Where Was Jacques Lacan in 1971 72

8/10/2019 Where Was Jacques Lacan in 1971 72

1/18

WHERE W AS JACQUES L ACA N IN 1971-72?

...ou pire and THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE PSYCHOANALYST

Cormac Gallagher

Introduction

In a recent review of an exhaustive study on The Smiths - a 1970'sband - the wr i te r remarks : This is not a book for anoraks - it's a book foranoraks with furry trims .

Something s imilar might be said about the texts I am going todiscuss in this paper - the seminar with the curious t i t le of ...ou -pire, andthe series of talks called The knowledge of the psychoanalyst. M a n yLacanians have gone to the i r graves , and many more wi l l , wi thout everha vin g ope ned the m . They ha ve not bee n officially e di ted or pu blish ed inFrench and so one has to search around to f ind unat tr ibuted pirate

edi t ions or those that have bee n pu t together for pr iv ate us e by differentassociations.

Our group at St Vincent 's spent the academic year 2002-2003translat ing and reading them fol lowing out a long-term project of makingavai lable at least a basic version of the Lacan seminars that have not beenofficially translated into English - so far our tally stands at thirteen.

...ou pire - the three dots at the begin ning are im po rta nt a nd theyare fol lowed by a conjunct ion and an adverb 'or worse ' - is the 19th inLacan's ser ies of annual seminars and he wil l eventual ly make i t tonu m be r tw enty s ix. H e talks m ore a nd mo re of the fact that he is reac hingthe end of his teaching career if not of his l ife and this is what pushes himall the more towards what Roudinesco cal ls ' the search for the absolute ' .This seminar fol lows Semblance and ant icipates Encore - which i s

Paper presented to the 10th ann ual congress of APPI, 15th November 2003.

1


2/18

nowadays probably his best known seminar in the English-speakingwo rld. Desp ite his protestations of tiredness he nevertheless manag es to

produce two more sessions than the previous year and adds to these aseries of seven talks which he called The knowledge o f the psychoanalyst.

Where was Lacan...?

Places seemed to be important to him at this stage. He had beg un

his teaching in 1953 at the psychiatric hospital, Sainte-Anne, had beenejected and moved to the Ecole Normale in 1964, and finally ended up inthe Law Faculty near the Pan theon in 1969. In the curren t year hecontinues his semina r in the Pan theo n. But he rejoices at the fact tha t he isalso able for the first time in almost a decade to return to the hospitalwhere he had begun his own psychiatric training nearly half a century

earlier. As he never ceases to rem ind his audienc e, a friend and classmatethere was Henri Ey, the most prominent French psychiatric author of hisepoch, with wh om he has maintained excellent relations but who m h e hasrepeatedly challenged on his 'organo -dyna mic' a pproac h to mental illness.In the first session at Sainte- Anne Lacan congratulates him for the'civilising' effect he has had on psych iatry d urin g his long career.

'If I have come back to speak at Sainte Anne' he says 'it was to speak topsychiatrists' and to help them to realise 'what specifies them as psychiatrists'.He was therefore aiming at quite a different audience to the literati andlogicians who thronged his seminar and on whom he was increasingly torely in the yea rs to com e. But from the very first session he realises thatthe trainee psychiatrists he wanted to talk to 'at an elementary level were ina 'crushing minority'. His habitua l followers ha d not been put off by thefew extra kilometres they had to travel and had swamped the intendedaudience. So as the year progressed th e fiction of a ne w audience began todisappear and the 'elementary' remarks he had intended to make at thehospital began to require a thorough knowledge of his previous seminarsand writings and really continued the work of the seminar.

2


3/18

Nevertheless, there is initially a distinct difference b etw een the w ay

he talks to his seminar and to the audience at Sainte-Anne. H e insists thatin both places he amuses himself making a rather facetious distinction:'What I explained the last time, is that serious amusements took place elsewhere,in a place where I have found shelter, and that for here I have reserved comicamusements../1 He also gently mocks the desire of his audiences forlectures on an occasion when Roman Jakobson fails to put in an

appearance: Because in truth I do not give them. As I said elsewhere veryseriously, I amuse myself.. . .2 And this is not just frivolity. Referring back tothe four discourses and in particular to the discourse of the analyst hesays:

This Si is precisely what I am trying, in so far as I am

speaking here, w hat I am trying to prod uce for you . As aresult ...I am at the place, the same one, and this is what iseduca tive about it, I am at the place of the analy sand .3

So he is using his listeners as analysts in an endless attem pt to prod uce themaster signifier as regards wh at concerns the analytic discourse.

Themes?

So how introduce this seminar and the accompanying talks andpersuade some braver souls to read and immerse themselves in them?After living with them for a year and a half it eventually dawned on methat they were texts - I use the word loosely - in which Lacan had madesome major developments in his treatment of the formulae of sexuation.In addition he ha d also introduced some new term s, signifiers, which w ereto play an important role in his remaining years and in the thinking andw riting of Lacanians ever since. Hence, I am go ing to organise wh at I

1

J. Lacan. ...Ow pire. Book IXX, seminar of 3rd February 7 2 , p. 3. Unp ublishedTranslation. C. Gallagher.2 ibid, session of 9th February 7 2 , p. 1.3 ibid, session of 8th March 7 2, p. 5.

3


4/18

have to say around a number of themes: The formulae ofsexuation - whichhad been introduced the previous year - the matheme (a new term that had

long been implicit in his teaching), lalangue (another neologism that lookedto the past and the future) and the Borromean Knot which he discovered b ychance in conjunction w ith his meditations on an enigmatic formula abouthuman relations that we will discuss later.

I should stress at the outset that I will be dealing with these themesonly at the level of the current seminar and talks. This is not an exercise

in 'final state' Lacanian doctrine but an attempt to clarify where he was ata very particular stage of his life and teaching when none of these themeswere fully elaborated . As usu al I will try to let Lacan speak for himselfand limit my contribution to some connecting commentary.

The formulae of sexuation

Before getting into the technicalities of these formulae let us lightenour approach by listening to Lacan's account of a contact with Simone deBeauvoir who might well be described as the high priestess of the moderndiscussion of the relationship between the sexes:

The functions described as 'sexuality' are defined,

inasmuch as we know something about it - we know a littleabout it even if only by experience - from the fact that thereare two sexes, wha tever m ay think a celebrated author w hoI ought to say, at one time, before she produced this bookcalled 'The second sex', believed, by reason of someorientation or other - for, in truth, I had not yet begun to

teach anything - believed she should consult me beforepro du cin g' The second sex'. She called m e on thetelephone to tell me that undoubtedly she needed myadvice to clarify what should be the psychoanalyticcontribution to her work . Since I poin ted o ut to her tha t itwould require indeed at least - this is a minimum, because

I have been speaking for 20 years and it is not by chance -

4


5/18

that it would require five of six months for me to

disentangle the question for her, she pointed out to me thatthere was no question, of course, that a book that wasalready in train should wait so long, the laws of literaryprod uction being such that it seemed to her that she shou ldrule out her having more than three or four conversationsw ith me. After which , I declined this hono ur.

The foundation of what I am, for some time, in the processof bringing forward for you, very precisely since last year,is very precisely the fact that there is no second sex. Thereis no second sex from the moment that language comes intofunction.4

So we are mo ving from the affirmation that there is no sexual relationsh ipto the statement that there is no second sex. Men and wo m en clearly existbut

The sexual relationsh ip... can no longer be written in term sof male essence and female essence.5

But, says Lacan, the new writing that he is producing on the basis ofFrege's quantification theory rather than Aristotle's propositional logicclaims to support the network of sexual relationships and offers a chanceof making a division between what is grounded as male and as female.He repeatedly writes on the board over these years a series of letters thatclaim to gro un d the non-relationship between the sexes. I have found noconven ient book on logic that spells out the constituents of these formu laein the way Lacan uses them . The Ox wh ich appe ars in all four elements isunlikely to appear in a book of logic since it is derived from Lacan's own

4 ibid, session of 3 rd M arch '72, p. 4.5 ibid, session of 3rd March '72, p . 10.

5


6/18

way of writing the phallic function as it emerges in psychoanalysis asdeno ting both the phallus and castration.

...O of x affirms that it is true...that what is referred to theregister of the sexual act, refers to the phallic function. Itis very precisely inasmuch as it is a matter of the phallicfunction...that something solicits us to ask them how thetw o pa rtne rs are different. And this is very precisely

inscribed by the formulae that I pu t on the bo ard.6

The other symbols derived from modern logic, first appeared in theprevious year's seminar and can be explained as follows: 3 - there exists;and V - all. These symbols can be seen as a reversed E and an upside -do w n A. W hen a line appears above either of these or above Ox they are

to be seen as negated - although Lacan is at pains to stress that thisnegation is not the same as the negation of traditional propositional logic.The formulae are arranged in pairs, two on the left and two on the right,two on the up per row and tw o on the lower and are laid out as follows:

3x . O x 3x . Ox

Vx .O x Vx . OxThough this is no t made explicit in the present sem inar it m ight be helpfulto refer to Dylan Evan 's explanation of them . The symbo ls on the left-hand side refer to the male, those on the right to the female. 3x . Ox (=there is at least one x that is not submitted to the phallic function);

Vx . Ox (= for all x, the phallic function is valid ); 3x . Ox (= the re is notone x that is not submitted to the phallic function); Vx . Ox (= for not allx, the phallic function is valid).

6 ibid, session of 3rd March '72, p. 11 .

6


7/18

I must confess that for us - and for me who actually attended these

presentations som e thirty years ago - these formulae remain very obscurebut fortunately a number of other speakers at this congress have beenwilling to tackle them h ead on. Let us conclude this section with one of theways in which Lacan tries to open up the relationship between the sexes inthis seminar by focussing on the notion of 'all m en' an d 'all w om en ':

...what is involved in the kinship of the universal with ouraffair? Namely, the statem ent by which objects ough t to bedivided into two 'alls' of an opposite equivalence... it is amatter of grounding this sexual relationship in universals:how is the universal 'Man' related to the universal'Woman'??

Far from being an abstraction this relationship occupies our whole earthlylife and it arises, he claims, because we are not just dogs and bitches butare possessed by language a nd are speaking beings - otherwise w e w ou ldnot have to bring the universal into play as people from Aristotle on havedone.

Having dealt with some of Lacan's developments of his formulae ofsexuation we can treat even more briefly the two new terms of mathemeand lalangue which he introduced this year, before ending with someconsiderations on the Borromean Knot.

Lalande, Laplanche, Lalangue

Saussure distinguished between parole, langue and langage [word,tongue, language] and Lacan now introduces a further refinement in ouruse of language in psychoanalysis which he will henceforth call lalangue.The best discussion I have seen on this is in Erik Porge's recent book8 but Iwill only quote a single phrase since it ranges well beyond the scope of

7 ibid, session of 3 rd March '72, p . 8.8 E. Porge. Jacques Lacan, un psychoanalyste, EKES Paris, 2000.

7


8/18

this ye ar's sem inar: Lalangue denotes the binding of the subject of desire to thetongue'.

Instead I will allow Lacan to tell how he almost stumbles on theterm. Reflecting on the early years of his teaching, what he now calls hisdiscourse, he says in his first talk at Sainte Anne:

I had begun it by saying 'the unconscious is structured likea lang uag e'. Someone found an extraordinary contraption:

the tw o chaps wh o could have best worked along this track,spun out this thread, were given a very nice job:Vocabulaire de la Philoso phic W hat am I saying,Vocabulaire de la Psychanalyse. You see the slip, hu h?An yw ay it 's as good as Lalande.

Lalangue, as I write it now - I have no blackboard - well,write lalangue in one word: that is how I will write it fromnow on. .. .1 did not say that the unconscious is stru cture dlike lalangue but is structured like a language, and I willcom e back to it later.

But when those responsible that I spoke about earlier werelaunched on the Vocabulaire de la Psychanalyse, it isobviously because I had put on the agenda the Saussurianterm lalangue which I repeat I will henceforth write as asingle word . And I will justify w hy. Well then , lalangu ehas nothing to do with any dictionary wh atsoever. Adictionary has to do with diction, namely, with poetry orwith rhetoric for exam ple. This is not noth ing , hu h? It goesfrom invention to persuasion, anyway it is very important.

Only, it is precisely not this aspect that is related to theunco nsciou s. Contrary to what I think, the mass of listenersthink, but that all the same a good number know already,

8


9/18

already know if they have l is tened to the few terms in

which I t r ied to make a passage to what I say about theunconscious: the unconscious is a matter first of all ofgr am m ar. It also ha s a l i tt le to do, a lot to do, ev ery thin g todo with repet i t ion, namely, the aspect that is qui te contraryto w ha t a diction ary is us ed for. So tha t i t w as a ra the rgood way to ensure tha t those who could have he lped me

at that t ime to follow m y trai l , w ere diverted. G ra m m arand repetit ion is a quite different aspect than the one that Ipinpointed earl ier as invent ion, which is not nothing ofcourse nor is pers uas ion. Co ntra ry to w ha t is , I do n ' t kn oww hy , s ti ll ver y wid es pre ad , the useful aspect in the funct ionof lalangue, the useful aspect for us psychoanalysts, for

those wh o ha ve to deal with the uncon scious, is logic .9

This is a valuable crit ique of one of the most consulted dictionariesof psychoanalysis which is often taken as a reliable guide toun de rst an din g Freu d and Lacan 's w ork . H is init ia l s l ip in ta lking abou t a'dict ionary of phi losophy' - the one best known in French, edi ted by

Andre Lalande - shows what he thinks of the 'dict ionary ofpsychoanalys is ' tha t had seduced away two of h is most promis ingcollaborators , Jean Lap lanche and J-B Pontal is . This is pe rh ap s hisclearest state m ent of w ha t he objects to in i t. I t m isin ter pre ts his bas ictenet that the unconscious is s t ructured l ike a language by focusing ondefini t ions rather than the grammar of the unconscious, which I take to

mean here the funct ions that Freud f i rs t isolated in connect ion with thedream-work, condensa t ion , d isp lacement e tc .One f inal quote from Lacan as he introduces this new term into his

discourse:

. . . if I say that I am talking about language, i t is because

what is a t s take are common features that can be

9 J. Lacan. op.cit. Session of 4t h Novemb er 7 1 , p . 4 .

9


10/18

encoun tered in lalangue. Lalangue itself is subject to a verygreat variety bu t there are nevertheless cons tants. The

language that is at stake, as I took the time, the care, thepain and the patience to articulate, is the language whereone can distinguish the code from the message, amongother things. W ithout this minima l distinction, there is noplace for speech. That is w hy, w hen I introd uce theseterms, I call them "Function and field of speech" - for

speech it is the function - "and of language" - for languageit is the field.10

The m atheme

Once again let us introduce this term in an anecdotal way as Lacandid to his audien ce at Sainte-Anne. He talks about a question that h adbeen p ut to him the prev ious evening by someone from his School:

It is one of the people who take their position a little toheart and who posed the following question which has ofcourse in my eyes the advantage of getting immediatelyinto the core of the subject. Everyone kn ow s that this rarelyhap pen s to me , I mak e my approach in pru den t steps. Thequestion that was put to me is the following: Is theincomprehension of Lacan a symptom ?11

First he distinguishes between his person and his discourse and then goeson to claim that his discourse was not all that misunderstood - otherwiseho w explain the large audiences that are attracted by it. But he goes alittle further and articulates an experience that is common to many of hislisteners and readers:

10 ibid, session of 4th November '71, p p. 6-7.11

ibid, session of 2nd

December '71, p . 1.

1


11/18

To take up anyway one of the la test test imonies that I

received about i t , about the way in which everyoneexpresses themselves, well then, despi te this sent iment ofnot really being with i t , nevertheless, I was told in thislatest test imony, that this helped the person in quest ion tof ind his bearings in his own ideas, to be i l luminated, to bei l lumina ted himself on a cer tain nu m be r of points .12

And th is leads h im on to a much more universa l phenomenon than notun de rs ta nd ing Lacan: ma them at ica l incomp rehens ion .

This is some thing tha t manifests itself there are people, andeven young people, because this is only of interest among

the young for whom th is d imension of mathemat ica lincom preh ensio n exists . Is i t a sym ptom ? I t is cer tain thatwhen one interests oneself in these subjects who manifestmathematical incomprehension, fair ly widespread s t i l l inour t ime, one has the feeling . . . that i t comes, in the subjectwho is the prey of mathematical incomprehension, f rom

something which is l ike a dissat isfact ion, a maladjustment ,something experienced precisely in the handling of thet ru th va lue .

And he goes on to ar t iculate something that cer tainly would be qui testar t l ing to educat ional psychologists and remedial teachers:

The subjects who are prey to mathematicalincomprehens ion expect more t ru th than the reduct ion tothese values that are called, at least in the first steps ofma them atics , ded uct iv e valu es. The ar t iculat ions that aredescribed as proofs seem to them to lack something which

12 ibid, p . 2.

11


12/18

is precisely at the level of a req uire m en t of tru th . Thisbivalency: true or false, certainly, and, let us say, not

unr easo nab ly, leaves the m baff led. ..13

This seems to me to be an attempt to align the analytic discourse, as Lacanun de rs ta nd s i t, w i th ma them atics . In other w ord s, the pract ice of f reeassociation is ba se d on the fact tha t one is no t look ing for tru th or m ea nin gbut ra ther on the a t tempt to support analysands in the ar t iculat ion of their

desire s. Psy cho ana lysis is quite close to w ha t Be rtrand Russell says ab ou tmathematics in that :

. . .mathematics is very precisely what busies i tse l f wi thsta tem ents ab out wh ich i t i s impossible to say wh eth er theyha ve a tru th , or eve n if they me an any thi ng at al l . Thisindeed is a rather extreme way of saying that al l the careprecisely that he has lavished on the r igour of put t ingmathematical deduct ion into shape, is something that isassuredly addressed to something qui te different to thetruth, but has an aspect that is al l the same not unrelated toit.14

All of this f inally b rin gs us in a rather ineleg ant w ay to the first me ntio n ofthe t e rm ma theme (matheme). A t least from the sem ina r Object Relations(1956-57) onwards Lacan7s teaching has been laced with mathematicalstyle formulae - the different intersecting points of the graph are a goodillus tratio n of this - $ D , $ o, etc. But n o w he in tro du ce s a signifier th atemphasises the central i ty of the mathematical in his teaching and whichwill be increasingly used in the years that remain of his teaching and inthe w or k of his successo rs. After rem ark ing that m ath em atic s is a f ield inw hich on e canno t wri te jus t an y old thing he goes on to ta lk abo ut :

13 ibid, p. 5.14

ibid.

12


13/18

. . . something that I have not yet made an al lusion to here,

nam ely, here at the sem inar, bu t tha t I bro ug ht forw ard insom e remark s where , no do ubt , som e of those w ho are herea t tende d, namely a t Sa in te A nn e , w he n I po sed thequest ion of what one could cal l a matheme, posi t ingalre ad y that it is the pivo tal po int of an y teach ing. In oth erwords that the only teaching is mathematical , the rest is a

joke.15

This gives us the l ink between the incomprehension of Lacan and theincomprehens ion of mathemat ics and the years to come wi l l see an evengreater s t ress on the mathematis ing of psychoanalysis in terms of knotsan d cha ins and top ology . But this is the year that wil l see the intro du ct ion

of the mathematical contr ivance that is perhaps the one most associatedwith the la ter Lacan - the Borromean knot.

I ask you to refuse m e . . / and the Borromean knot

At the beginning of the fifth session of his seminar - one at which

Jakobson was supposed to have de l ivered a lec ture - Lacan wrote on thebo ar d th is en igm at ic phrase :

' I ask youTo refuse

W hat I am offer ing y o u. . . because: i t ' s no t t h at /

Qe te demande/de me refuser/ce queje t'offre/parce que: c'est pas ga.)

W he re th is formula cam e from is ha rd to know , even tho ug h in the ed i t ionof ...ou pire p ro du ced b y Char les Merm an 's assoc ia t ion it i s accom paniedby a l i t t le table of Japanese words and their French t ranslat ion with a hinttha t this is an exam ple of the pol i teness req uire d in Japa n w he n offering a

gift.

15 ibid, session of 15th December '71, p. 3.

13


14/18

Lacan also relates i t to Wittgenstein and one of his best-known

proposi t ions:

Wit tgenste in , throughout his whole l i fe , wi th admirableascetic ism, s ta ted som ething tha t I cond ense as , w ha t onecan not say , we ll the n, let us not talk abou t it . A s a resu lt h ecould say almost nothing. . . . I t is very precisely, i t seems to

me, what one cannot speak about that i s a t s take when Idesignate by 'it is not that ' which just by itself justifies ade m an d such as ' to refuse wh at I am offer ing yo u ' . A ndnever theless there is something that may be tangible toev ery bo dy , i t is ind eed this ' i t 's no t tha t ' . W e areconfron ted w ith i t at every ins tant of ou r existence.1 6

Lacan discusse s this 'I ask yo u etc ' - w hich h e describes as a kn ot - at som elength, but following such a discussion would take us too far afield.Instead let us return to his discovery of the importance of the Borromeanknot in unravell ing i t :

A s t range thing, whi le I was quest ioning myselflast even ing abo ut the wa y I w ou ld prese nt that toyou today . . . i t happened, whi le dining with acharm ing pe rso n w ho is following M onsieu rGuilbaud's classes that , l ike a r ing on a f inger, Iw as presen ted w i th someth ing tha t I am no w goingto , that I am going to show you, something whichis nothing less, i t appears, I learnt last evening,than the coat of arms of the Borromeans.

16

ibid, session of 9th

Februa ry '72, p. 9.

GO

14


15/18

It needs a little care, and that is why I am taking it. And

there you are You can redo it, you did not bring anystring? You can redo it w ith pieces of string.17

And he encourages his audience to experiment with it and emphasises theun us ua l features it emb odies:

It is enough then for you to cut one of them, for the twoothers, even though they seem to be knotted togetherexactly like in the case of what you know well, namely, therings of the Olympic Games, is that not so, and which fortheir part continue to hold together when one of them hasgone. Well as rega rds this, it's finished It is som ething

that all the same is interesting, because you m ust remem berthat when I spoke about a signifying chain, I alwaysimplied this concatenation.18

And he finally goes on to relate this experiment to the central element inhis theory, the o-object.

It is clear that in this knot that I put before you today,demand, refusal and offer, only take on their sense eachfrom the other, but that what results from this knot as Itried to u nk no t it for you, or rath er, to take on the test of itsunknotting, to tell you, to show you that it never holds,

holds up in two's by itself that this is the foundation, theroo t, of w ha t is invo lved in the little o-object.19

17 ibid, p . 12.is ibid , p . 13.19 ibid, p . 14.

15


16/18

This notion of the importance of the chain of three is taken up when hereturns to Sainte-Anne the fol lowing week. This meri ts a ra ther lengthy

quote since i t l inks the Borromean knot to the fundamentals ofpsycho analyt ic discourse an d includes an exchang e with a naiv e l is tener:

I spoke in shor t about th is th ing that I summarised in theBo rrom ean kno t . I m ea n a chain of three , wh ich is suc h th atby detaching one of the r ings from this chain, the other two

cann ot ho ld toge ther for a single instant . From w ha t do estha t arise? I am forced to exp lain it to yo u, since after all Iam not sure that put forward, qui te s imply, in a crude waylike that it is enough for all of you.

This means a quest ion about what is the condi t ion of thediscourse of the unconscious , i t means a quest ion posedabout what language is . In effect , this is a question that hasno t be en sett led. La ng ua ge ou gh t to be tackled in i tsgrammar, in which case - this is certain - i t relates to atopology.. .

X: What is a topology?

Lacan: W hat is a topology? W hat a nice pers on Atopology is something that has a mathematical def ini t ion.Topology is something that is tackled first of al l by non-metrical relat ionships, by relat ionships that can be put outof sha pe . I t is pro pe rly s pea kin g the case for these sort offlexible circles that constitute my:

I ASK YOUTO REFUSE

WHAT I AM OFFERING YOU.

16


17/18

Each one is something c losed and flexible and which onlyh o l d s up by being l inked to the o thers . N oth ing can besus ta ined all by itself. This topolog y, by r eason of itsmathemat ica l inser t ion , is l inked to re la t ionships - thisprecisely is w h a t my l as t seminar demonst ra ted - is l inkedto relat ionships of pu re s ignificance. N am ely , tha t it is in sofa r as these three te rms are th ree tha t we see tha t the

presence of the third establ ishes a re la t ion be tween theother two. This is w h a t is m e a n t by the Borrom ean knot.20

Conclus ion

In th e f inal seminar Lacan rules out any ques t ion of p r o v i d i n g a

s u m m a r y of the yea r ' s work - a l though he wil l la ter provide hi s usualdense account of it for th Annuaire de I Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudesunder whose ausp ices he was pe rmi t t ed to teach at the Sorbonne.

Since this paper is a l ready something of a s u m m a r y, a l t h o u g h Iwould p re fe r, as in p rev ious yea r s to describe it as a col lage, ourconclusion can be ve ry brief. First : even th ou gh ...ou pire and the

accom pany ing t a lks are not all tha t wel l kn ow n and are o v e r s h a d o w e d bythe ear l ier seminar on the four discourses and the subsequen t Encore, Ith ink we have seen enough to say tha t they in t roduce a n u m b e r ofsignifiers that are i m p o r t a n t in Lacan ' s la te r work and con t inue toinfluence the w r i t ing and pract ice of those who succeeded him. Secondly,I th ink they bear wi tness to th is man 's unf lagging a t tempts to art iculate

the relevance of F reud to the con tempora ry deba tes on the hu m an subjec ta n d how the d i scovery of the unconsc ious i l luminated the w o r k of earlierthinkers , f rom Socrates on who took ser iously the d i l e m m a s of ourexistence. Final ly, they sho w his pass ion to revi tal ise psychiatry andpsychoana lys i s and to m a k e k n o w n to those in the genera l publ ic whohave ears to hea r, h is teaching on the psyc hoan alyt ic disc ourse.

20 ibid, session of 3rd March '72, pp . 1-2.

17


18/18

Address for Correspondence: School of Psychotherapy

St Vincent s HospitalElm ParkDublin 4Ireland

18

Documents

Where Was Jacques Lacan in 1971 72