love, the formula's of sexuation, desire, jouissance, knowledge and the body. On why jouissance is in what serves no purpose (p. 3). On why the One and the sexual relation do not exist. On why love is narcissistic at the core. On the difference between impotence (masculine) and impossibility (feminine) (p. 7). On the difference between phallic and feminine jouissance, and how both fail to establish a sexual relationship. On why psychoanalysis is eventually about the body enjoying (jouissance) itself (23). On the contingency of the phallus. How love always relates to failure and surprise. On a non-substantial understanding of the world. Why writing love letters is often narcissistic too (p. 57). On why negation is a positive thing for Lacan (what a cutie he is) (p. 59). Why making love is like making poetry (p. 72). Why feminine jouissance being there in full, and then having a little more (and why this jouissance is the most existential) (p. 74, 77). "The unconscious is the fact that being, by speaking, enjoys, and wants to know nothing about it" (p. 105). "I speak without knowing it. I speak with my body and I do so unbeknownst to myself. Thus I always say more than I know" (p. 119). "[...] the subject turns out to be - and this is only true for speaking beings - a being whose being is always elsewhere, as the predicate shows. The subject is never more than fleeting and vanishing" (p. 142).
How should we love according to Lacan? We should recognise that "all love is based on a certain relationship between two unconscious knowledges" (p. 144). Then, we should realize that sexual relations always fail, but that "[...] in a sort of poetic flight, in order to make myself understood, I called courage - courage with respect to this fatal destiny" (p. 144). And, lastly, "to know what your partner will do is not a proof of love" (p. 146).
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