Jacques-Alain Miller - Böcker

"The unfulfilled and unsatisfied mother around whom the child ascends the upward slope of his narcissism is someone real. She is right there, and like all other unfulfilled creatures, she is in search of what she can devour, quaerens quem devoret. What the child once found as a means of quashing the symbolic unfulfilment is what he may possibly find across from him again as a wide-open maw [...] To be devoured is a grave danger that our fantasies reveal to us. We find it at the origin, and we find it again at this turn in the path where it yields us the essential form in which phobia presents. We find it again when we look at the fears of Little Hans [...] With the support of what I have shown you today, you will better see the relationships between phobia and perversion [...] I shall go so far as to say that you will interpret the case better than did Freud himself [...]"Extract from Chapter XI"[...] it's no accident that what has been perceived but dimly, yet perceived nevertheless, is that castration bears just as much relation to the mother as to the father. We can see in the description of the primordial situation how maternal castration implies for the child the possibility of devoration and biting. In relation to this anteriority of maternal castration, paternal castration is a substitute [...]"Extract from Chapter XXI"[In the case of little Hans] The initial transformation, which will prove decisive, is […] the transformation of the biting into the unscrewing of the bathtub, which is something utterly different, in particular for the relationship between the protagonists. Voraciously to bite the mother, as an act or an apprehension of her altogether natural signification, indeed to dread in return the notorious biting that is incarnated by the horse, is something quite different from unscrewing, from ousting, the mother, and mobilising her in this business, bringing her into the system as a whole, for this first time as a mobile element and, by like token, an element that is equivalent to all the rest."Extract from Chapter XXIII

Sollers once wrote that, to him, Claudel was first and foremost the man who wrote, "Paradise is around us at this very moment, all its forests attentive like a great orchestra that invisibly adores and implores. The whole invention of the Universe with its notes falling vertiginously one by one into the abyss where the wonders of our dimensions are written."Well, Lacan is, to me, the one who says in this Seminar, "We are all familiar with hell, it is everyday life."Is that the same thing? No, I don't think so. Here there is no adoration, no invisible orchestra, no vertigo or wonders. Let us begin by the end: Lacan "evacuated" from the rue d'Ulm along with his audience, not without resistance or an uproar. The episode was in all the papers. What had he done to deserve such a fate? He had spoken not only to psychoanalysts, but also to young people who were still fired up by the events of May 1968, who nevertheless accepted him as a master of discourse at the same time as they dreamt of subverting the university system. What did he tell them? That "Revolution" means returning to the same place. That knowledge now imposes its law on power and has become uncontrollable. That thought is censorship itself. He spoke to them about Marx, but also about Pascal's wager — which became in his hands a new version of the master/slave dialectic—not to mention the foundations of set theory. He moved on to a discussion of perversion, and models of hysteria and obsession. All of that is connected, scintillates, and captivates.Between the lines, the dialogue between Lacan and himself continues regarding the subject of jouissance and the relationship between jouissance and speech and language.

When I decided to explore the question of Witz, or wit, with you this year, I undertook a small enquiry. It will come as no surprise at all that I began by questioning a poet. This is a poet who introduces the dimension of an especially playful wit that runs through his work, as much in his prose as in more poetic forms, and which he brings into play even when he happens to be talking about mathematics, for he is also a mathematician. I am referring to Raymond Queneau. While we were exchanging our first remarks on the matter he told me a joke. It’s a joke about exams, about the university entrance exams, if you like. We have a candidate and we have an examiner. – “Tell me”, says the examiner, “about the battle of Marengo.”The candidate pauses for a moment, with a dreamy air. “The battle of Marengo...? Bodies everywhere! It’s terrible... Wounded everywhere! It’s horrible...”“But”, says the examiner, “Can’t you tell me anything more precise about this battle?”The candidate thinks for a moment, then replies, “A horse rears up on its hind legs and whinnies.”The examiner, surprised, seeks to test him a little further and says, “In that case, can you tell me about the battle of Fontenoy?”“Oh!” says the candidate, “a horse rears up on its hind legs and whinnies.” The examiner, strategically, asked the candidate to talk about the battle of Trafalgar.The candidate replies, “Dead everywhere! A blood bath.... Wounded everywhere! Hundreds of them....”“But my good man, can’t you tell me anything more precise about this battle?”“A horse...”  “Excuse me, I would have you note that the battle of Trafalgar is a naval battle.”“Whoah! Whoah!” says the candidate. “Back up, Neddy!” The value of this joke is, to my mind, that it enables us to decompose, I believe, what is at stake in a witticism. (Extract from Chapter VI)

The title is, at first glance, enigmatic. Clue: it concerns men and women—their most concrete, amorous, and sexual relations in everyday life, as well as in their dreams and fantasies. It has nothing to do with what biology studies under the heading of sexuality, of course. Must we leave this field to poetry, novels, and ideologies? Lacan attempts to provide a logic for it here—one that is quite cunning.In the sexual realm, it is not enough to be; one must also exhibit. That is true of animals. Ethology has detailed the display behavior that precedes and conditions mating: it is, as a rule, the male who signals his intentions to a potential partner by exhibiting shapes, colors, and postures. These imaginary signifiers constitute what we call semblance. Similar exhibitions have been noted in human beings, and have served as grist for satire. In order to serve as grist for science, we must clearly distinguish them from the real that they veil and manifest at the same time—that of jouissance.The latter is not the same for both sexes. Difficult to locate in women—and in fact, diffuse and unsituable—the real at stake for men is coordinated with a major semblance: the phallus. The upshot being that, as opposed to what commonsense would have us believe, men are slaves of the semblance they prop up, whereas, women are freer in this regard, and are also closer to the real; and that if a man is to sexually encounter a woman, he must put semblance to the test of the real, which is tantamount for him to the "moment of truth"; and that, if the phallus is suitable for signifying man as such—"every man"—feminine jouissance, because it is "not wholly" taken up in semblance, constitutes an objection to the universal.A logic is, therefore, possible, if one has the audacity to write the phallic function as follows, F(x), and to formalize the two distinct ways in which a subject can be sexualized by inscribing himself in that function as a variable. This approach requires us to go beyond the myths invented by Freud, those of the Oedipus complex and of the father of the primal horde (Totem and Taboo); to mobilize Aristotle, Peirce, and the theory of quantification; and to elucidate the true nature of writing, including both Chinese and Japanese.At the end of this trajectory, the reader will know how to elucidate Lacan's aphorism, "There's no such thing as a sexual relationship."—Jacques-Alain Miller

Taking us into and beyond the realm of Freudian psychoanalysis, Lacan examines the psychoses' inescapable connection to the symbolic process through which signifier is joined with signified. Lacan deftly navigates the ontological levels of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real to explain psychosis as "foreclosure," or rejection of the primordial signifier. Then, bridging the gap between the theoretical and the practical, Lacan discusses the implications for treatment. In these lectures on the psychoses, Lacan's renowned theory of metaphor and metonymy, along with the concept of the "quilting point," appears for the first time.

"Ten times, an elderly grey-haired man gets up on the stage. Ten times puffing and sighing. Ten times slowly tracing out strange multi-coloured arabesques that interweave, curling with the meanders of his speech, by turns fluid and uneasy. A whole crowd looks on, transfixed by this enigma-made-man, absorbing the ipse dixit and anticipating some illumination that is taking its time to appear.Non lucet. It’s shady in here, and the Théodores go hunting for their matches. Still, they say, cuicumque in sua arte perito credendum est, whosoever is expert in his art is to be lent credence. At what point is a person mad? The master himself poses the question.That was back in the day. Those were the mysteries of Paris forty years hence.A Dante clasping Virgil’s hand to be led through the circles of the Inferno, Lacan took the hand of James Joyce, the unreadable Irishman, and, in the wake of this slender Commander of the Faithless, made with heavy and faltering step onto the incandescent zone where symptomatic women and ravaging men burn and writhe.An equivocal troupe was in the struggling audience: his son-in-law; a dishevelled writer, young and just as unreadable back then; two dialoguing mathematicians; and a professor from Lyon vouching for the seriousness of the whole affair. A discreet Pasiphaë was being put to work backstage.Smirk then, my good fellows! Be my guest. Make fun of it all! That’s what our comic illusion is for. That way, you shall know nothing of what is happening right before your very eyes: the most carefully considered, the most lucid, and the most intrepid calling into question of the art that Freud invented, better known under its pseudonym: psychoanalysis."—Jacques-Alain Miller

When I decided to explore the question of Witz, or wit, with you this year, I undertook a small enquiry. It will come as no surprise at all that I began by questioning a poet. This is a poet who introduces the dimension of an especially playful wit that runs through his work, as much in his prose as in more poetic forms, and which he brings into play even when he happens to be talking about mathematics, for he is also a mathematician. I am referring to Raymond Queneau. While we were exchanging our first remarks on the matter he told me a joke. It’s a joke about exams, about the university entrance exams, if you like. We have a candidate and we have an examiner. – “Tell me”, says the examiner, “about the battle of Marengo.”The candidate pauses for a moment, with a dreamy air. “The battle of Marengo...? Bodies everywhere! It’s terrible... Wounded everywhere! It’s horrible...”“But”, says the examiner, “Can’t you tell me anything more precise about this battle?”The candidate thinks for a moment, then replies, “A horse rears up on its hind legs and whinnies.”The examiner, surprised, seeks to test him a little further and says, “In that case, can you tell me about the battle of Fontenoy?”“Oh!” says the candidate, “a horse rears up on its hind legs and whinnies.” The examiner, strategically, asked the candidate to talk about the battle of Trafalgar.The candidate replies, “Dead everywhere! A blood bath.... Wounded everywhere! Hundreds of them....”“But my good man, can’t you tell me anything more precise about this battle?”“A horse...”  “Excuse me, I would have you note that the battle of Trafalgar is a naval battle.”“Whoah! Whoah!” says the candidate. “Back up, Neddy!” The value of this joke is, to my mind, that it enables us to decompose, I believe, what is at stake in a witticism. (Extract from Chapter VI)

Often controversial, always inspired, Jacques Lacan here weighs theories of the relationship between the desire for love and the attainment of knowledge from such thinkers as Aristotle, Marx, and Freud. He leads us through mathematics, philosophy, religion, and, naturally, psychoanalysis into an entirely new way of interpreting the two most fundamental human drives. Long anticipated by English-speaking readers, this annotated translation presents Lacan's most sophisticated work on love and desire.

"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 Lautréamont; 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 ... or 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

The author's writings, and especially the seminars for which he has become famous, have provoked intense controversies in French analytic circles, requiring as they do a radical reappraisal of the legacy bequeathed by Freud. This volume is based on a year's seminar, which is of particular importance because he was addressing a larger, less speci

"Published in association with the Journal for Lacanian Studies (JLS), the Ex-tensions series of short books aims to address “extant tensions” affecting the broad field of Lacanian psychoanalysis, whether they originate within its own boundaries or outside its direct sphere of influence. The 6rst of these books is by the renowned Lacanian Jacques-Aloin Miller. On Wednesday 8 October 2003, the French National Assembly passed a bill intended to regulate, for the 6rst time, the practice of psychotherapy in France. Moved by Bernard Accoyer, the purpose of the legislation was to restrict the practice of psychotherapy to psychiatrists and clinical psychologists; it would effectively no longer be legal for any other practitioners, including psycho- analysts, to practice in the sphere of mental health. "

The French text was prepared by Jacques-Alain Miller in consultation with Jacques Lacan, from the transcriptions of the seminar.

This Seminar, together with Seminar I, which was published simultaneously, was worked on by both translators so as to produce uniformity in both terminology and style. Considerable attention was paid to the practices of previous translators of Lacan, in particular Anthony Wilden, Alan Sheridan, Stuart Schneiderman and Jacqueline Rose, in the hope that some consistency in the English rendition of Lacan can be achieved.

Lacan dedicates this seventh year of his famous seminar to the problematic role of ethics in psychoanalysis. Delving into the psychoanalyst's inevitable involvement with ethical questions and "the attraction of transgression," Lacan illuminates Freud's psychoanalytic work and its continued influence. Lacan explores the problem of sublimation, the paradox of jouissance, the essence of tragedy (a reading of Sophocle's Antigone), and the tragic dimension of analytic experience. His exploration leads us to startling insights on "the consequence of man's relationship to desire" and the conflicting judgments of ethics and analysis.

This volume is based on a year's seminar in which Dr. Lacan addressed a larger, less specialized audience than ever before, among whom he could not assume familiarity with his work. For his listeners then, and for his readers now, he wanted to "introduce a certain coherence into the major concepts on which psycho-analysis is based," namely, the unconscious, repetition, the transference, and the drive. Along the way he argues for a structural affinity between psychoanalysis and language, discusses the relation of psychoanalysis to religion, and reveals his particular stance on topics ranging from sexuality and death to alienation and repression. This book constitutes the essence of Dr. Lacan's sensibility.

In his famous seminar on ethics, Jacques Lacan uses this question as his departure point for a re-examination of Freud's work and the experience of psychoanalysis in relation to ethics. Delving into the psychoanalyst's inevitable involvement with ethical questions, Lacan clarifies many of his key concepts. During the seminar he discusses the problem of sublimation, the paradox of jouissance, the essence of tragedy, and the tragic dimension of analytical experience. One of the most influential French intellectuals of this century, Lacan is seen here at the height of his powers.

During the third year of his famous seminar, Jacques Lacan gives a concise definition of psychoanalysis: 'Psychoanalysis should be the science of language inhabited by the subject. From the Freudian point of view man is the subject captured and tortured by language.' Since psychosis is a special but emblematic case of language entrapment, Lacan devotes much of this year to grappling with distinctions between the neuroses and the psychoses. As he compared the two, relationships, symmetries, and contrasts emerge that enable him to erect a structure for psychosis.Freud's famous case of Daniel Paul Schreber is central to Lacan's analysis. In demonstrating the many ways that the psychotic is `inhabited, possessed by language', Lacan draws upon Schreber's own account of his psychosis and upon Freud's notes on this 'case of paranoia'. The analysis of language is both fascinating and enlightening.

"The unfulfilled and unsatisfied mother around whom the child ascends the upward slope of his narcissism is someone real. She is right there, and like all other unfulfilled creatures, she is in search of what she can devour, quaerens quem devoret. What the child once found as a means of quashing the symbolic unfulfilment is what he may possibly find across from him again as a wide-open maw [...] To be devoured is a grave danger that our fantasies reveal to us. We find it at the origin, and we find it again at this turn in the path where it yields us the essential form in which phobia presents. We find it again when we look at the fears of Little Hans [...] With the support of what I have shown you today, you will better see the relationships between phobia and perversion [...] I shall go so far as to say that you will interpret the case better than did Freud himself [...]"Extract from Chapter XI"[...] it's no accident that what has been perceived but dimly, yet perceived nevertheless, is that castration bears just as much relation to the mother as to the father. We can see in the description of the primordial situation how maternal castration implies for the child the possibility of devoration and biting. In relation to this anteriority of maternal castration, paternal castration is a substitute [...]"Extract from Chapter XXI"[In the case of little Hans] The initial transformation, which will prove decisive, is […] the transformation of the biting into the unscrewing of the bathtub, which is something utterly different, in particular for the relationship between the protagonists. Voraciously to bite the mother, as an act or an apprehension of her altogether natural signification, indeed to dread in return the notorious biting that is incarnated by the horse, is something quite different from unscrewing, from ousting, the mother, and mobilising her in this business, bringing her into the system as a whole, for this first time as a mobile element and, by like token, an element that is equivalent to all the rest."Extract from Chapter XXIII

“Alcibiades attempted to seduce Socrates, he wanted to make him, and in the most openly avowed way possible, into someone instrumental and subordinate to what? To the object of Alcibiades’ desire – ágalma, the good object.I would go even further. How can we analysts fail to recognize what is involved? He says quite clearly: Socrates has the good object in his stomach. Here Socrates is nothing but the envelope in which the object of desire is found.It is in order to clearly emphasize that he is nothing but this envelope that Alcibiades tries to show that Socrates is desire’s serf in his relations with Alcibiades, that Socrates is enslaved to Alcibiades by his desire. Although Alcibiades was aware that Socrates desired him, he wanted to see Socrates’ desire manifest itself in a sign, in order to know that the other – the object, ágalma – was at his mercy.Now, it is precisely because he failed in this undertaking that Alcibiades disgraces himself, and makes of his confession something that is so affectively laden. The daemon of Αἰδώς (Aidós), Shame, about which I spoke to you before in this context, is what intervenes here. This is what is violated here. The most shocking secret is unveiled before everyone; the ultimate mainspring of desire, which in love relations must always be more or less dissimulated, is revealed – its aim is the fall of the Other, A, into the other, a.”Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan is widely recognized as a key figure in the history of psychoanalysis and one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th Century. In Anxiety, now available for the first time in English, he explores the nature of anxiety, suggesting that it is not nostalgia for the object that causes anxiety but rather its imminence. In what was to be the last of his year-long seminars at Saint-Anne hospital, Lacan's 1962-63 lessons form the keystone to this classic phase of his teaching. Here we meet for the first time the notorious a in its oral, anal, scopic and vociferated guises, alongside Lacan’s exploration of the question of the 'analyst's desire'. Arriving at these concepts from a multitude of angles, Lacan leads his audience with great care through a range of recurring themes such as anxiety between jouissance and desire, counter-transference and interpretation, and the fantasy and its frame.This important volume, which forms Book X of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, will be of great interest to students and practitioners of psychoanalysis and to students and scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences, from literature and critical theory to sociology, psychology and gender studies.

During the third year of his famous seminar, Jacques Lacan gives a concise definition of psychoanalysis: 'Psychoanalysis should be the science of language inhabited by the subject. From the Freudian point of view man is the subject captured and tortured by language.' Since psychosis is a special but emblematic case of language entrapment, Lacan devotes much of this year to grappling with distinctions between the neuroses and the psychoses. As he compared the two, relationships, symmetries, and contrasts emerge that enable him to erect a structure for psychosis.Freud's famous case of Daniel Paul Schreber is central to Lacan's analysis. In demonstrating the many ways that the psychotic is `inhabited, possessed by language', Lacan draws upon Schreber's own account of his psychosis and upon Freud's notes on this 'case of paranoia'. The analysis of language is both fascinating and enlightening.

In his famous seminar on ethics, Jacques Lacan uses this question as his departure point for a re-examination of Freud's work and the experience of psychoanalysis in relation to ethics. Delving into the psychoanalyst's inevitable involvement with ethical questions, Lacan clarifies many of his key concepts. During the seminar he discusses the problem of sublimation, the paradox of jouissance, the essence of tragedy, and the tragic dimension of analytical experience. One of the most influential French intellectuals of this century, Lacan is seen here at the height of his powers.

What does Lacan show us? He shows us that desire is not a biological function; that it is not correlated with a natural object; and that its object is fantasized. Because of this, desire is extravagant. It cannot be grasped by those who might try to master it. It plays tricks on them. Yet if it is not recognized, it produces symptoms. In psychoanalysis, the goal is to interpret—that is, to read—the message regarding desire that is harbored within the symptom. Although desire upsets us, it also inspires us to invent artifices that can serve us as a compass. An animal species has a single natural compass. Human beings, on the other hand, have multiple compasses: signifying montages and discourses. They tell you what to do: how to think, how to enjoy, and how to reproduce. Yet each person's fantasy remains irreducible to shared ideals. Up until recently, all of our compasses, no matter how varied, pointed in the same direction: toward the Father. We considered the patriarch to be an anthropological invariant. His decline accelerated owing to increasing equality, the growth of capitalism, and the ever-greater domination of technology. We have reached the end of the Father Age. Another discourse is in the process of taking the former's place. It champions innovation over tradition; networks over hierarchies; the draw of the future over the weight of the past; femininity over virility. Where there had previously been a fixed order, transformational flows constantly push back any and all limits. Freud was a product of the Father Age. He did a great deal to save it. The Catholic Church finally realized this. Lacan followed the way paved by Freud, but it led him to posit that the father is a symptom. He demonstrates that here using Hamlet as an example. What people have latched onto about Lacan's work—his formalization of the Oedipus complex and his emphasis on the Name-of-the-Father—was merely his point of departure. Seminar VI already revises this: the Oedipus complex is not the only solution to desire, it is merely a normalized form thereof; it is, moreover, a pathogenic form; it does not exhaustively explain desire’s course. Hence the eulogy of perversion with which this seminar ends: Lacan views perversion here as a rebellion against the identifications that assure the maintenance of social routines. This Seminar predicted “the revamping of formally established conformisms and even their explosion.” We have reached that point. Lacan is talking about us.

What does Lacan show us? He shows us that desire is not a biological function; that it is not correlated with a natural object; and that its object is fantasized. Because of this, desire is extravagant. It cannot be grasped by those who might try to master it. It plays tricks on them. Yet if it is not recognized, it produces symptoms. In psychoanalysis, the goal is to interpret—that is, to read—the message regarding desire that is harbored within the symptom. Although desire upsets us, it also inspires us to invent artifices that can serve us as a compass. An animal species has a single natural compass. Human beings, on the other hand, have multiple compasses: signifying montages and discourses. They tell you what to do: how to think, how to enjoy, and how to reproduce. Yet each person's fantasy remains irreducible to shared ideals. Up until recently, all of our compasses, no matter how varied, pointed in the same direction: toward the Father. We considered the patriarch to be an anthropological invariant. His decline accelerated owing to increasing equality, the growth of capitalism, and the ever-greater domination of technology. We have reached the end of the Father Age. Another discourse is in the process of taking the former's place. It champions innovation over tradition; networks over hierarchies; the draw of the future over the weight of the past; femininity over virility. Where there had previously been a fixed order, transformational flows constantly push back any and all limits. Freud was a product of the Father Age. He did a great deal to save it. The Catholic Church finally realized this. Lacan followed the way paved by Freud, but it led him to posit that the father is a symptom. He demonstrates that here using Hamlet as an example. What people have latched onto about Lacan's work—his formalization of the Oedipus complex and his emphasis on the Name-of-the-Father—was merely his point of departure. Seminar VI already revises this: the Oedipus complex is not the only solution to desire, it is merely a normalized form thereof; it is, moreover, a pathogenic form; it does not exhaustively explain desire’s course. Hence the eulogy of perversion with which this seminar ends: Lacan views perversion here as a rebellion against the identifications that assure the maintenance of social routines. This Seminar predicted “the revamping of formally established conformisms and even their explosion.” We have reached that point. Lacan is talking about us.

Jacques Lacan is widely recognized as a key figure in the history of psychoanalysis and one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th Century. In Anxiety, now available for the first time in English, he explores the nature of anxiety, suggesting that it is not nostalgia for the object that causes anxiety but rather its imminence. In what was to be the last of his year-long seminars at Saint-Anne hospital, Lacan's 1962-63 lessons form the keystone to this classic phase of his teaching. Here we meet for the first time the notorious a in its oral, anal, scopic and vociferated guises, alongside Lacan’s exploration of the question of the 'analyst's desire'. Arriving at these concepts from a multitude of angles, Lacan leads his audience with great care through a range of recurring themes such as anxiety between jouissance and desire, counter-transference and interpretation, and the fantasy and its frame.This important volume, which forms Book X of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, will be of great interest to students and practitioners of psychoanalysis and to students and scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences, from literature and critical theory to sociology, psychology and gender studies.

"Ten times, an elderly grey-haired man gets up on the stage. Ten times puffing and sighing. Ten times slowly tracing out strange multi-coloured arabesques that interweave, curling with the meanders of his speech, by turns fluid and uneasy. A whole crowd looks on, transfixed by this enigma-made-man, absorbing the ipse dixit and anticipating some illumination that is taking its time to appear.Non lucet. It’s shady in here, and the Théodores go hunting for their matches. Still, they say, cuicumque in sua arte perito credendum est, whosoever is expert in his art is to be lent credence. At what point is a person mad? The master himself poses the question.That was back in the day. Those were the mysteries of Paris forty years hence.A Dante clasping Virgil’s hand to be led through the circles of the Inferno, Lacan took the hand of James Joyce, the unreadable Irishman, and, in the wake of this slender Commander of the Faithless, made with heavy and faltering step onto the incandescent zone where symptomatic women and ravaging men burn and writhe.An equivocal troupe was in the struggling audience: his son-in-law; a dishevelled writer, young and just as unreadable back then; two dialoguing mathematicians; and a professor from Lyon vouching for the seriousness of the whole affair. A discreet Pasiphaë was being put to work backstage.Smirk then, my good fellows! Be my guest. Make fun of it all! That’s what our comic illusion is for. That way, you shall know nothing of what is happening right before your very eyes: the most carefully considered, the most lucid, and the most intrepid calling into question of the art that Freud invented, better known under its pseudonym: psychoanalysis."—Jacques-Alain Miller

Sollers once wrote that, to him, Claudel was first and foremost the man who wrote, "Paradise is around us at this very moment, all its forests attentive like a great orchestra that invisibly adores and implores. The whole invention of the Universe with its notes falling vertiginously one by one into the abyss where the wonders of our dimensions are written."Well, Lacan is, to me, the one who says in this Seminar, "We are all familiar with hell, it is everyday life."Is that the same thing? No, I don't think so. Here there is no adoration, no invisible orchestra, no vertigo or wonders. Let us begin by the end: Lacan "evacuated" from the rue d'Ulm along with his audience, not without resistance or an uproar. The episode was in all the papers. What had he done to deserve such a fate? He had spoken not only to psychoanalysts, but also to young people who were still fired up by the events of May 1968, who nevertheless accepted him as a master of discourse at the same time as they dreamt of subverting the university system. What did he tell them? That "Revolution" means returning to the same place. That knowledge now imposes its law on power and has become uncontrollable. That thought is censorship itself. He spoke to them about Marx, but also about Pascal's wager — which became in his hands a new version of the master/slave dialectic—not to mention the foundations of set theory. He moved on to a discussion of perversion, and models of hysteria and obsession. All of that is connected, scintillates, and captivates.Between the lines, the dialogue between Lacan and himself continues regarding the subject of jouissance and the relationship between jouissance and speech and language.

"Alcibiades attempted to seduce Socrates, he wanted to make him, and in the most openly avowed way possible, into someone instrumental and subordinate to what? To the object of Alcibiades's desire – ágalma, the good object.I would go even further. How can we analysts fail to recognize what is involved? He says quite clearly: Socrates has the good object in his stomach. Here Socrates is nothing but the envelope in which the object of desire is found.It is in order to clearly emphasize that he is nothing but this envelope that Alcibiades tries to show that Socrates is desire's serf in his relations with Alcibiades, that Socrates is enslaved to Alcibiades by his desire. Although Alcibiades was aware that Socrates desired him, he wanted to see Socrates's desire manifest itself in a sign, in order to know that the other – the object, ágalma – was at his mercy.Now, it is precisely because he failed in this undertaking that Alcibiades disgraces himself, and makes of his confession something that is so affectively laden. The daemon of Αἰδώς (Aidós), Shame, about which I spoke to you before in this context, is what intervenes here. This is what is violated here. The most shocking secret is unveiled before everyone; the ultimate mainspring of desire, which in love relations must always be more or less dissimulated, is revealed – its aim is the fall of the Other, A, into the other, a."Jacques Lacan

'Logic of the fantasy': the expression recurs throughout the Seminar as a leitmotif, yet not a single lesson is devoted to it; not even a briefly sustained development. Does this mean that the logic of the fantasy is here playing the role of some new-fangled mirage? No it doesn't, not if we can take on board how this logic is the very site at which Lacan's comments converge, which is what I have sought to indicate by entitling the final chapter 'The axiom of the fantasy'.It begins with him audaciously blending the mathematical Klein group and the Cartesian cogito, modified in such a way as to offer up the alternative, 'Either I am not, or I am not thinking'. On this basis, Lacan summarises the course of an analysis in four phases.A further mathematico-psychoanalytic blend: the sexual act is illuminated by the light of the Golden number. What ensues is that 'there is no sexual act', this being the first trace of what was to become a pons asinorum: 'there is no sexual relating'.The reader will also come across the invention of a 'value of jouissance', inspired by Marx, and will be surprised to see the big Other, the 'locus of speech', being newly defined as 'the body', the primordial locus of writing.A good many other gripping insights and constructions await this reader, if he is minded to follow the meandering, the stalling and the about-turns, along with advances and flashes of brilliance, an obstinate and profoundly honest thinking that, whenever it comes up against a stumbling block, never skirts around it but endeavours to turn it into a cornerstone.Jacques-Alain Miller