From Lacaniana, edited by Moustafa Safouan

Summary of Seminar XIV, The Logic of Fantasy, by Daniel Koren

What is a logic of fantasy? What relation is maintained between fantasy - and more
widely the unconscious, psychoanalysis - and logic? What contribution does logic bring
to the theory and the practice of psychoanalysis? Many of these questions are
introduced in this seminar, but for Lacan they constitute a preamble, for the ambition of
his teaching is going to go well beyond.
In effect, in reintroducing within that same logic what is structurally elided - the function
of the signifier, of lack and the place of the subject - in re-thinking logic from the
perspective of object a, Lacan is calling for a new logic, a sort of first logic. This is to
establish, in the name of the facts of the unconscious, a reversal in what is classically
recognised as logic and to do nothing other than establish there its own foundations.
I am going today to throw out some points which will be contributions instead of
promises. Its with these words that (140) Lacan opens his seminar of 1966-1967, The
Logic of Fantasy. A surprising title, in which the promise, announced immediately, was
immediately put in question. For Lacan it was a question of pushing, up to their final
consequences, propositions and advances which he had developed since the seminar
on Object Relations and more particularly since Identification. Lacan wants to extract
logic from behind these propositions. He considers it to be logic which makes a demand
on psychoanalytic practice and the experience of the unconscious; a logic which we are
obliged to found, he says, on behalf of the facts of the unconscious. The proposal is a
strong one. What are, more precisely the facts of the unconscious which have been
brought to development in the preceding years and which require at their foundations
this logic? They are the logic of alienation (Seminar XI); the articulation of the subject
and of the signifying structure, together with the relation of incommensurability that it
maintains with sex (Seminar XII); and the theory of the object a (Seminar XIII).
For all this, if Lacan engages himself totally in this audacious gamble, he does not fail to
underline the somewhat disproportionate aspect of his undertaking, given the difficult
topics to tackle, both on the side of psychoanalysis and on the side of logic. In effect, it
will be a question of constructing a quite unprecedented logic insofar as it would in
many respects go in the opposite direction to classical logic, as we are going to see. For
this theory, it is interesting to note the nuances that Lacan himself introduces by way of
reflection. If, during the first session of the seminar he could comment on the title of this
year as that which (141) imposes itself at the point where we are on a certain path,
during the last session he comes to note that he will have to close the subject without
having done anything more than open it. This is why one can affirm that this seminar
marks the synthesis of a pathway and signals the opening of another step which
supports the inexistence of a sexual relation [rapport] in support of the always more
important recourse to logic, up to its culmination in the seminar Encore, from which time
the accent will thus be put on the Borromean knots.

Before deploying the major axes of the seminar, lets enumerate the points around which
this unprecedented logic is going to be articulated. What do we have to account for? It
seems to us possible to reduce the multiplicity of themes tackled in this seminar to three
points.

First of all the subject founds itself in a forced alienation which manifests itself as the
opposite of that implied by the Cartesian cogito. In other words, from the false certitude
of being that a subject takes as his thought Lacan opposes the alternative either I
dont think or I am not. The subject, such as he is constituted by his dependence on the
signifying order, that which manifests itself in an analysis, would appear in the seesaw
between the alienating pole (I do not think) and the pole of unconscious Bedeutung (I
am not). Second point: the experience of psychoanalysis, as Freud demonstrated in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle, plays itself out entirely in the register of repetition. The
second slope (142) of the logic of fantasy articulates itself on the structural reasons of
repetition and of its eventual exceeding by the dimension of the act. Finally, the point of
confluence of these two preceding points (alienation and repetition) is the sexual
question: Lacan insists right throughout the seminar on what he calls repeatedly the
difficulty inherent in the sexual act, in which he remains resolutely Freudian. Freud had
already noted that nothing in the unconscious determines what was is masculine and
feminine. Lacan goes further: The great secret of psychoanalysis is that there is no
sexual act.
Lacan seeks to deploy this logic of fantasy in several stages. We will be content here to
mark some essential points of articulation.
One of the first questions that Lacan poses, and at the very start of the seminar,
concerns the necessity of the recourse to formal logic. Lacan establishes, in this year of
his seminar, a dialogue with logic where it is at once an essential tool and an
insurmountable obstacle. If logic helps us to think about the world, Lacan notes that the
experience of the unconscious places logic in the face of major impasses. But its not a
vain polemic with formal logic that he invites us to. The point which to him seems
essential, and which he specifies in an explicit manner only at the end of this seminar,
goes beyond the eventual quarrel with logicians since the aim is always psychoanalytic.
At no moment does Lacan propose to do a simple course in logic, but to utilise
elements of logic as a structure with which to (143) approach these two registers which
interest psychoanalysis at the highest point of its practice: the register of alienation on
one hand, and the register of repetition on the other.
For Lacan, logic is at the same time necessary and misleading. Necessary, in that it
permits us to articulate correctly a certain number of relations (and by the same
movement, their limits); misleading, in that it installs the illusion of a metalanguage. This
is particularly true for those who try to found language as a language-object, an
operation which would consist in enveloping language by another order which would be

expected to explain it without contradiction. This is why he lingers so long on the

relations between logic, language and writing.
The relations between writing and logic are closer, and Lacan states that all the recent
developments of logic are linked by games of writing. However, he demonstrates that
this only remains operational on the condition that it be concentrated on the pure
statements [noncs], in ignoring the dimension of enunciation. In effect, whilst
statements [les noncs langagiers] are pronounced or written, they submit themselves
to the games of the signifier introduced by the dimension of semantic sliding which
makes no signifier appear to belong to any signification.
More radically, and to clearly mark the impasses of logic that pretend to conceive a
universe of discourse where the question of meaning would be resolved through a
metalanguage, Lacan asks himself: what is the consequence in this universe of
discourse of the principle according to which the signifier could not signify itself? He
affirms that this principle fulfills the same function as an axiom and that it puts in the
greatest difficulty a logic which would be take as its object the existence of a universe of
discourse. Lacan therefore applies to himself the same critical function (144) as that
which is brought into play in the paradox of Russells catalogues. If the universe of
discourse is constituted by everything which can be said, what introduces the axiom a
signifier cannot signify itself? Is this axiom part of the universe of discourse? It poses a
problem in both cases. Either because it would not be encompassed by the universe of
discourse, or that it is included and it then returns something which would not be in the
universe of discourse, whilst its very principle is to encompass everything which can be
said.
From this point of view and in relation to formal logic, Lacan effects a twist of which the
objective is to demark this logic that he tries to found on the facts of the unconscious. In
effect, he makes an appeal to formal logic to give account of the radicality of the
constitution of the subject (the status of the object a, subjective alienation, non-rapport
between the sexes, etc). But he does not fail to underline the limits which this logic
encounters (the critique of Russells paradox, the limitation of the criterias of operability
of logical propositions, etc). This twist brings Lacan to state a thesis, which can be taken
by logicians as at best a misunderstanding, at worst as a provocation, namely that if
there was a logic of fantasy, it would be foremost in regard to all logic which is smeared
about by the dirty formalisers [plus principielle au regard de toute logique qui se coule
dans les dfils formalisateurs], where it could however demonstrate an extraordinary
fertility.
In other words, Lacan searches in an explicit manner (145) for new operators, for tools
which permit him to give an account of the decisive manner of these processes which,
like Traumgedanken, dream-thoughts, have the particularity to think themselves where
no I can claim to be the author. For, on the contrary, they are the effect of it.

During the first lessons of the seminar, Lacan returns to the points which will be
reworked in what follows, themes well-known to followers of his seminar since Object
Relations. Let us list them, in no particular order: the pre-eminence of the signifier in the
causation of the subject, the non-identity of the signifier with itself, the inexistence of a
metalanguage, the refutation of language-object, the formula of metaphor as a model of
the functioning of the unconscious and of repression, the critique of the paradoxes of
Russells catalogue in the name of the dimension of enunciation, the unary trait, the
dimension of lack and its relation with the function of repetition, the question - essential
and taken up again in what follows - of truth, the problem of interpretation, and the
question of the implications of truth and falsehood in relation to subjective enunciation.
But Lacan warned his audience: to repeat is not necessarily to repeat the same thing. If
he re-introduces these elements, he brings them into parallel for the first time. The
employment of the tools of logic appear there. The effort of conceptulisation to which
Lacan engages himself places it, according to his own terms, on the limits, on the edges
of analytic praxis. However, that requires him to give to the formulations still more rigour
to identify what is at issue.
Thus he will engage with the logic of Boole, for example, to illustrate that mathematical
logic is, according to Lacan, a pure logic, that is to say a pure (146) theoretical game
which is supposed to reflect the laws of thought which think outside of the subjectivity of
the subject. In fact, what essentially interests Lacan here, are two aspects of this logic.
On the one hand, it permits the formal logical demonstration of the non-identity of the
signifier, that is to say, that no signifier can signify itself. On the other hand, the return to
Lacan taking on the impossibility of the inclusion of logic into the dimension of lack. In
effect, this logic excludes the minus one (-1), that is to say, lack. How to grasp this? Lets
take the example of any set. What constitutes, what organises this set cannot be interior
to this set. That amounts to saying that one can predicate a set only on its exterior, or
that we cannot think of the unity of a set that is outside this set. What does that mean?
Lacan underlines that it needs a supplementary element, which he designates during the
session of 23rd November 1966 as a plus one [Un en plus]. In the preceding example,
the set can only be signified as a result of this plus one. But this means also that the
plus one lacks the elements of the collection [la collection]. In other words, this (+1) is
at the same time a (-1), the element which most underlines an essential, constitutive
lack. It is on this hiatus of logic that Lacan situates the place of the signifier and of the
subject in relation to a lack. Logic excludes this lack in order to be operational, but this
elision becomes symptomatic, and it is towards this in the end that Lacan develops his
reasoning. Very precisely, he considers that logic leaves the fields empty [laisse des
champs en blanc], and that these are the points which concern logic the kind of logic
demanded of the analytic field, which does not elide the subject of enunciation and
which distinguishes radically the status of meaning [signification] and its origin in the
signifier.
(147) During these first sessions of the seminar, Lacan goes permanently to-and-fro
between psychoanalytic facts and logical propositions, sometimes to indicate their points

of confluence, sometimes to mark their difference. Lacan pursues this path in effecting a
reconciliation between free association and interpretation on one hand, and on the other
hand the network, defined as the organisation from which, according to him, the
premises of a mathematical logic can develop themselves. In fact, Lacan had already
made an appeal to the structures of networks. But here, in a double movement, he
considers these networked structures (this will be discussed with regards to the Klein
group [le groupe de Klein, this probably has another meaning]) and the question of truth
such as it has been posed since the Middles Ages.
One must not lose sight of the essential function of a network consisting in the manner in
which the lines of association according to Lacan, free associations come to
converge on privileged points, elective affinities [points d'lection, privilgis]. The
question which looms through this convergence is that of the truth that one can take
from analytic experience. The signifying structure is a networked structure, which is
deployed in multiple networks. When this leads to a fundamental fantasy like that which
appears in the recurring dream of the Wolf Man, we wonder what is our criteria of truth.
For Lacan, as for Freud, the question comes down to determining the manner in which
the subject comes to be represented by signifiers in this scene. The analysis of the
dream shows in an exemplary manner how the lines of association which produce the
subject converge on precise points where it is not a question of anything other than the
play [maniement] of the signifier. So Lacan (148) articulates with force what he has to
say: where do we find our criteria for truth? Nowhere other than in the relation between
truth and the signifier. According to him, the point on which psychoanalytic experience
converges towards modern logic consists in the way in which the relation of the signifier
to truth can short-circuit all thought which supports it. If modern logic aims at reducing
itself to the correct handling [maniement] of what is only writing, for analysts the question
is one of establishing truth [vrification] through the direct thread of the play of the
signifier, provided that this thread, which weaves multiple repetitions like versions of this
lack, keep in suspension the question of truth.
Lacan then engages himself in a detour on logical propositions, truth tables [les tableaux
de vrit] and comments on the ex falso sequitur quodlibet [from a contradiction,
anything follows] of the Stoics, together with the relations between truth and falsehood.
The real interest of this commentary consists in confirming anew that to function
workably logic depends on the plugging of the holes [mise l'cart] of what
psychoanalysts cannot exactly leave to one side, namely the subject of the enunciation.
At each point, this excursion allows him to introduce another essential logical function
from which he will extract great profit: the function of negation, applied logically to the
Cartesian cogito. This is the true point of departure of what one can call a logic of
fantasy.
Leaving these elements of logic (the function of a network exemplified by le groupe de
Klein, the functions of (149) truth and the function of negation), Lacan is going to work
anew on the Cartesian cogito. Why? Very simply because the cogito, as he had
explained several times, is exemplary in presenting itself as an aporia, a radical

contradiction to the status of the unconscious. In effect, the unconscious all the time
denies the claims of the ego to assure itself of its existence by the means of thought.
The experience of the psychoanalytic clinic shows the exact opposite: the affirmation I
think, regardless of the predicate that is attached to it, pays the price of the mis-knowing
[mconnaissance] of subjective enunciation. Inversely, giving way to the enunciation
brings the subject back to the assumption that he is not the author of his thoughts.
The following step consists in putting the cogito doubly to the test: through the material
implication of the stoics and through the logic of De Morgan. Putting to the test means,
as we have seen, not taking at face value the Cartesian implication (the ergo). Lacan
employs logic and the functions of truth in using a certain number of matrices to
establish that we can only define an operation by the implication to admit it as a
consequence [unclear: pour tablir qu'on ne peut dfinir une opration comme celle de
l'implication qu' l'admettre comme une consquence.] (150) What he means by
consequences consists in defining the extent of the field in which, in a signifying chain,
we can situate [mettre] the connotation of truth. According to Lacan, we can situate
[situer] the connotation of truth on the link of a falsehood firstly, followed by a truth, and
not vice versa [sur la liaison d'un faux d'abord, d'un vrai ensuite, et non pas l'inverse].
Truth can only arise as second, as a consequence of the existence of the field of the
signifier [la vrit ne peut ainsi se poser que comme seconde, comme consquence de
l'existence du champ du significant].
From this perspective, Lacan proposes a new propositional logical operation which he
calls omega operation: a tentative logical inscription of alienation. If the two
propositions on which it operates are exact, so the result of the operation is false.
Through this omega operation, Lacan affirms that I think and I am cannot be true
either simultaneously, or by implication. Besides, this conjunction is made the object of a
radical critique from Lacan: the cogito of Descartes puts in place, in the relation of
thought to being, the establishment of the being of the I [linstaturation de letre du Je].
Nevertheless, we have to (151) highlight this, as it is often cause for confusion, that
Descartes is not considered by Lacan as a metaphysicist of Being. If Descartes interests
him, it is because he has effected a radical rupture in relation to Aristotelian metaphysics
centered on Being reducing the question of being to that of the being of the I.
Descartes operated a first ontological detachment, Lacan extends this movement of the
subject by subverting it, removing one can say, his being. He insists here as always,
since the start of his teaching on the fact that the Freudian discovery leads from a
rejection of this idea of the being of the I, to a veritable impossibility of the return of
thought to being, which resides on the side of the unconscious or on the side of the id,
an impossibility from which Lacan is going to draw the logical contours.
This is why Lacan has recourse to the logic of De Morgan, the application of negation
making a series of possible articulations appear. According to De Moragans law, the
negation of the intersection of A and B is equivalent to the meeting [runion] of the
negation of A and of the negation of B:

The negation of the Caretesian cogito makes appear the alternative I do not think, or I
am not as a corollary of the passage to the revelation of the falsity of the cogito. If
psychoanalytic experience refutes the Cartesian implication, it is legitimate to apply to
this formula of the cogito the function of negation. In effect, if I think, then I am not; or
if I am, I do not think. Thus, for Lacan, the implication is revealed in a single
alternative: either I do not think or I am not [this may not be right: ou je ne pense pas ou
je ne suis pas. Note no grave accent on the ou].
Lacan argues that this is the best translation that one can give of the cogito as a point of
crystallization of the subject of the unconscious. In leaving this point, (152) to give
another place to the alienation which founds the subject, Lacan starts to develop what
the logic of fantasy is.
We find this drawing in the seminars of 11th January 1967 and 18th January 1967:

(153)

Lacan uses a scheme from one of Kleins groups [as above, not sure what this refers to:
un demi-groupe de Klein] on which he indicates the essential dissymmetry between
thought and being, between the unconscious and the id, whose necessary character
appears in the different inversions and reversions of the grammatical structure imposed
by the alienating choice. Subjective alienation which founds the subject is properly
speaking the reverse [lenvers] of the cogito. We observe a difference in relation to the
model of alienation which Lacan had proposed in Seminar XI. Lacan proposes here two
different moments of subjective alienation. The first moment corresponds to that of the
paternal metaphor: to be the phallus of the mother, or to receive the signifier from the
father, the one which introduces to the order of meaning and loss the status of being the
maternal phallus. This forced choice is effected, as a general rule, in every case of
neurosis, as a choice of meaning with, by consequence, the loss of being. A double loss
if one means: loss at the level of being but also loss of the maternal Other, marked from
now on by castration. Thus, this (154) first moment of subjective alienation, correlative to
the operation of the paternal metaphor, results in the separation of the subject. It is here
that the second moment of alienation intervenes, which also plays itself out in the
disjunction of a forced choice between being and meaning. But here it is a question of
meaning which the subject gives to his thoughts.
Either where I do not think or where I am not? [Ou je ne pense pas ou je ne suis pas ?
Again, no grave accent on Ou]. The least bad option is that of I do not think, which
saves the I as a pure and unique instaturation of being. In the face of this forced choice
the subject chooses the least worse option, the one which allows him, in appearance,
to preserve his being: through this being he can think of nothing except the thing
designated [le designer].
Related to the essence of this I do not think appears the shadow of the not me [pas-je]

in the same place as the ergo, that is to say, at the level of intersection in the Eulerian
representation. This not me is absolutely essential because, as Lacan indicates, it is
what Freud designates in his second topography as being the id. For Lacan, the id is
properly speaking that which, in discourse as far as it is logically structured, is not I. This
means, to follow Lacans logical articulation, a discourse insofar as it is logically
structured which escapes the I. And Lacan claims: When I say, logically structured,
understand this: grammatical. This is manifested in the fact that fantasy presents itself
as a sentence (A child is being beaten) which excludes in its very structure the I as
such. No commentary, Lacan adds, can testify to what introduces itself to the world in
such a formula. The structure of the sentence A child is being beaten does not
comment on itself, it shows itself. (155)
Lacan highlights the essential link between fantasy structured as such and the drive,
about which he had already shown in a close commentary on Instincts and their
Vicissitudes that they are constituted by a grammatical montage organised as a series
of reversions. The subject is taken in this grammatical structure that he had defined in
Seminar XI as acephalous [acphale, headless] that is to say where the I has no place,
where it is not the subject of the sentence, as in the statement of the fantasy.
There is a shared line between the I which speaks, but which is excluded from being,
and what is substituted as articulation of thought and which is grammatically structured
in a sentence. Remaining on one side of being, and on the other side of thought; the
accent being placed by Lacan on the element of the alternative which is going to be lost.
If loss at the level of thought, as we come to see it, resulting in a being which cannot
think itself, the other alternative, the I am not is exactly what is at stake in the
unconscious. The truth of alienation shows itself in the place of loss [dans la partie
perdue].
At the most immediate phenomenological level, the unconscious manifests itself as an
effect of surprise, there where the subject does not recognise himself, where he is not (in
slips, jokes, etc) [French here is mots desprit, translates better into English as quips
than jokes]. Lacan remarks on a point which he had already highlighted in the
seminar Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis, namely that any sentence, provided that
it is grammatical, produces meaning. At the level of the unconscious, we have the issue
of Beduetung. This means that where I am not, takes the place of the same type of
inversion that we come to observe relatively to I do not think. In other words, if the I do
not think was reversed according to the schema of alienation being something, the I
am not reversed is alienated in a thinking - thing. [si le "je ne pense pas" s'inversait
selon le schma de l'alination en "suis - quelque chose", le "je ne suis pas" s'inverse,
s'aliene en un "pense chose"]. Lacan highlights that this formula gives the true (156)
meaning to Freuds formulation according to which the unconscious is constituted by
thing representations [representations de choses].
With the id, we are dealing with a thought of something lost which would be like a disbeing [dsetre]. In the same manner, the inexistence at the level of the unconscious is

marked by an I think that is not I [je pense qui nest pas je].
There is a final step to take on the path of this logic of alienation, the first part of this
logic of fantasy: it is to indicate the disjunction of these two terms which pose
themselves as constituting the different relations of the I in thoughts about existence
[dans la pense de lexistence.] The I do not think and the I am not are not brought
together: they obscure each other. But it is at the place of I do not think that the it of
sentence I am it [je suis a] which, for Lacan, brings us back to the Freudian
imperative: Wo Es war, soll Ich werden. The Ich if it is werden [comes to be], comes
about precisely because it is not there. The I must by consequence not be dislodged,
as one can translate the Freudian formula, but on the contrary lodge itself there, where,
as Lacan puts it, playing on the equivocation: it lodges itself in logic.
The lines of the schema of Kleins demi-group converge towards the corner situated in
the bottom left. A number of consequences follow from this articulation. If in the shadow
of the I am not, of the default [du dfaut] of being, is revealed by the truth of the
structure, that is to say, the object a, then in the shadow of the I do not think, of the
default of thought, the hole in Bedeutung opens up, namely, says Lacan, the
incapacity, the impossibility of all signification to cover the nature of sex [ce quil en est
du sexe]. Hence the inscription of minus phi, in the bottom left, which symbolises
castration. Lacan underlines that (157) the essence of castration is what in this other
obscure relation, this eclipse, manifests itself in what sexual difference supports itself on
the Bedeutung of something which is lacking under the aspect of the phallus.
With these articulations, the first part - and in a way the core - of the logic of fantasy is
posed. Moving from this tightened structure around the veritable reversal of the cogito
with these logical tools (the logic of sets - De Morgan -, groupes de Klein, functions of
negation) Lacan opens the space of two lacks which correspond reciprocally to
themselves: lack at the level of being (the object a as the cause of desire) and lack at
the level of the signifier (S (barred A)). It seems to us that Lacan had never pushed his
theories this far. These advances will allow him in what follows in this seminar to
pronounce some previously unheard consequences which will constitute the second part
of this logic of fantasy. In effect, in this space there is deployed a series of problematics
as complex as they are essential of which the underlying leitmotif is none other than the
phenomenon of repetition.
Repetition: here we have the name of the second face, of the second axis of this
singular logic.
Lacan recalls the antinomic character of repetition compulsion in relation to Freuds
presuppositions concerning the principles of the functioning of the psychic apparatus,
notably in relation to the notion of homeostasis and of the lessening of tension
(corresponding to the economical point of view of Freudian metapsychology). It is an
essential clinical point, of which the negative therapeutic reaction or masochism, for

example, bear witness. But (158) what repeats in repetition? Repetition of an experience
of loss [dune situation perdue], it evokes the trace of a first experience [dune situation
premiere]. This first experience becomes repeated because it is an experience of loss.
Lacan rightly underlines that this conception is strictly Freudian and that it dates from
well before Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as Freud highlighted the irreducible character
of the object as lost since the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Lacan sees an
equivalence between this first experience of loss which repeats itself and
Urverdrangung, primary repression. The subjects foundational loss finds its logical
status under the form of a constituent law of the subject himself and which is:
repetition.
Repetition is the movement proper to the infinite duplication of lack [le mouvement
propre au ddoublement infini du manque]. Lacan has recourse to the golden number
[nombre dor] to explain this movement. It is a question of giving account of the manner
in which the subject, taken in the signifying structure, marked by the signifier and by the
lack which constitutes him as desiring subject, deploys itself in a series of interminable
repetitions of this lack in trying to respond to it. It is in this phenomenon of repetition that
there plays out what Lacan calls the drama of the subjectivisation of sex.
This drama of sexuation is linked to the non-accommodation of the sexes, to which
Lacan accords a particular effort of explanation. For if there is no sexual act, as he
affirms in this seminar for the first time - a formula which will be transformed in what
follows to there is no sexual relation - he strives to show what is behind this
impossibility. For this, he comes back to the golden number for support. It serves to
calibrate (159) the incommensurability of Unity [lUnit]: a part which has no common
measure with Unity as a whole.
Lacan cites, in the session of 22nd February 1967, his paper The Signification of the
Phallus, written in 1958: The phallus as signifier gives the ratio [la raison, to follow
Finks translation from this paper] to desire, in the sense where the term is employed to
mean the mean and extreme ratio of harmonic division. He explains - for the first time, it
would appear - the meaning which he gives to this formulation. This mathematical
problem has been known since the Greeks (Book X of Euclid), and consists of the
division of a whole into two parts such that everything is the largest of its parts as it is the
smallest [la division d'un tout en deux parties telles que ce tout soit la plus grande de
ses parties comme celle-ci est la plus petite]. In mathematical terms: let AB be a
segment of the right. Let C be a point of this segment, such that AC is greater than CB.

C divides AB in half if the extreme ratio were AB/AC = AC/BC. This problem has
received diverse treatments [dnominations] in the history of mathematics. The
development in fractions continues to bring about a suite of repetitions affected by this

same ratio [le dveloppement en fraction continue laisse apparaitre une suite de
reptitions affectes de la meme 'raison']. Lacans interest is on the singular relation of
unity to the golden number: he starts from something which presents itself as
incommensurable and about which it is nevertheless a question of measuring, namely
(160) the effect of loss, in other words of the a as lost object. It is through this loss that
the phallus presents itself as ratio of desire.
Lacan uses this mathematical tool to give a place to what is in question in the sexual act.
More precisely, he wants to show that the affirmation there is no sexual act is
supported by an incommensurability: an incommensurability of which, to play on these
terms, one cannot get the measure of without recourse to mathematics.
How does this incommensurability concern psychoanalysis? For Lacan, it is a question,
no more no less, of articulating the terms which allow us to give an account of how
repetition is implicated in the sexual act. Repetition implies - and in this Lacan
undertakes to follow the letter of Freud - an element of measure and harmony [un
lment de mesure et d'harmonie], that is, what orders the deployment of repetition, and
which is exactly what it is a question of specifying.
Lacan represents the problem on the schema from the transformations, or rather the
duplications, of a, the A, the One [lUn] and 1. This is to the extent that in repetition thus in the total failure - of the sexual act there is, precisely, a measure [une mesure]. He
tries to establish this measure between the One [Un], 1, a and A.
Let us differentiate firstly the One and 1. The One serves for Lacan as a metaphor of the
unity of the couple, of which the model is for him the unity between the mother and the
child. It is this unity that the child, as product of the couple, as object a, is confronted
with when he is later engaged in a sexual relationship. The 1 is the countable 1 [le 1
comptable], the one of the unary trait, (161) of repetition. It repeats the first One [lUn
premier] when the subject tries to be counted, without success, as One vis-a-vis the
Other in the conjuncture of the sexual relation, when he wants to identify himself as
sexual partner.
The a, product of the couple, the child, is each and every one with whom the Other is
confronted. In the schema it corresponds to the little segment which projects itself on the
big Other, and demonstrates at every attempt, every repetition, its incommensurability
with the One. The relation of the subject as a with the 1 of the Other is
incommensurable, but in what sense? In the sense where there is no common measure
of jouissance. This aharmonic division [division anharmonique], as Lacan calls it,
metaphorises the absence of a common measure of jouissance between the subject and
the Other in the field of the (lack of) sexual relationship.
Between this One, (A) and difference (a), in the repetition which instates itself and which
is itself a loss, there is a harmonious ratio, not in the sense of an impossible

complementarity but in the constant relation of the smallest to the largest. It is there that
the minus phi intervenes, that is to say, castration designated as the signifying relation of
the phallic function as essential lack of the junction of the sexual relation with its
subjective realisation. The phallus is the element which neither of instantiation nor
complementarity nor symmetry between the sexes. On the other hand, the sexes
differentiate themselves according to the relation that they establish to the phallus.
Lacan supports the idea that the absence of a guarantee regarding that which
differentiates the masculine from the feminine is what invests the act of copulation as
that which could bring this guarantee. The modern version of the Platonic myth would be
the one of a sexual conjunction where the (162) jouissance of each partner could be
complementary, finding a common measure and shared on the side of the man and on
the side of the woman. This common measure, this relation between jouissances could
produce a symbolisation of the sexes which would supplement that which is lacking in
language. Unfortunately, there is nothing of the sort. It is on this point that the question
of sex and of subjective alienation is raised. And this issue follows the same path as the
logic of alienation. If the I do not think manifests itself as being male or female, the I
am not being on the other side, that is to say, on the side of the Other, that founds the
misunderstanding of the sexual act, signals what comes from the I do not think where I
am not thinking and which arrives at the I am not in the place where I am not being. It
is as the subject declares himself in all innocence that being a man there where I do not
think, under the form of you are my wife there where I am not. Nothing prevents the
woman from doing the same. It is under this form of ignorance that the subject manifests
himself in the sexual act. And, in so doing, it situates at the juncture or, to express it
better, at the disjuncture of the body and of jouissance.
This articulation constitutes the second part of this logic of fantasy. As Lacan puts it, it is
a question of rethinking logic from the starting point of this little a [ partir de ce petit a].
We must not lose the perspective that the deployment of the drama of the
subjectivisation of sex in the medium and extreme ratio of the phallus as lack is
consecutive to primordial alienation: the little a is the metaphorical child of the One and
of the Other, says Lacan, provided that it is (163) born as a waste product [pour autant
qu'il est n comme dchet] of the inaugural repetition of the relation of the One to the
Other, the repetition through which the subject comes to be born.
The subject finds its place in the satisfaction found in repetition. In the repetition of the
sexual act, the subject is in search of a response, of the appearance of a final signifier
which would enable it to represent itself as man or woman. It is here that there emerges
the disjunction of the body and jouissance. The common measure expected of the
sexual act cannot be reached, and not only because of the failure of the organ involved
in copulation. If phallic jouissance existed, it is limited by erection, it is a purely autoerotic
jouissance which produces no relation and of which detumescence signals the limit. But
in the most radical fashion, the subject is already marked by the signifying function which
is acquired only by a loss of jouissance. This loss is designated by the letter a. The
sexes are thus for each other the measure of this impossible jouissance, but this

measure is impossible, incommensurable. Each sex repeats with the other the
duplication of 1 + a = 1/a.
In this movement of repetition, three pathways, according to Lacan, are open to the
subject - always in the perspective of this structure as a network which he uses, the
groupe de Klein: acting out, the passage lacte and sublimation. There is a direct
relation between alienation which, we remember, is represented to us as linking two
different operations: first of all the forced choice of I do not think from the Es of the
logical structure; then, the other element that one cannot choose of the alternative
situated at the nucleus of the unconscious as something where no thought can be
attributed to the I, and which joins it to a I am not, namely the indeterminable character
of the subject in relation to (164) unconscious though. From there, Lacan proposes to
situate, always on the basis of a repetition, the correspondence of two modes under
which the subject can appear in a different manner according to the dictates of the act
[les versants de lacte]: either the one of the I of alienation which he correlates to the
passage lacte, or as the one which reveals the position of the unconscious in the
analytic situation, correlated to acting out.
Lacan considers the deployment of this dimension of the act in repetition as the founder
[comme foundateur] of the subject. Thus, after it, the subject would be, in the act, pure
division. Identifying the question of the act will bring us back to identifying the pivotal
point of repetition for the subject, in other words that which is formed from lack. Lacan
does not dwell further on this point, but he will take it up again the following year.
Let us nevertheless highlight what he brings into relief: that the important thing is not so
much in the definition of the act as in what follows it. In this session of the seminar Lacan
uses common representations from the topology of surfaces: the torus and the Moebius
band. He asks himself the question of whether the cut generated by the signifier meaning: by the act - produces a different structure. This leaves in suspense the
question, which seems to us essential as much from the theoretical point of view as from
the clinical point of view, of locating the incidences and consequences of the act not only
at the level of the determination of the subject, but in the mutations of the subject.
There are certainly other questions which are raised in this seminar. Thus, for example,
the reader will find important developments on sublimation and its relation to satisfaction,
to repetition and the sexual act. But it is on jouissance, or perversion in general (165)
and on masochism in particular that Lacan brings essential contributions which surely
count amongst the finest that one can find in the analytic literature. We will not discuss
them here, despite their interest and their importance, because we wanted to limit our
discussion to the core of the seminar.
Let us highlight simply that Lacan closes this year of the seminar by returning to the
question of truth. Where logic is intended to be clear, clean and sharp - connoting a
faithfulness to truth or falsehood - psychoanalysis, or rather what the practice of

psychoanalysis reveals, is inscribed in contradiction. It is exactly this that poses a

problem for logic: contradiction, since it rests on the principle of the excluded (something
can be affirmed and negated at the same time from the same point of view) or the law of
bivalence (every proposition is either true or false). Analytic practice demonstrates that
in no case as concerns the subject will things be either linear or univocal. The
unconscious manifests itself as a contradiction by inacting the principle of noncontradiction. But this state of affairs only makes us pose with a still greater demand the
question of truth. What is the truth of a discourse which can affirm and disaffirm at the
same time the same thing? Lacan does not back down in the face of this difficulty. He
defines analytic discourse as being submitted to this law of soliciting the truth. It finds
itself in the discourse of the subject, in the defiles of the signifier, in its recurrence. Or in
the importance of fantasy.
(166) In logic, the logicians, the authors, whatever may be their merits, limit themselves
to the formal functions of truth in the framework that we have highlighted , namely the
principle of non-contradiction and of bivalence [bivalence]. However, Lacan insists on
the impossibility which confronts logic thanks to the problem of signification, because
there is no possibility of fixing any signification as being univocal. This is why, according
to him, from the logical point of view, one cannot help ascribing somewhere a logic that
attributes the function of truth to a group of signifiers. This is exactly the function that
Lacan accords to fantasy. For him, fantasy is only an arrangement of signifiers which put
in place the object a and the subject represented by a sentence. From this point of view,
the fantasy is deduced [se dduit] from the grammatical structure which oscillates
between the I do not think and the I am not as a signification of truth. However, what
meaning can we give to this signification of truth? Lacan poses here a veritable
definition. He considers that the signification of truth means the same as when we use
the uppercase V in logic [la meme chose que lorsqu'on affecte un nonc d'un grand V
en logique - uppercase V probably refers to Verit, the Truth]. Through this connotation
of truth (to which we are brought by the tortuous path of repetition) fantasy, reduced to a
sentence [une phrase], acquires for Lacan the dignity of an axiom. In our interpretation,
fantasy has no other role. From this point of view, he is to be taken as literally as
possible. The analyst is charged with finding it in each structure, and defining the laws of
transformation which will assure this fantasy, in the deduction of the enunciations of the
unconscious discourse of the patient, the place of an axiom. An axiom of what? Of the
manner in which the subject disentangles himself in order to counter the deficiency of
his desire in the field of the sexual act.
(167) We mentioned by way of introduction the idea of an audacious wager on the part
of Lacan. It is up to each to decide for himself if this wager has yielded its promises. As
far as we are concerned, it seems to us that this seminar has won its wager: but not the
one that had been posed. In other words, not in relation to this logic conforming to the
facts of the unconscious that Lacan, in his own words, did not sketch out. Nevertheless,
from these outlines, essential questions have been developed up to the furthest point.
Notably for what concerns the articulation of the subject in the structure through the
operations alienation-repetition, through the accent put on the difficulty intrinsic to the

sexual act and of the logic of its incommensurability, the articulations on jouissance as
being the economy of fantasy, the questions which open up in relation to the analytic
cure, and specifically its end and, on this basis, the essential question, difficult but
critical, of the training of analysts.
Let us add that the interrogations produced in the work in progress [in English in the
original] of the seminar have manifestly inflected its direction. Lacan bifurcates for a
moment on his path. Leaving the elaboration on the logic of fantasy, he finds himself
through the intermediary of the work on repetition faced with the question of the act.
However, from this moment, it seems to us that it is this question which he takes strictly
on logical considerations, about which he will only come back towards the end of his
seminar. Under these conditions, we can see very clearly how it is that the seminar of
the following year will be devoted to The Psychoanalytic Act.
Translated (badly) from the French by Owen Hewitson