This is the beginning of what will be a longer and hopefully better integrated section of this website.
If you don't know who Jacques Lacan was, this page in its current form is not at all self-explanatory (sorry),
so you'd be better off on a less flagrantly Lacanian page,
such as this one, or even this one.
If you know Lacan only in terms of the male endowment = square root of negative one imbroglio,
then for all intents and purposes you DON'T know who Lacan was, and the same recommendation applies.
If you'd genuinely like to learn something about Lacan,
this FAQ page
from a Los Angeles Lacanian group is a decent, though not necessarily easy, place to start.
SOME NOTES ON JACQUES LACAN'S SEMINARSWhat has most confused the understanding of the progression of Lacan's seminars over the years is the idea that he mostly commented on Freud's texts during the first ten years, when he was speaking at Sainte Anne, before moving on to articulate his own, independent ideas thereafter. In one form or another most commentators repeat this misperception of the development of Lacan's thought. It seems to have acquired the status of common knowledge among Lacanians. The curious thing is that a careful reading of Lacan's seminars does not bear it out at all. While there may have been an officially assigned reading of Freud in each of the Sainte Anne seminars and not subsequently, this more likely reflected Lacan's reduced confidence in his new audience--larger, more diffuse, less psychoanalytic--and its willingness to delve into analytic texts than any basic change in his theoretical orientation. The penultimate Sainte Anne seminar, Seminar IX, for example, deals rather little with Freud's texts--considerably less than Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis), the first of the post-Sainte-Anne period, which, while it admittedly ranges far afield, is grounded in four concepts defined by their centrality in Freud's ouvre from the 1890s on. It's possible to discern a turn away from Freud within Lacan's seminars; actually, there are two such turns, both of them critical shifts in Lacan's teaching. But neither even roughly coincides with the 1964 restarting of his seminar at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, after his "excommunication" ended the Sainte Anne period. The first takes place in Seminar VII (VI is transitional). This is when Lacan does, indeed, break from a primary focus on Freud's texts, though they never cease to be frequently brought up, nor had they ever been an exclusive focus. It should be realized, though, that the fact that previously Lacan relied heavily on textual commentaries on Freud does not in the least mean he was only calling people's attention to Freud's ideas in this early period. As he explained in his memorable session of June 1, 1966 (Seminar XIII), his return to Freud had always been a rethinking of Freud. His rethinking would hereafter (from 1959 on) be conducted at a greater distance from Freudian texts. What is remarkable is for how long Lacan's main project remained this rethinking. His goal, in my view, was essentially a desubstantification of Freudian theory. Freud's thought was so startlingly new in his time, requiring so many innovations little supported by previous thought, that he can't be faulted overmuch for having made copious use of conceptual props--fancies he reified, substantified, made into solid things to be believed in, although they could never be observed or even detected in themselves. One example is the distinction between primary and secondary processes--something Lacan careful avoided using from an early date. It should not be thought that this is in any way a stupid distinction. On the contrary, it is extremely fruitful in Freud's work. There is, indeed, something quite Lacanian about it, for the differences Freud delineates between the two processes are very closely related to Lacan's dictum that the unconscious is structured like (but is not) a language; the secondary processes reflect language as we know it, while the primary processes are language-like and yet foreign to language. There is nonetheless a basic problem with Freud's distinction. As he presents it, a dream proceeds from dream thoughts to primary process to secondary process, at which point the dreamer remembers and verbalizes the dream. The dream thoughts are in fact directly recoverable through analysis. But what is never recovered is the intermediate form Freud's theorization requires them to take, after the primary proces works them over, but before the secondary process reworks them again. That must remain a purely hypothetical stage. Lacan's approach is not by any means to dismiss these hypotheses--conceptual props, as I called them earlier. Rather, he considers each a precious linchpin signalling a faultline within a valuable observation. Lacan tread very lightly around these delicate points until he could find a firmer support for the same weight. Only then did he remove them. What emerged as a result was a version of psychoanalytic theory that can genuinely be called a reinterpretation of Freud's. This is not to say, as Lacan sometimes suggested and has all too often been subsequently repeated, that his reinterpretations were simply bringing out the hidden meaning of Freud's texts. Nor is it to deny that Lacan made many new proposals not particularly connected to anything in Freudian theory. But it is to affirm that Lacan's driving aim was creating highly rigorous, Occam's-Razor-proof substitutes, preferably as formal as possible, for certain Freudian concepts--particularly those that seemed shakiest in their own right and yet clearly played a major structuring role in analytic theory. This reworking continued until very late in Lacan's productive life. In Seminars XVII and XVIII we see him wrestling with Freud's Oedipus complex, dividing the Oedipus myth from the Totem and Taboo myth and questioning both in a sharp tone on the verge of dismissive. What is there, Lacan asks, that would substantiate the connection Freud draws between Oedipus and the primal horde father, or indeed justify the primal horde father at all? And yet, in the end, Lacan was compelled once again to concede that Freud in a way was right; for in Seminar XIX he comes out with his four formulas of sexuation, one of which states that there exists a man who is outside the phallic law. This man is, precisely, Freud's primal horde father, reinterpreted in a form as far from mythic as one could imagine--as one of a pair of contradictory formulas in the most formal symbolism of modern mathematics, expressing the fundamental paradox of men (and juxtaposed with another pair of contradictory formulas that pertain to women). This is the last act, so far as I can tell, in Lacan's desubstantification of Freudian theory. It is no accident that the next year, his leitmotif is essentially, "Why am I still talking to you?"--that he raises this question at every turn, names the seminar Encore, and even tells his audience he had a dream the night before that none of them showed up, releasing him from the duty of having to speak. It is precisely this situation, not repeated before or after, of being at loose ends, reduced to a commentator on his own previously articulated concerns, that briefly turns Lacan into an oracle behind the podium, pushing his discourse towards the starlingly polyvalent quality, more typical of the analyst than the lecturer, at which so many readers have wondered. And at the end of the year, Lacan spells out that he might have given his last seminar. But in one session on Borromean rings late in the year he clearly broke new ground. It seems to have been this subject that revived his interest and brought him back. For all of his seminars from XXI onward would be concerned more and more heavily with his attempt to reinterpret the whole of psychoanalytic theory in terms of these rings and related constructs from the mathematics of knot theory. Instead of Freud's theory, it was his own 1953 epistemological break--the real, imaginary, and symbolic orders--that he now tried to formalize. It was a massively ambitious project that Lacan never finished getting off the ground, let alone completed. That is not to say that he made no progress, or that much cannot be gleaned from his late seminars. But it would be a fundamental misconstrual of the trajectory of his discourse in that period--really an underestimation of its audacity and scope--to deny that what he was aiming at went far beyond what he ever succeeded in elaborating. In his last attempt, in Seminar XXVI, to advance his theory, we do not find him sealing his discourse with final pearls of wisdom, but forcing a few stumbling steps down a road that stretches into a vast darkness before him. At one point in Seminar XXIII, he speaks of how he is now engaged in research, recalling the quite negative remarks he'd made about research in Seminar XI, when he'd spoken of it as a process of seeking, evoking Jesus', "You would not be seeking me if you had not already found me," and echoing Picasso's "I do not seek, I find." For the first time, Lacan had embarked upon a course that did not allow him to proceed by finding what was in front of him, but forced him to seek along an enormous predetermined loop the material that would give substance to his vision of a radically formalized psychoanalysis. Lacan was well aware of the primitive state of knot theory at the time--indeed, all the progress mathematicians made in the field up until 1978, when his output all but ceased, may be less than what they've accomplished since. And Lacan's aim was mind-bogglingly ambitious, even for him. Indeed, Einstein might have found himself in a similar situation had he waited to start work on his unified field theory until he was already in his seventies, as Lacan was then. But I see no foolish bravado in the attempt--only one more insistence on taking what Lacan saw as the next step ahead. And it would not surprise me greatly if some day, someone actually carries out something much like his last endeavor--very likely demonstrating in the process why the task simply could not be completed in the 1970s. THE POST SAINT-ANNE SEMINARSThere is indeed a major shift in Lacan’s discourse at the time of the excommunication, but it had little to do with Freud. Seminars XI-XIII constitute a transitional period between the intimate atmosphere of the first ten seminars and the mass address beginning with Seminar XIV, whose first session came the day after Ecrits hit the bookstores. Indeed, there are repeated references in the early stages of Seminar XIV to its surprising sales and the crowds now packing the auditorium. There is also an announcement early in that seminar that the experiement tried the previous two years, when Lacan had arranged some "closed" sessions in a small room with a few invitees and with several people usually giving prepared presentations, had failed and would not be continued. Lacan did in fact hold three of these sessions in Seminar XV, but the juxtaposition with the ever-expanding crowd in the open sessions must have created an increasing discordance within the social body of the audience. In any case, after the May 1968 strike brought that seminar to an abrupt close--and the subsequent betrayals of its promises inspired a still larger, and younger, crowd to come hear Lacan’s humbug-free message--he never attempted closed sessions again. By the time of Le Sinthome in the mid-seventies, the crowds had swollen to the point that making sure people could hear in the back was a constant issue. Lacan, a grumpy seventy-five, had little taste for shouting into the microphone--so little that he finally exclaimed to his audience, "Si vous n’entendez pas, foutez le camp!"--which could be roughly translated as, "If you can’t hear, get the fuck out of here!" |
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