...or Worse: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIX

Le Séminaire #19

by Jacques Lacan, Jacques-Alain Miller (Editor)

'A chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella. The impossible face-off between a whale and a polar bear. One was devised by LautrEamont; the other punctuated by Freud. Both are memorable. Why so? They certainly tickle something in us. Lacan says what it is. It's about man and woman.There is neither accord nor harmony between man and woman. There's no programme, nothing has been predetermined: every move is a shot in the dark, which in modal logic is called contingency. There's no way out of it. Why is it so inexorable, that is, so necessary? It really has to be reckoned that this stems from an impossibility. Hence the theorem: 'There is no sexual relation.' The formula has become famous.In the place of what thereby punctures a hole in the real, there is a plethora of luring and enchanting images, and there are discourses that prescribe what this relation must be. These discourses are mere semblance, the artifice of which psychoanalysis has made apparent to all. In the twenty-first century, this is beyond dispute. Who still believes that marriage has a natural foundation? Since it's a fact of culture, one devotes oneself to inventing. One cobbles together different constructions from whatever one can. It may be better Eor worse."There is Oneness." At the heart of the present Seminar, this aphorism, which hitherto went unnoticed, complements the "there is no" of sexual relation, stating what there is. It should be heard as One-all-alone. Alone in jouissance (which is fundamentally auto-erotic) and alone in significance (outside any semantics). Here begins Lacan's late teaching. Everything he has already taught you is here, and yet everything is new, overhauled, topsy-turvy.Lacan had taught the primacy of the Other in the order of truth and the order of desire. Here he teaches the primacy of the One in its real dimension. He rejects the Two of sexual relation and that of signifying articulation. He rejects the Big Other, the fulcrum of the dialectic of the subject, disputing its existence which he consigns to fiction. He depreciates desire and promotes jouissance. He rejects Being, which is mere semblance. Henology, the doctrine of the One, here outclasses ontology, the theory of Being. What about the symbolic order? Nothing more than the reiteration of the One in the real. Hence the abandoning of graphs and topological surfaces in favour of knots made of rings of string, each of which is an unlinked One.Recall that Seminar XVIII sighed for a discourse that would not be semblance. Well, with Seminar XIX, we have an attempt at a discourse that would take its point of departure in the real. The radical thought of modern Uni-dividualism.'Jacques-Alain Miller

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Theory, France, Philosophy

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

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

[Peter Mathews · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jacques Lacan's 19th Seminar is titled "...or Worse," a name that he seems to think is very witty and funny, but that makes no sense to me. It doesn't seem to connect in any meaningful way to the themes he explores here. It is also worth noting that in this year, Lacan ran his usual seminar at the Sorbonne in conjunction with a series of talks on the topic "The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge" at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, the original location of his seminar. Jacques-Alain Miller includes those pertinent to "...or Worse" in this book, while the three other Sainte-Anne talks are collected in Talking to Brick Walls.

In his earlier years Lacan spent a lot of time talking about the interaction between subject and Other. One of the most crucial revisions he undertook of this idea occurred in Seminar XI, where he develops the concept of the "subject who is supposed to know." This concept allows him to show how the subject's desire is directed at an illusion. The analyst, for instance, is constructed as an imaginary master, a subject who is supposed to know, but this mastery is merely a product of the analysand's fantasy.

The ideas we get in Seminar XIX are essentially a very complicated reworking of this idea through two channels.

The first channel is that of Plato's Parmenides. Here, Plato considers the nature of the One and formulates some important caveats. Foremost among these is that the requirement that the Form/Idea be seen as something formal and absent. Think of it in the terms of Borges's story "On Exactitude in Science," which describes an empire where exact map-making is taken to such an extreme that they make a one-to-one scale map. The impracticality of such a move is what Plato seeks to avoid: if the One were in the world, it would fill it up completely, a redundant replica, like Borges's map. For that reason, the One can only be imagined - and thus, from Lacan's perspective, the One is a zero (it only exists formally) that is perceived as a one (because it is mistaken for something, despite its inexistence).

The second channel is the mathematical one, which is primarily drawn from Frege and set theory. Lacan harps on about how it is Frege who discovers the importance of the number zero to the sequence of integers. The number zero, and the empty set, both again show something that exists formally but that, at the same time, has no existence. The "one" is thus, in a sense, zero, so that there is "no relationship" between two terms as such: zero (formal one) plus one (actual one) always equals one.

If we put all this back into analytic relationship, then we see that it consists of a subject who mistakes the "formal one" of the analyst for reality - the analyst is actually a zero, a nothingness, that seems only to exist in a formal sense. This is becomes true in Lacanian theory for all subjective interactions, whereby the subject tries to connect with an Other that *appears* to be "one" but is actually zero. In fact, every "one" is in this situation: all ones are actually empty sets, entities that appear to exist only because they are formal markers of inexistence. That is why his formula "Y a de l'un" ("There is only one") has a double meaning: insofar as there is only the (formal) one, there are only zeroes.

While all of this theorizing and interplay between different fields is very clever in a formal sense, I don't really see the point of any of it. Lacan is not really doing anything amazingly new: the genuine revolution happened in Seminar XI, so that what he presents us with here is a highly formalized (and not very useful) restatement of those concepts. Still, it could have been worse...

[Holden Rasmussen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title, "...or worse", refers to an idea Lacan introduces in this seminar, but doesn't explicate fully until the XXth seminar: that there is no sexual relation as sex and sexuality are fabrications of language and social convention. The "...or worse" plays with the effect Lacan believes his thesis will have on people who want to cling to stable identities. "You could believe in a sexual relationship.... or worse." Lacan, obviously, does not actually believe this outcome is bad, but he thinks it's funny how outraged people will be. He seems to have hit a particularly rich vein of anger even from 40 years in the past. Just observe the anger and frustration of insecure young men and women today who flock to Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro for answers and the alleviation of anxiety in an age when old values are (excitingly) falling away. Lacan remains relevant today for what his insights, opaque as they are, could help us think through.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

After a third re-read I got a lot more out of it, which in a way is quite disheartening. When will I be finished with Lacan? Is his discourse truly non-all?



I’ve read this a second time and obviously I appreciated it more now I tried to really grasp the math - his elaboration on the One as constitutive exception of the All is quite ground breaking especially in light of the subsequent seminar with his even more ground breaking discovery, utilizing mathematical logic, of the pas-tout or non-all/not-whole/not-all.



This feels a bit like one of his lost seminars. He never quite establishes anything to hold onto, though he sure tries. I personally want to learn more of set theory and quantum theory, but I’m not quite sure where to go for this information.

[Jared]

You thought Lacan could get more confusing?? He covers math in this one....

[Jeroen · Rating 4 out of 5]

In dit seminarie werkt Lacan zijn formules van seksuering uit door een ondervraging van Parmenides van Plato enerzijds, en de verzamelingenleer (Cantor, Frege, Gödel,...) anderzijds. Het is geen eenvoudig seminarie maar het is de moeite om je er in te verdiepen. Van père, vader, naar pire, slechter. Hoe kan de wiskundige noodzaak van "vader" en "god" gedacht worden en hoe geraken we er van af? "voorbij de inconsistenties van alle dingen in de realiteit" is er zoiets dat buiten "alle dingen staat" of "er is geen enkele uitzondering en daarom hangt realiteit met haken en ogen aan elkaar en is ze onvolledig". Het reële is geen substantie (meer), maar een impasse van de formalisering. Die impasse is logisch. Het symbolische is eindig en van daar de naam "term", toch is er geen enkele reden om te stellen dat er buiten die inconsistente realiteit iets is. Er ex-sisteert iets, god doet dat, de oervader doet dat, toch is dit slechts logisch-mathematisch en geen substantie.

[Billie Pritchett]

It's difficult to know what Lacan is on about, but fake math aside, the practical upshot of all this is a simplification of the therapist's role with regard the patient. The therapist is supposed to pay attention to the patient at the level of the patient's speech and elude the patient's wanting to know what the therapist wants from him or her, else that knowledge would undermine the work of the therapy. The therapist need only track the patient's discourse and allow that discourse to speak back to the patient. Left unsaid is how the therapist ought to handle this, apart from appearing to keep him- or herself out of it. I guess that's part of the art of the practice, and why it's such a delicate relationship and difficult to do.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clarifying for the introduction of the formulas of sexuation, especially going into Seminar XX, with important considerations of Cantor, Gödel, et al., and suggestive elliptical commentary on queer and trans subjectivities. His critique of Freud on equating the activity/passivity pole with the masculinity/femininity one leaves much to ponder.

[Christopher Walters · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another decent seminar from Lacan. This one involves a discussion of the lack of ‘sexual relation’, Plato’s Parmenides, and a somewhat clumsy utilization of set theory. There are nuggets in here for sure but I wouldn’t call this one of the best seminars.

[Христо · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this Seminar twice. It is on one hand extremely technical, and on the other hand very broad. Quite lengthy in that it includes not just the Seminar itself, but several talks at St. Anne hospital which were held during the year of the Seminar. It's tough, it's a challenge, but it's definitely worth the effort. Someone can of course simply turn their attention to Seminar XX or the Names-of-the-Father collection for a much briefer foundational collection of Lacanian lectures. But for the enjoyer of Lacan, this Seminar is a must.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Witness the garden in which late Lacanian thought finally grows into its own and blossoms.