Series: The Seminar Of The NUS Psychoanalysis Society - Seminar IV: Devious Lacan?
"Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real."
This seminar is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on psychoanalysis, covering the works of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud.
The Nostomodernist project is a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history.
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Seminar IV: Devious Lacan? is to be delivered by Thomas J. Pellarin on Sunday, 30th October 2022 in the Philosophy Graduates Room at the National University of Singapore (NUS).
Introduction to Seminar IV
We have arrived at the last seminar of the first series of The Seminar Of The NUS Psychoanalysis Society. In the initial syllabus for Seminar IV, I wanted to include an explanation of how Schema L and the Graph of Sexuation operate in Lacanian psychoanalysis, considering how Seminar IV—as the final seminar—is meant to both engage with the advanced concepts of Lacan as well as integrate the syllabus of the previous seminars under these advanced concepts, such as the diagrams which totalise the relations and discourses in the Registers of the Imaginary, Symbolic and the Real, but which necessarily have to be prepared for first.
As always, the aim was to satisfy this preparation by instilling a positive and welcoming attitude towards Lacan, such that if I threw a complex and esoteric diagram at you, there would be a familiarity to its process, as if you were meeting an old friend attempting to tell you a new story, instead of a bewildering exercise in listening to a foreign language, which would make the discussion meaningless in effect.
To better illustrate this sentiment, I will quote from the mouth of Lacan himself, when he wrote in Seminar XI, that “The ambiguity that persists in the question as to what in psycho-analysis is or is not reducible to science can be explained if we realize to what extent analysis implies, in effect, a beyond of science—in the modern sense of Science itself, whose status in the Cartesian departure I have tried to demonstrate. If measured against science understood in this sense, psycho-analysis might be reduced to the rank of something with whose forms and history it so often suggests an analogy—namely, a church and, therefore, a religion. The only way to approach this problem is on the basis of the following—that, among the modes at man's disposal for posing the question of his existence in the world, and beyond, religion, as a mode of subsistence of the subject who interrogates himself; is to be distinguished by a dimension that is proper to it, and which is struck by a kind of oblivion. In every religion that deserves the name, there is in fact an essential dimension reserved for something operational, known as a sacrament. […] But psycho-analysis is not a religion. It proceeds from the same status as Science itself. It is engaged in the central lack in which the subject experiences himself as desire. It even has a medial, chance status, in the gap opened up at the centre of the dialectic of the subject and the Other. It has nothing to forget, for it implies no recognition of any substance on which it claims to operate, even that of sexuality.”
In essence, in psychoanalysis there is a capturing of that which cannot be captured by language, or rather there is an attempt to capture, in a roundabout way, that which cannot be expressed directly in language, and yet, by explicating it through language, we find an approximate or mythological sense of what cannot be expressed that therefore, given our sense of language as the structure of our unconscious, succeeds in expressing some truth in its inability to present truth to us. Another way to imagine it: in exploding the truth, we can recognise a sense of it through the shards of truth we sieve through on the floor.
Between Seminar III and IV, I conducted an intermediate seminar, known as Seminar S—because the system of Roman Numerals lacks a decimal system, and therefore, I substituted the notion of half with the small Roman bronze coin known as the Semis, as represented by S and which was valued at half the value of an As, or the bronze coins of the Roman Republic—and in this two-hour long seminar, I condensed the content of three seminars and triumphed with a dry throat and a fatigued brain the feeling of beginning to understand Lacan beyond the threshold of the theoretical.
In other words, I am grateful for those who attended the seminars, and I am likewise grateful for the opportunity I granted myself out of courage and transference to desire to deliver them, because the results which I have gained out of their difficulty are indispensable to me and to the ideal I wish to be.
It said that you either read Lacan for several days or several years; is it a self-fulfilling prophecy to even ask this question, given that I already know—and will know retroactively—which one is the case?
Guiding Questions
What is the Graph of Desire?
What is the Elementary Cell of the Graph of Desire?
What is the intermediate Graph of Desire?
What is the complete Graph of Desire?
What are the Four Discourses?
What is the Discourse of the Master?
What is the Discourse of the Hysteric?
What is the Discourse of the Analyst?
What is the Discourse of the University?
What is the Discourse of the Capitalist?
Seminar Notes
Thank you for attending this last Sunday of the seminar series, because with Seminar IV, we have come to the end of the first set of psychoanalysis seminars. I have no more time this semester to continue them, and I doubt that anyone would show up after this week anyways.
We may continue next semester with the second set of four seminars on Freud, which is crucial to understanding Lacan, because Freud acts as the base from which Lacan rehabilitates and develops his thoughts, as well as borrows outright from.
But this seminar today is the most difficult; if throughout the other seminars, I have tried to inculcate an attitude towards Lacan, which makes him readable, approachable and even friendly because of what he shows you and what I have tried to demystify, then today I have to mystify him again, insofar as when you consider the symbols and diagrams he develops throughout his career and seminars, there is a mythic element which you have to work through to understand them.
In case these are the final four seminars of this series, I will begin this last seminar with a guide on how to pursue Lacan on your own. Two essential resources for studying Lacan are his Ecrits, or collected writings up to 1966, as edited by his son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, as well as his Seminar, also edited by Miller, which range from Seminar I to Seminar XXVII, delivered annually from 1953 to 1980, with each seminar consisting of more than a dozen lessons on psychoanalytic theories that evolve from his early period from Seminars I to X to the middle period of Seminars XI to XVI and the later period of Seminars XVII to XXVII.
This historical grouping is based on the location of his seminars, such that his early seminars are centered upon their location within the Centre Hospitalier Sainte-Anne 1953 to 1963, before his moving to the École Normale Supérieure in his middle period from 1964 to 1969 and then his later period with the Place du Panthéon from 1969 until his death at age 80 in 1981.
It will take some time to introduce the chronology of the seminars, but I believe it will be worthwhile to briefly outline the content of each period, although I should note that not all of the seminars are published in English by either Norton or Polity, so if you wish to read them yourself, you may wish to depend on the missing translations provided by Cormac Gallagher.
The early period of Lacan is defined by his exploration and introduction of semiotics, the symbolic, the metonymy, the Other, the Schema L, the concept of jouissance, the Graphs of Desire, the Phallic symbol Φ, the Barred Subject $, the Other, the Name-of-the-father, the specular image and the Object a to a new school of psychoanalysis.
To keep it brief, his middle period is witness to the objet petit a, the four discourses of the Master, the Hysteric, the Analyst and the University; in his late period, he refines and introduces the Graph of Sexuation, hainamoration, the Borromean Knot and so on.
Over time, there is an increased use of algebra and Lacan comes into his own, less as a successor of Freud—albeit Freud is essential to Lacan—and more as an operator of a distinct field of Lacanian psychoanalysis. However, it would be misleading to say that each of these concepts, in their respective seminars, are introduced for the very first time in every case; which is to say, these concepts are found in Lacan throughout and they are developed each year, covering the same mythic subjects at times and exploring new metaphors in other years.
To read Lacan is therefore to read the story of his thoughts in an incremental fashion, which is appreciated over time, in the witnessing of years, such that there is rarely a big jump with Lacan, but a series of small and incredible jumps which, at the end of his career, become a massive canyon to trespass and explore.
We will now proceed into the discussion of the Graph of Desire. Early in his career, Lacan was interested in borrowing the signifiers of topological and mathematics to express in symbolic terms a type of discourse or social bond, which he believed operated both in and outside of language, because which could nevertheless be signified or stood-in for with a symbolic relation. In Seminar V, he introduces the Graphs of Desire as a means to show the nature and process of analysis, given that in analysis, we explore the relation of the subject and desire to its articulation by signifiers.
However, as we will observe with the first stage of the Graph, or the Elementary Cell, this articulation is barred or divided by nature, because of the subjectivity which situates the subject as an impossible search for lost unity. Unlike psychology, the aim of psychoanalysis can be said to resemble a coming-to-terms with the disunity of the self, such that there is no process by which we might unify the self as subject, except by symbolic illusion or allusion, and this Graph illustrates that, because it begins with the unconscious, represented by Δ, as a point of entry that immediately passes through the diachronic vector of the signifying chain, or that which Lacan calls the Symbolic Register.
I reiterate that this seminar will be the most difficult to engage with; it will require you to pay attention to the general explanations I have given in the previous seminars, and that you attempt to apply them here, when we see them represented graphically.
The unconscious subject, who at this point, is not even a subject but a becoming-subject, passes through the signifying chain at the point of birth, such that from birth, we are always divided as a subject by the vector of the signifier and the signified, as represented here by S and S' respectively.
As explained in Seminar II, the signifying chain is the operational structure of language: we only understand the meaning of a sentence upon its completion, such that the beginning of the signifier is vague but universal—it could go anywhere—but becomes a definitive signification of a concept upon its encounter with S' to complete the sentence, which is why the unconscious Δ passes closer to S' than S, because there is a retroactive act of interpretation or explanation; in other words, the unconscious can only explain itself to itself once it is too late, or once the meaning is already found, and therefore we have an explanation for the nature of the conscious or the Ego, or that which is necessarily Barred Subject $ by language from the outset, as being divided by language and always expressing itself through something else—the Other.
In other words, our unconscious self is different from our conscious self; there is something which is lost in translation, or lost as a necessity of translation, such that it is too late to know ourselves before language, given that to express ourselves, we have already been coopted by language, and we have become split as a subject and an objectified or symbolised subject. For instance, when we introduce ourselves, and say that my name is so-and-so, this so-and-so is a symbolic stand-in for what I am: it is an objectification for something which cannot be seen, and which therefore arises to the sight of the Other by its signification of the Other—the language we share—such that you are not speaking to me, but to a comprehensible me, which is therefore not the complete me but a deliberate and possibly feeble misrepresentation.
In the second graph, or the first of two intermediate graphs, Lacan shifts the Barred Subject $ to the position of the unconscious Δ, and replaces the Signified with the Voice. The relation or vector between the Signified and the Voice—or Voix—is that of the Symbolic Register, or the same relation as the Elementary Cell; its nature is to represent the function of speech, or the process of misrepresentation as per the prior graph which we take as truth, which consists of words and therefore signifiers.
For instance, when someone is sad, they will declare that they are sad—through their voice, they will vocalise their sadness—but what is the nature or structure of this emotion? It is through language! The feeling of sadness is articulated as a declaration, or a truth, which we assume to be true to ourselves, but especially those of Others, such that if someone tells us about their sadness, we will believe them. Why? There is a trust in language—that language tells us the truth! However, what is the inherent authority of this language or this phrase or word? What in of itself signifies to us that this means what it means?
This is what Lacan tries to illustrate here: the Barred Subject $ passes through the signifying chain once again, through a process which now mediates what we say or express as being true, and therefore, transforms the Other, represented by A, as a function of the signifier in language, now S(A), such that the Other—the Other of our shared culture, symbols and therefore the language game we play so as to become mutually-comprehensible to each Other, even though, in of itself there is a hollowness to the signifiers without a game and thus rules to play by—is now symbolised in something other than the Real or the real world, or as something now as signified in language as the Ego-Ideal /(A).
The Ego-Ideal is essentially the conscience of consciousness, or that self-regulating signification of the Other which posits that whatever it says is true, but we must acknowledge that the nature of this signification to reality—its quality of being true—is dependent on an essentially false and imaginary relation, because nothing in the signifier itself gives meaning except that which we understand as the Other—as culture, language games or rules—and therefore the voice as either belonging to ourselves or Others is an ideal or an Ego-Ideal /(A).
This internal voice of conscience, which takes the structure of language, also shares its form with the Name-of-the-Father, or the Big Other, or the Law: it is essentially the internalisation of the process of signification which underscores the subject and its relation within language, which is always an Other thus causing a division or splitting—spaltung—in the self when it passes through the signifying chain.
For instance, when you cross the street, you turn to the streetlight to observe whether it is safe to cross. There is nothing inherent in the streetlight itself, as either red or green, which signifies to you its meaning as some Other; instead, it is you who creates a signification of the Other within it, or thus who identifies it as an Other—as a rule—or as authority which must be obeyed because it conveys some truth as a function of language.
The Barred Subject $ thus internalises the truth of the Voice through the signifying chain, which thereof mediates as an internalisation of the Other A as a function of the Other S(A) as signifier, to signify a false world or representation of the Real through language, which necessarily must be considered as true and real as a function of the splitting nature of language, such that we will surrender to its authority or truth, because we now signify it as the Big Other, or that truth which we must accede to because of its nature in language, and hence find our place as symbolically-represented by how the Other imposes itself onto us—we who plays its games.
There is a short circuit in this graph; there is another function of discourse, or another vector, which skips the passing through the Symbolic Order, and instead goes straight to the Ego Ideal I(A): the Imaginary Order, or the Ideal Ego i(a), or the very goal and process, which first occurs at the Mirror Stage, and henceforth creates a need or desire to become whole or ideal again, and thus, gives us the function of language as one means to achieve this.
As we introduced in Seminar I, the Mirror Stage occurs at the realisation of the specular image of the other in the mirror, such that we observe an ideal and complete version of ourselves, which is different from the messiness of the experience we feel inside, that is seemingly-absent from the complete image in front of us. We therefore chase this ideal for the rest of our lives as the nature of an impossible object of desire, so as to reduce the gap between the subject of I and the object of you—who I see in the mirror—deferring to the function of metonymy along the signifying chain, such that if only I could attain this or become this desire, I would become ideal again.
When we return to the short-circuit on the graph, this Ideal Ego i(a) is mediated through the Mirror Stage to become the Subjective Ego (moi) m—even though no real splitting has occurred here as with language or the Symbolic Register—and hence, this occurs at the level of the Imaginary Register.
If the Ego Ideal I(A) is the imposition of a false truth by the function of the Other in language, then the Ideal Ego i(a) is the imposition of an ideal and thus unnecessary truth by the function of the other of ourselves in the mirror, such that the commingling of the two occurs at the level of the Ego Ideal I(A), or where the Imaginary believes that it can become ideal if it participates in the Symbolic Register.
We proceed into the third graph, or the second of the intermediate Graphs of Desire, wherein we find a retaining of the structure of second graph, or the first of the intermediate Graphs of Desire, but with the addition of two vectors, that of the Barred Subject $ and the objet petit a, out of the desire d which originates from the path of unconscious Δ to the Other A to the relation $ ♢ a, expressed as the famous question of che voui? or what do you want?
In previous seminars, I have used the terms need and desire interchangeably, but here we find a framework which demands a distinction between them: that need originates at the point of the unconscious Δ as a necessity without language, and becomes reified by the Other A of language as it passes through the signifying change, thus transforming by a process of signification into a desire, or that which is removed from the biological necessity of need, and which is oriented as the desire of the Other, or that which is mediated by the signifier within the Symbolic Order as the Other—that which could fulfill our Lack, our objet petit a or the impossible object of desire which could make us ideal once more.
For example, Lacan uses the example of a child who demands the Love of their mother; however, the mother who Loves, having signified to them the object of desire which could fulfill their Lack, necessarily Loves someone else: the Father. At this point, there is a realisation for the child that the Love of their mother cannot fulfill their Lack—there is always not enough. Hence, the child defers or transfers its desires along the function of metonymy to a symbolic substitute onto Other objects, in the manner of fantasy, which equivalently could fulfill that desire, even though at the heart of the matter, this is an impossible and continuous shifting of desire forever, because nothing can satisfy our desires and what we believe to be able to satisfy such desire is a symptom of a neurosis, as covered up by the process of signification or the signifier functioning as the Other.
In another example, the signifier functioning as the Other could be the possession of material wealth, such that the signifier of wealth functions as the Other which could fulfill us; it is also the Other which we believe could desire us, such that desire is the desire of the Other: the dual-structure of wanting to be desired by the Other and therefore to desire the desire which the Other tells us we ought to desire, but which it is in fact what we, as Barred Subjects $, have created as a signification in a mythological world of language.
But to desire the desire of the Other reveals something to us: if it we who Lack something, and therefore, attempt to console our Lack and therefore our desire with a fantasy of the desires of the Other, then it is the Other too who is Lacking in something, such that they could desire us as well.
This leads us into the fourth and complete Graph of Desire, mediating between all reams of the Barred Subject $ and the function of the signifier as the Other and the relation between this function and the Barred Subject $ towards desire d—where we note that the desire of the Other reveals that the Other has Lack too—and closing the loop of itself is the Lack of the Other S(A) and its retroactive relation to Drive $ ♢ D along the diachronic vector of jouissance into castration -φ, with the former now answering the critical question of che voui? because what we desire is the desire or Lack of the Other.
What the Lack of the Other reveals to us is something about ourselves: that the Cartesian cogito of I think is insufficient to reveal the aetiology of ourselves to ourselves—with aetiology being the term Lacan uses in reference to knowledge of our original nature—such that there is an attempt at thinking or cogitating enough to know the nature of the self, but this process is always interfered with to the point of failure because of the nature of the subject or self in the Real, or that which we cannot know nor explain directly as human beings.
Recall here the Saussurean algorithm: that the relation between Signifier and Signifier is the prioritisation of the Signifier over the Signified, or the hierarchy of the S over the s, such that the spoken word or the phonological and thus acoustic sound is what we first consider over the thought it generates with regards to how language overtakes the meaning of our thoughts when we express them.
Consider that the evocation of the phrase, I am sad, cannot convey the phenomenological experience of sadness itself, much less the particular instance of sadness as you experience as qualia; instead, there is something which is lost in translation, or something which is overtaken by language or the word, which stands-in symbolically for that which cannot be expressed in language as anything but as an Other, or as a signifier functioning as an Other.
Reverting to the relation of the Lack of the Other S(A), this Other which is the functioning relation of our expression as need now transformed into desire is the signification of that which we Lack, or that which we believe we need to desire—we demand—in order to fulfill our Lack or that which we do not have, but which if we possessed it, could make us complete and ideal again; we might also consider, as I explained in Seminar II and III, that it is what could give us the universe.
Once again, this is the function of the metonymy, of the deferral of desires along the signifying chain, such that retroactively we will always understand that we are still Lacking something, even if we once obtained the signifier or object which we believed could satisfy our Lack. This quality of retroactivity is what dominates the relation between the Lack of the Other S(A) and now the Drive $ ♢ D along the diachronic vector of jouissance and castration -φ.
In other words, at the sight of the Lack of the Other S(A), we are Driven to a pursuit of jouissance as assumed to be the mythological starting point of intentionality in a similar way to that of the unconscious Δ, because we believe that if we could become the object of desire for the Other and thus fulfill our desires if we become the Lack of the Other, we may reach reclaim that mythological starting point of the Ideal Ego i(a).
Now, to retroactively build on what we have anticipated in Seminars I, II and III, we might observe at this point that the signifier of the Lack of the Other S(A) is similar in structure to that of the phallus Φ, or to that mythological and not substantive stand-in for potency or power, which can always be robbed of us, and therefore reveals itself as something which we can never consistently have, and nevertheless symbolises for us as something to desire as if it were desire itself.
This is what Lacan designates as a Master Signifier, or that signifiers which references to itself, and which all other signifiers reference as a measure to identify themselves, but which the Master Signifier, being its own referent, is closed off from in the signifying chain. An easy illustration of this is money, such that money is the signifier of value in of itself, such that the signification of money or value is money, which is value, in a self-referential chain. However, we must note that the Master Signifier does not have a fixed value or signification, and therefore, this ambiguity allows for the flexibility of desire to take place for other signifiers, such that there is not a fixed or singular interpretation of desire and how to fulfill desire, but many ways because of the variable nature but fixed presence of the Master Signifier, because it reveals as a signifier how the subject is represented to and by other signifiers.
However, it should seem obvious to us now that this act of possessing the Lack of the Other S(A) or the phallus Φ is impossible; there is nothing which can replace nor gain us access to the object-in-of-itself, because that object or mythological state is mythological and not substantive—it lies in the realm of pure fantasy. But this coming-to-terms with truth has a name: castration -φ. To avoid castration -φ, we enter into fantasy; if we might mitigate the encroachment of the Real onto our false reality as signified through language in the Symbolic Register and desired because of the childhood machinations of the Imaginary Register, we short-circuit in a similar way as that of the Ideal Ego i(a) and leap into fantasy as a possible means of fulfilling our jouissance.
Remember that jouissance is pleasure to the point of pain; it is analogous to the Freudian death drive or that experience of pleasure which goes beyond the pleasure principle into a futile cycle of repitition in hopes of fulfilling our object of desire, such that we would be willing to destroy ourselves if it meant that we could experience that fullness or completeness or ideal state again.
To clarify what Drive $ ♢ D means for Lacan, it is essentially a demand made upon the mind by the body because of the relation or necessary connection between the two; but the appearance of the lozenge ♢ or the more-than-less-than <> relation is pointed towards the fact that this too is a shifting relation, where sometimes one dominates over the other.
If I choose to continue this seminar series into the second set of seminars, we will discuss the Freudian death drive in detail; however, for the purposes of this seminar, we will consider that jouissance is what we desire in order to fulfill our impossible desire, and likewise that desire also acts as a limitation on jouissance in that it directs us desire of jouissance to a particular expression of hope instead of a headless hedonism, but curiously that we will eschew castration -φ or the loss of this hope by leaping into fantasy—although, we must ask if we make this leap out of a sincere belief in our fulfilment via fantasy or whether if the function of fantasy is to simply to fantasise?
But notice that there is a second portion to the upper half of the Completed Graph of Desire: there is an element of desire which escapes from its signification along the vector of the Other A, which points to desire as being a function of the Imaginary Register too, and thus able to create itself and therefore its desires from the subject—and thus the fantasies of the subject—without the castration -φ of the big Other A as the Ego Ideal I(A), which we can now observe as fulfilling a second function of castration -φ, outside of the first function of castration -φ which arises from the very desire of jouissance itself.
If the big Other functions as a jouissance limiter—a restriction or function of castration -φ on how much jouissance we can allow ourselves to experience—such that it is not permissible for us to commit whatever hedonistic action we desire, because of the function of language, culture and the Law as the Other in restricting us as well, we must admit that the appearance of a need for a big Other is reflective of castration -φ itself, such that castration must exist for jouissance to exist, and that we likewise discover this fact retroactively along the signifying chain.
It is therefore what we are not that defines what we are: we desire what we do not have, and hence, we discover ourselves retroactively this way in how we are Barred from our desires as a function of both language and desire itself. Therefore, we arrive at an idea of what the Complete Graph of Desire illustrates to us and how signifiers operate to make the absent thing present through desire.
We shall now take a break before heading into a discussion of the four discourses.
The four discourses of Lacan cover the discourses of the master, the university, the hysteric and the analyst in the following configuration. Within the discourses are a set series of variables or terms which interchange between certain positions in a clockwise direction from the Agent to the Truth, and it is the intersubjective relations or social bonds produced between certain variables in certain positions that establish a certain type of discourse.
For Lacan, discourse is the admittance of intersubjectivity between subjects—one as the subject and the other as the Other—and the relations which arise from their interaction, such that we have previously been introduced to the function of the Other in the psyche of the Subject in the other seminars, and now that we approach how the Subject operates with the Other outside of their own mind.
Each position has a relation to the others: starting from the top left is the Agent, followed by the Other in the top right, with Truth and Product in the bottom left and right respectively. The Agent can be considered as the Subject of the discourse, or the one who speaks, while the Other is the one who is being addressed to, but what is the nature of this address and why does the Agent need to speak anything? We must then consider the Truth as what was attempted to be expressed by the Agent and the Product as what was actually expressed.
The four variables or terms are that of the Master Signifier S1, Knowledge S2, the Barred Subject $ and the objet petit a, with the vectors relating to the relation of a cause in the place of something else. To reiterate, the Master Signifier S1 is the self-referencing and thus self-mastered signifier which orients how the subject is represented by other signs by nature of its fixity and yet its ambiguity as well; Knowledge S2 in this case, is what is defined as the sense or the process of signification within the Symbolic Register, which the unconscious Δ crosses along the signifying chain to retroactively become the Barred Subject $.
It will be easier to explain the interaction of the terms in the four positions if we consider what Lacan illustrates in Seminar XVII: his discourse of the proposition that desire is the desire of the Other. Hence, this example of discourse will rely on something we have understood in the Graph of Desire, and it will more neatly show the relation which is observed in the four discourses, albeit with a different but familiar set of terms.
Locate desire in the position of the Agent, the Other in the position of the Other, and loss and truth in the positions of Product and Truth respectively; now consider that the desire of the subject is addressed to the Other, and you will understand if you have understood the Graph of Desire that the Product of this discourse can only be Lack. And what is the Truth here? It is truth itself: the nature of the Real which is inaccessible to us. This is the discourse or intersubjectivity of the proposition of desire being the desire of the Other.
Therefore, consider the Discourse of the Master, the Master Signifier S1 occupies the position of the Agent, followed by Knowledge S2 in the position of the Other, with the objet petit a and the Barred Subject $ in the positions of Product and Truth respectively.
The Master Signifier S1 as Agent addresses or puts to work Knowledge S2 as the Other, or the knowledge of how to use the Other to produce the Barred Subject $ for the enjoyment of the Master Signifier S1 as Agent, but consider what the Master Signifier S1 actually produces: the objet petit a. By nature, the objet petit a operates as a signification of the Other into that which could fulfill us or, by the process of surplus jouissance, cause us to lose jouissance and thus become castrated by the truth of us as Barred Subjects $, who projects a false view of reality via language. It is desire of the nonsensical signifier, which is the Master Signifier S1, for whom desire is self-referential and underived from other instances of desire, because it is the source of desire which makes other desires work, in relation to the Other, that produces Lack as the objet petit a in attempting to express the relation of the Master Signifier and the Other as the function of the Barred Subject $.
An example of the Discourse of the Master is that of the Absolute Monarchy: in the position of the Master Signifier S1, the Monarch puts to work the Slaves, or to the Other who knows how things work. This produces the objet petit a for the Monarch, or that which gives them pleasure beyond pleasure—jouissance—or the decadent and dangerous enjoyment which is possible to achieve as a lifestyle if the Monarch puts Knowledge S2 to work for itself. However, the truth of this address is that the Monarch has a Lack like everyone else, and their position of Master Signifier S1 as Agent is fundamentally a fragile and ephemeral authority or figurehead of power.
In the Discourse of the University, Knowledge S2 occupies the position of the Agent, followed by the objet petit a in the position of the Other, with the Barred Subject $ and Master Signifier S1 in the positions of Product and Truth respectively.
Knowledge S2 as Agent addresses or puts to work the objet petit a as the Other, or that it directs itself to the excess jouissance of the subject—an enjoyment which lies outside of its objectivity, and therefore, rests in subjectivity—so as to produce the Truth of the Master Signifier S1, or that self-referential signifier which could make everything—even Knowledge S2 itself—sensible by its introduction, but that this discourse only manages to produce the Barred Subject $ as an impotent result of this effort. In other words, the University attempts to understand and thus control everything about the subjectivity of the subject, or that it cannot bear to misunderstand the subject as the Other, and hence it must try to dominate it so as to produce an understandable concept of a person; naturally, this fails every time, because the objet petit a resists every attempt at terminal signification and thus stability; we find an explanation here for why the Master Signifier S1 is directed by an upwards vector to signify it as a cause for the appearance of Knowledge S2 in the position of Agent.
The example which the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, in his 2006 essay, Jacques Lacan's Four Discourses, cites as being representative of the Discourse of the University is the body of the Soviet Union: a massive institution of ideological control. Another example of the Discourse of the University is that of scientific knowledge—crucially, it referring not to science but to scientific knowledge as a kind of discourse—but in the case study of the USSR, it is the Lack of Knowledge which drives Knowledge S2 to address the excess jouissance or plus-de-jouir so as to capture it, but this failed attempt only reveals its inability to master the subjectivity of the subject, producing only the realisation of the subject and therefore Knowledge S2 as Agent of its own Lack, given that both are subject to the same act of symbolic castration by language, and thus split between the unconscious and conscious because of the elevated privilege of signifier, as per the Saussurean algorithm S/s.
In the Discourse of the Hysteric, we find something which we have already spoken about: the Discourse of the desire of the Other. In other words, the hysterical nature of our desire is a neurosis concerned with how the Other desires us, such that we are preoccupied with their Gaze and what it means, such as whether it could castrate us, and that in our anxiety, we come closer to a collapse of the narcissistic fantasy of control that we have over our own image, because we orient our desires in relation to the desire of the Other.
Therefore, we return to what we said earlier about desire in the position of the Agent, the Other in the position of the Other, and truth and loss in the positions of Truth and Product respectively; we replace them now with the Barred Subject $ as the Agent, the Master Signifier as the Other, Knowledge S2 as the Product and the objet petit a as Truth.
In the attempt of the Barred Subject $ to make the Master Signifier S1 work to produce jouissance in the possession of the objet petit a, but that there is only Knowledge S2 which is produced; this is a reversal of the Discourse of the University, because what essentially occurs is a desire for knowledge by the split and hysteric Agent, who addresses the Master Signifier S1, or the self-referential and hence self-sufficient signifier, demanding an explanation for everything which the Master Signifier S1 Lacks an explanation for—therefore, the Real, which is connected to the impossibility of possessing the objet petit a—thus revealing the Lack of the Master Signifier S1 itself.
As the American psychoanalyst and well-known translator of many of Lacan’s texts, Bruce Fink, wrote in his contribution to the 1998 book, Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, as edited by Dany Nobus, “In the hysteric's discourse, object (a) appears in the position of truth. That means that the truth of the hysteric's discourse, its hidden motor force, is the real. Physics too, when carried out in a truly scientific spirit, is ordained and commanded by the real, that is to say by that which does not work, by that which does not fit. It does not set out to carefully cover over paradoxes and contradictions, in an attempt to prove that the theory is nowhere lacking—that it works in every instance—but rather to take such paradoxes and contradictions as far as they can go.”
Therefore, when I said earlier that scientific knowledge, and not science itself, was the part of the Discourse of the University, we can recognise here the neuroticism at the heart of science as a pursuit of Truth, mediated by whatever we Lack knowledge of, which operates as the Discourse of the Hysteric here. For the hysteric, there is something akin to a fetishisation of Knowledge S2 by the Barred Subject $, such that there is always a question of who am I according to the Gaze of the Other, because I will reify myself if it means I may become their desire. Hence, there is a hysterical interrogation of authority, because the hysteric fundamentally does not know, and thus requires knowledge to be sated; who has this knowledge but the authority of the Master Signifier S1? However, this is different from the paranoiac, who does know, but who is consistently afraid of losing Knowledge S2, and therefore interrogates the Master Signifier S1 to continuously affirm what they know.
In the Discourse of the Analyst, the objet petit a occupies the position of the Agent, followed by the Barred Subject $ in the position of the Other, with the Master Signifier S1 and Knowledge S2 in the positions of Product and Truth respectively.
To articulate this discourse, it would become necessary for us to understand the clinical method of psychoanalysis; in a deliberate act of sabotage, I have avoided the clinical structure of Lacan in these first set of seminars, because it is a clinical tradition which must be elaborated from the original point of Sigmund Freud. What I have tried to achieve is the inculcation of a base attitude towards Lacan, which means to show his usefulness, his mythological foundation and to drive an interest forward to explore him. If we do speak of Lacan’s clinical method as well as his diagnostic method for neurosis and pathology, we will speak in its rehabilitative relation to the clinic of Freud, when we approach Freud in the second set of Seminars V–VIII.
But to illustrate the Discourse of the Analyst, we will have to speak somewhat about the relation between the Analyst and the Analysand, and hence, what the structure of psychoanalytic practice, outside of the theory, appears like.
As Bruce Fink explains, “Object (a), as cause of desire, is the agent here, occupying the dominant or commanding position. The analyst plays the part of pure desirousness (pure desiring subject), and interrogates the subject in his or her division, precisely at those points where the split between conscious and unconscious shows through: slips of the tongue, bungled and unintended acts, slurred speech, dreams, etc. In this way, the analyst sets the patient to work, to associate, and the product of that laborious association is a new master signifier. The patient in a sense 'coughs up' a master signifier that has not yet been brought into relation with any other signifier. In discussing the discourse of the master, I referred to S1 as the signifier with no rhyme or reason. As it appears concretely in the analytic situation, a master signifier presents itself as a dead end, a stopping point, a term, word, or phrase that puts an end to association, that grinds the patient's discourse to a halt. It could be a proper name (the patient's or the analyst's), a reference to the death of a loved one, the name of a disease (AIDS, cancer, psoriasis, blindness), or a variety of other things. The task of analysis is to bring such master signifiers into relation with other signifiers, that is, to dialectize the master signifiers it produces. […] Clearly the motor force of the process is object (a)—the analyst operating as pure desirousness. What does it mean concretely for the analyst to occupy the position of object (a) for an analysand, the position of cause of the analysand's desire? Many analysands tend, at an early stage of analysis to thrust responsibility for slips and slurs onto the analyst. As one patient said to her therapist, 'You're the one who always sees dark and dirty things in everything I say!' At the outset, analysands often see no more in a slip than a simple problem regarding the control of the tongue muscles or a slight inattention. The analyst is the one who attributes some Other meaning to it. As time goes on, however, analysands themselves begin to attribute meaning to such slips, and the analyst, rather than standing in for the unconscious, for that strange Other discourse, is viewed by the analysand as its cause: 'I had a dream last night because I knew I was coming to see you this morning.' In such a statement, very often heard in analysis, the analyst is cast in the role of the cause of the analysand's dream: 'I wouldn't have had such a dream were it not for you,' 'The dream was for you,' 'You were in my dream last night.' Unconscious formations, such as dreams, fantasies, and slips, are produced for the analyst, to be recounted to the analyst, to tell the analyst something. The analyst, in that sense, is behind them, is the reason for their production, is, in a word, their cause.”
Through this long quotation, which is part of an excellent delineation of Lacanian psychoanalytic practice by Fink, and what the precise goals and nature of the relationship of the Analyst and Analysand are, we might understand what the Discourse of the Analyst symbolises, and especially why the objet petit a occupies the position of the Agent.
In the psychoanalytic practice, the Analyst must stand-in for the objet petit a as a cause for desire, or a means by which transference occurs, wherein the desires and emotions of the Analysand, relating to historical signifiers of their past, thus forming their present situation, are transferred onto the Analyst as the one by which they hope such things could be worked out with. If there is an expectation for being cured as a result of analysis, then the reason we seek analysis in the first place is predicated on the expectation of our own suffering—a suffering which we know we will eventually clear, but one we cannot arrange by ourselves alone. But this operates on an unconscious level; it is therefore the role of the Analyst to reel outwards of the Analysand, and on the independent accord of Analysand, the string of language—or the signifying chain—which could produce out of them the unconscious Knowledge S2 as the Master Signifier S1 in words, and thus reach a conclusion to the quest that is led by speaking.
Hence, the objet petit a, or the Analyst or a cause for the potential fulfilment of desire—insofar as transference can occur if the Analyst is viewed as an imaginary and mirrored other, a symbolic stand-in or a symbolic Other, or an instantiation of the Real which produces an interaction with the unconscious—addresses the Barred Subject $ of the Analysand so as to produce the Master Signifier S1 which could arrive us at the end of the speaking cure of psychoanalysis through its recognition of Truth in the Knowledge S2 of the unconscious—therefore, unconscious Knowledge S2.
Lastly, in the Discourse of the Capitalist, which is the fifth and arguably incomplete discourse of Lacan, there is realisation of a novel set of pathologies, neuroses and therefore symptoms which depart from the classic cases of neurosis, psychosis, obsession, hysteria, phobia and perversion of Freud and Lacan’s time.
Under the conditions of late Capitalism, there is a short-circuiting of the pathways to jouissance by the Subject, who no longer passes through the Other so as to obtain jouissance at a minimum symbolic distance, but instead immediately and direct satisfies their jouissance by obtainment of an object or activity that does not require the Other nor its signification.
If the rest of the discourses are concerned with the failure of the Symbolic Register to shield ourselves from the encroachment of the Real, such that the Symbolic or the process of signification is always insufficient, and therefore, that the nature of the Symbolic is illusory and yet an illusion in which we partake as a means to obtain the objet petit a, as shown by the case study of the Master and the hysteric, the Discourse of the Capitalist, or the material consumer, is that which does not need to engage with the Other insofar as one can purchase a soda to satisfy the Lack of a soda.
There is no convoluted nor doomed process of signification for the Capitalist; if the Discourse of the Master, for instance, involves an illusory control of the Master Signifier S1 over Knowledge S2—illusory because the Master is still a Barred Subject $ like everyone else, except that they appear not to be—then the Discourse of the Capitalist involves a straightforward control of the Master by an easy cause of jouissance, which therefore as capital becomes the new Master, because the immanence of capitalism offers a non-illusory power to simply indulge in jouissance at all times, which does not relate as a failure of the Symbolic but as a triumph of the Barred Subject $ in obtaining the objet petit a through Knowledge S2 of how to fulfill their desires.
Hence, in the Discourse of the Capitalist, the Barred Subject $ occupies the position of the Agent, followed by Knowledge S2 in the position of the Other, with the Master Signifier S1 and the objet petit a in the positions of Product and Truth respectively.
Once again, the Barred Subject $ addresses or puts to work Knowledge S2, or specifically the knowledge of how the Market works, to their cause of jouissance, and likewise as previously mentioned, there is no trick here: there is simply a goading for the material consumer to just do it. The Truth beneath this is that the Master Signifier S1 of the Market now stands-in for the consumer, as if making decisions for them and orienting their desires according to its own desires, but fundamentally it is the consumer themselves who participates in this discourse, becoming more antisocial and narcissistic as one no longer needs to engage with the Other of society and other people, such that the fulfilment of Lack need not be found in social relations, but relations of the subject to the objects which can immediately fulfil his desire.
This is why, for Lacan, the Discourse of the Capitalist is akin to the discourse of an addict, or for whom the pursuit of jouissance is now without the limits of signification, because one is able to partake in enjoyment via an easy access to sexual and material satisfaction; and crucially, that this is preferable to the old methods of striving and suffering, with the risk of castration and the presence of anxiety, towards an objet petit a which is impossible to obtain—if anything, it has become too possible to obtain.
What is dangerous is that the Barred Subject $ of the capitalist—or one who enjoys by participating in the capitalist system—finds its jouissance in the Master Signifier S1, which masks itself as a cause for something else because there is nevertheless a freedom in the choice of the capitalist to partake in such a system, but that this feedback loop of jouissance is a catalyst for the obliteration of social relations as we understand them, such that the subject retreats into the inner world of the self, having no longer any need nor incentive to engage with the Other anymore, because the subject knows what it wants, and more importantly, it knows how it can obtain it.
Therefore, we have concluded the syllabus of Seminar IV and that of the first set of seminars for the Seminar of the NUS Psychoanalysis Society in 2022. Thank you.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2022. All rights reserved.
Great article! Quick question-
A writer I follow wrote this:
"I have a couple of friends and acquaintances who are (or were) really into Lacan. They’re all exactly the same: highly-driven highly-charismatic people, alternating between eerily brilliant and totally incomprehensible, and always deeply misanthropic throughout. Teach fits this same mold. Does the personality type attract you to the theory? Does the theory produce the personality type? It’s a weird enough coincidence that it makes me want to learn more.
And: I have a running argument with one of these people. The argument is: I accuse him of becoming a cult leader, he denies it. During a recent spat, he said something like - “okay, I agree that lots of people are fascinated by me / attracted to me / tend to do whatever I want, in a way that doesn’t make sense under the normal rules, and that you couldn’t replicate even if you wanted to. You can judge me for it, or you can admit there’s a hole in your map, something that I understand and you don’t. If you want to understand it too, read Lacan.”"
What do you think might be going on here?