Seminar XVI

Jacques Lacan's Seminars : I · II · III · IV · V · VI · VII · VIII · IX · X · XI · XII · XIII · XIV · XV · XVI · XVII · XVIII · XIX · XX · XXI · XXII · XXIII · XXIV · XXV · XXVI · XXVII I. Freud's technical writings II. The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis III. The Psychoses IV. The Object Relations V. The Formations of the Unconscious VI. Desire and its Interpretation VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis VIII. Transference IX. Identification The Names of the Father X. Anxiety XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis XII. Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis XIII. The Object of Psychoanalysis XIV. The Logic of Fantasy XV. The Psychoanalytic Act XVI. From One Other to the Other XVII. The Reverse of Psychoanalysis XVIII. On a Discourse That Would Not Be Semblance XIX. Or Worse XX. Encore XXV. The Moment of Concluding XXVII. Dissolution ← Seminar XV Seminar XVII →

From an Other to the other
Seminar XVI
Image commonly associated with circulating transcripts of Seminar XVI: D'un Autre à l'autre.
French Title	Le Séminaire, Livre XVI: D'un Autre à l'autre
English Title	The Seminar, Book XVI: From an Other to the Other
Seminar Information
Seminar Date(s)	1968–1969 (academic year)
Location	École Normale Supérieure (Paris)
Psychoanalytic Content
Key Concepts	Big Other (A) • Objet petit a • Jouissance • Surplus-jouissance • Surplus-value • Phallus • Feminine jouissance • Name-of-the-Father • Structure is the real
Notable Themes	Passage from the Other to object a and back; knowledge and jouissance; Marx and surplus-value; Pascal’s wager; crisis of the university; God, grace, and the dead Father; repetition of the Graph of Desire
Theoretical Context
Period	Middle period (transition to discourse theory)
Register	Symbolic/Real with emphasis on jouissance and knowledge
Chronology
Preceded by	Seminar XV
Followed by	Seminar XVII

From an Other to the other (Le Séminaire, Livre XVI: D'un Autre à l'autre) is the sixteenth annual seminar of Jacques Lacan, delivered at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris during the 1968–1969 academic year. The seminar has not yet appeared as a standardized volume in the French Le Séminaire series; it is known through stenographic notes, internal publications, and transcriptions used within Lacanian schools.

Seminar XVI continues the trajectory opened in Seminar XV: L'acte psychanalytique and prepares the formalization of the four discourses in Seminar XVII: L'envers de la psychanalyse. Lacan explores the passage “from an Other to the other”—from the big Other (Autre, A) as locus of signifiers and knowledge to the small other/objet petit a as cause of desire and support of jouissance—and back again. Through readings of Blaise Pascal and Karl Marx, he links surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir) to Marx’s surplus-value (plus-value), situating the objet petit a as a kind of “surplus” extracted from the subject’s relation to the Other.

The seminar also engages directly with the crisis of the university and the political events surrounding May 1968, interrogating the status of psychoanalysis in academia and insisting that “structure is the real” (la structure, c'est le réel). Lacan develops questions of feminine jouissance, the “nullibiquity” (nullibiquité) of the phallus, and the status of God and the Name-of-the-Father, all under the rubric of an economy of jouissance that exceeds the field of knowledge.

Historical and institutional context

ENS, May 1968, and the crisis of the university

Lacan’s seminar at the École Normale Supérieure took place in the immediate aftermath of the student and workers’ uprising of May 1968 in France, which had put the university and its institutions into crisis. Seminar XVI opens with Lacan situating psychoanalysis in relation to this crisis of the university and of academic authority. He famously declares:

“If psychoanalysis cannot be articulated as a knowledge and taught as such, it has no place in Academia, where it is only a matter of knowledge.”

At the same time, Lacan rejects the idea that psychoanalysis could dispense with conceptualization or with structure. Against anti-structuralist currents, he affirms that “structure is the Real” (la structure, c'est le réel), emphasizing that the real effects of psychoanalysis are mediated by formal structures of signifiers and discourse.

These discussions anticipate the university discourse and the analyst’s discourse that Lacan will formalize explicitly in Seminar XVII. D'un Autre à l'autre can thus be read as a bridge between his earlier structural and topological work and a more explicit social and political theory of discourse.

The École Freudienne de Paris and the mid-period seminars

By 1968 Lacan was teaching within the framework of the École Freudienne de Paris (EFP), founded in 1964 after his break with the International Psychoanalytical Association. The mid-period seminars (Books XIV–XVIII) are strongly marked by debates about training, transmission, and the position of psychoanalysis vis-à-vis the university and other institutions of knowledge.

Seminar XVI follows L'acte psychanalytique, where Lacan had examined the psychoanalytic act, subjective destitution, and the desire of the analyst, and precedes Seminar XVII, where he will formalize four discourses (Master, University, Hysteric, Analyst). Many commentators read From an Other to the other as preparing this shift by focusing on the relation between knowledge, jouissance, and the objet petit a.

Textual status and circulation

Like several of Lacan’s later seminars, Seminar XVI has not yet been published in a critical French edition. The text is known through stenographic notes taken by attendees and through transcriptions circulated within Lacanian circles. While these transcriptions have shaped scholarship and internal teaching, they do not have the status of an officially established text comparable to, for example, Seminar XI or Seminar XX. Academic references to the seminar typically acknowledge this provisional status.

Conceptual framework and methodology

Title and central problematic: from the Other to a and back

The title D'un Autre à l'autre plays on Lacan’s distinction between the big Other (A)—the locus of language, law, and symbolic address—and the small other or objet petit a, which functions as cause of desire and support of jouissance. The “passage from an Other to the other” includes:

• the movement from object a to the Other, and
• the movement from the Other back to object a.

Lacan analyzes this double passage in terms of the Graph of Desire and earlier work on the trait unaire (unitary mark) from Seminar IX: Identification. He returns to the line l—an unbroken, continuous line representing the unary trait—and confronts it with object a, the remainder or “fall” from the functioning of the signifying chain. In one schematic diagram, an unbroken line (l) is set alongside a as a point of subtraction or cut:

The unbroken line l (trait unaire) and object a in Lacan's diagrams

Lacan’s method throughout the seminar is to articulate such diagrams with readings of Pascal and Marx, showing how the objet petit a can be understood as surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir) in homology with Marx’s surplus-value (plus-value).

Structure is the real

One of the seminar’s programmatic statements is Lacan’s insistence that “structure is the Real” (la structure, c'est le réel). This formula responds to contemporary critiques of structuralism and to the temptation, after May 1968, to oppose “life” or spontaneity to abstract conceptualization.

For Lacan, the “real” of psychoanalysis is not an immediate lived experience but the insistence of certain structural impossibilities and stumbling blocks—most notably that “there is no sexual relation” and that jouissance cannot be fully integrated into symbolic knowledge. Seminar XVI thus preserves the structural orientation of Lacan’s earlier work while pushing it toward issues of the economy of jouissance, capitalism, and the functioning of the superego.

Readings of Pascal and Marx

Methodologically, Lacan proceeds by close reading and structural analogy. Two major references are:

• Blaise Pascal’s Le Pari (the wager) and the Pensées, used to articulate the relation between God, the subject, and the “nothing” (rien) that separates life from its jouissance; and
• Karl Marx’s theory of surplus-value in Das Kapital, taken as an exemplary formalization of a surplus extracted from the worker’s relation to labor, which Lacan parallels with a surplus extracted from the subject’s relation to jouissance.

Lacan insists that “Marx invented surplus-value, and I, Lacan, invented objet a'’.” He proposes to construct the notion of plus-de-jouir (surplus-jouissance) by homology with surplus-value, in order to isolate object a as the remainder extracted by discourse from the subject’s libidinal economy.

Key themes, concepts, and configurations

From objet a to the Other, and from the Other to objet a

Extending the work of La logique du fantasme, Lacan returns to the matheme of fantasy, $ <> a. In Seminar XVI he states that in this formula “the being of a is the plus-de-jouir, surplus-jouissance.” Object a is no longer only the object cause of desire; it is also the extracted surplus enjoyment that results from the subject’s insertion into the symbolic order.

At the level of enunciation, Lacan claims that perversion reveals “surplus-jouissance in its bare form.” The perverse subject is said to “give to God his true plenitude by giving a back to the Other”: a is in A, the small other in the big Other, yet a simultaneously makes a hole in A. Jouissance is excluded from the field of the Other as locus of knowledge; a is the effect of fall that results from this exclusion. After moving from a to A (giving the object back to the Other), one must then move from A back to a, isolating the surplus that is never entirely absorbed by symbolic articulation.

This double passage “from an Other to the other” formalizes the looping between the subject’s demand addressed to the Other, the signifiers that respond, and the remainder of jouissance not captured by meaning.

Surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir) and surplus-value

One of the most influential developments of Seminar XVI is Lacan’s articulation of surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir). Taking Marx’s surplus-value (plus-value) as a model, Lacan defines plus-de-jouir as a surplus, extra, or supplemental jouissance extracted from the subject’s relation to the Other and to the law.

In Marx, surplus-value is the difference between the value produced by labor and the value of labor-power, appropriated by the capitalist. By homology, Lacan presents surplus-jouissance as the “profit” extracted by discourse from the subject’s libidinal economy. The subject is separated from a part of its enjoyment; this separation produces both the object a and a superego imperative to enjoy.

Bruce Fink has emphasized that the French term plus-de-jouir is structurally based on plus-value and that translations which render it as “over-coming” (as in one early translation of Television) are misleading: the plus should be understood as “more,” in the sense of “again” (encore) or “surplus,” not as a moral overcoming. The more sensual sense of being “overcome” or “overwhelmed” by pleasure, Fink notes, is better reserved for the Other jouissance associated with certain forms of feminine enjoyment, whereas plus-de-jouir belongs to the logic of extraction and repetition.

Jouissance, phallus, and feminine jouissance

Seminar XVI develops several strands of Lacan’s teaching on jouissance:

• Questions of feminine jouissance: Lacan asks whether feminine jouissance should be located on the side of the Other or of the Thing (la Chose). This anticipates later formulations in Seminar XX: Encore about a supplementary, “not-all” (pas-tout) jouissance beyond the phallus.
• The “nullibiquity” (nullibiquité) of the phallus: Lacan speaks of the phallus as non-ubiquitous, a signifier that testifies that jouissance is real but cannot be everywhere; jouissance is real but cannot be completely symbolized.
• The phallus as a symbol that is lacking or outside-system: the phallus is the signifier of lack in the Other and may itself be situated as lacking or “outside the system” (hors-système), indicating an internal limit to symbolization.

These developments are linked to Lacan’s re-presentation of the Graph of Desire in the seminar: by repeating and modifying earlier graphs, he shows how the circulation of signifiers produces both the separation from jouissance and the emergence of object a as surplus.

Pascal’s wager, “the nothing that life is,” and the gap of jouissance

Seminar XVI contains an extended reading of Blaise Pascal’s wager (Le Pari). While Pascal apparently raises the question of the existence of God (“Does God exist?”), Lacan suggests that the only true question is that of the subject: “Do I exist?” (Est-ce que j’existe?).

Lacan takes up Pascal’s meditation on “the infinite nothing” (le néant infini) and the “nothing that life is” as a way of approaching surplus-jouissance. The assumption of loss—the wager on what is lost or risked—creates a gap (béance) between the body and its jouissance: such is, for Lacan, the effect of the objet petit a as lost object in the field of the Other. The subject’s relation to this gap is what Pascal thematizes under the heading of “misery” and the need for diversion (divertissement).

For Pascal, Lacan notes, salvation lies in grace: God’s mercy is greater than his justice. Grace allows proximity to the desire of the Other in its different articulations: “I ask myself what you want” (Que veux-tu?); “I ask you what you want” (Je te demande ce que tu veux); which leads finally to the prayer “Thy Will be done!” (Que ta volonté soit faite!). Yet this sentence is addressed to a faceless Other: God’s will, insofar as it is not our will, comes to lack. For lack of God, we are left with the Father as dead, the Father as name (Nom-du-Père)—pivot of discourse—and as the relation of jouissance to castration.

God, dead Father, and the Name-of-the-Father

Lacan remarks in Seminar XVI: “I mainly talk about a dead God, perhaps so as better to free myself from my relation to a dead Freud.” God appears here as an index of the structural place of the Other, but one which, in modernity, is evacuated, leaving a gap that is filled by the Name-of-the-Father.

Lacan states that “the Name-of-the-Father is a rift that remains wide open in my discourse, it is only known through an act of faith: there is no Incarnation in the place of the Other.” This formula both acknowledges the centrality of the paternal signifier in Lacan’s structural clinic (especially for psychosis, as in Seminar III: The Psychoses) and relativizes it: the Name-of-the-Father is not a guaranteed substance but a rift and a point of belief.

In the absence of a guaranteed God, what remains is a symbolic Father as name—anchor of discourse—and as operator of the relation between jouissance and castration. This allows Lacan to connect theology, law, and the subjective economy of surplus-jouissance.

Superego, surplus-jouissance, and consumerism

The notion of surplus-jouissance developed in Seminar XVI has been widely commented upon in later theory. Slavoj Žižek, drawing explicitly on Lacan, has proposed that we can grasp the logic of surplus-jouissance through seemingly trivial consumer objects such as “diet” products:

“So in the case of the caffeine-free diet Coke, we drink the Nothingness itself, the pure semblance of a property that is effectively merely an envelope of a void. This example makes palpable the inherent link between three notions: that of Marxist surplus-value, that of the Lacanian objet a as surplus-jouissance, and the paradox of the superego, perceived long ago by Freud: the more you drink Coke, the more you are thirsty; the more profit you have, the more you want; the more you obey the superego command, the more you are guilty.”

In all three cases, Žižek notes, the logic of balanced exchange is replaced by an excessive paradox: “the more you give, the more you owe”, the consumerist version being “the more you buy, the more you have to spend.” This paradox is the opposite of the paradox of love (as in Juliet’s “the more I give, the more I have”). The key to this perturbation is surplus-jouissance, the objet a that “exists (or rather insists) in a kind of curved space in which, the more you approach it, the more it eludes your grasp (or, the more you possess it, the greater the lack).”

Žižek also links surplus-jouissance to sexual difference and the paternal function, contrasting the pacifying symbolic law (Name-of-the-Father) with the excessive superego injunction embodied in the fantasy of the “primordial father” who enjoys all women. This reading extends Lacan’s Seminar XVI developments to a critique of contemporary consumerist and superego formations.

Sexual difference, superego, and “exception”

Following Lacan’s indications, Žižek argues that the superego is experienced more intensely in men than in women because it is men who are structurally tied to the excessive surplus-jouissance that exceeds the pacifying function of the symbolic law. From the standpoint of the paternal function, the opposition between pacifying law and excessive superego injunction is that between the Name-of-the-Father (symbolic authority) and the rapacious “primordial father” of Freud’s myth—allowed to enjoy all women.

This “primordial father” is, Žižek suggests, an essentially male (obsessional), not feminine (hysterical), fantasy. For the man, integration into the symbolic order is sustained by a hidden reference to unbridled, excessive jouissance—an unconditional superego injunction “to enjoy, to go to the extreme, to transgress and constantly force the limit.” It is man whose integration into the symbolic is supported by the superego exception. While these formulations go beyond Lacan’s own text, they are often cited as elaborations of the logic of surplus-jouissance introduced in Seminar XVI.

Theoretical significance and clinical implications

Knowledge, jouissance, and the discourses

Seminar XVI occupies a pivotal place in Lacan’s shift from a focus on the structure of the subject to a focus on discourse as a social bond. By articulating the relations between knowledge (savoir), jouissance, objet petit a, and surplus-jouissance, Lacan prepares the matrix of the four discourses he will present in Seminar XVII:

• the passage from A (the Other of knowledge) to a (the surplus-jouissance extracted from the subject), and
• the circulation of this surplus within Master, University, Hysteric, and Analyst discourses.

In this framework, the university discourse is characterized by the production of knowledge that nevertheless extracts surplus-jouissance; Seminar XVI’s reflections on the crisis of the university and the place of psychoanalysis there can thus be reread as anticipations of this formalization.

Clinical structures and perversion

Clinically, Seminar XVI contributes to Lacan’s theory of perversion as a distinct structure alongside neurosis and psychosis. By stating that perversion reveals “surplus-jouissance in its bare form,” Lacan highlights the perverse subject’s relation to the objet petit a as something to be returned to the Other—to give the Other its plenitude by staging and sustaining the Other’s jouissance.

This has implications for analytic technique: in working with perverse structures, the analyst must attend to how the subject positions themselves as instrument or servant of the Other’s enjoyment, and how surplus-jouissance is located and circulated through their acts and fantasies. The homology with surplus-value also suggests potential analogies between perverse structures and certain ideological formations in consumer capitalism, though Lacan himself only hints at these connections in Seminar XVI.

Body, jouissance, and the gap of a

The seminar’s emphasis on the gap (béance) between the body and its jouissance, produced by the assumption of loss, has clinical implications beyond perversion. It underlines that symptoms can be understood as attempts to manage, localize, or limit jouissance, and that the objet petit a functions as a way of “pinning” enjoyment to specific partial objects, zones, or fantasies.

In this respect, Seminar XVI can be read alongside Lacan’s later work on the sinthome (Seminar XXIII) as part of a broader effort to understand how subjects construct particular economies of jouissance that sustain their existence in the face of structural impossibilities.

Ethics and the dead Other

Finally, Seminar XVI continues the ethical reflections begun in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and modified in Seminar XV. The insistence on a dead God and a dead Freud, on the Name-of-the-Father as rift rather than substantial guarantee, points to an ethics of analysis that does not rely on any transcendent Other. The analyst must operate without the guarantee of a living master and within a discourse where the Other is lacking.

This ethics is closely tied to the question of surplus-jouissance: the analyst’s interventions must operate on the extraction and localization of jouissance, rather than on the restoration of a supposed harmony. In this sense, Seminar XVI contributes to Lacan’s ongoing redefinition of the psychoanalytic act and the desire of the analyst.

Reception and legacy

Within Lacanian psychoanalysis

Within Lacanian circles, From an Other to the other is considered a major seminar for the concepts of surplus-jouissance, the passage between the Other and object a, and the relation between knowledge and enjoyment. It is routinely studied in training programs and reading groups, often in conjunction with Seminar XV and Seminar XVII.

Because the text is unpublished, its reception has been mediated by different transcriptions, which can vary in detail and emphasis. Nevertheless, the key themes—plus-de-jouir, the Pascal and Marx readings, the statement “structure is the real,” the considerations on the university—are stable points of reference in Lacanian scholarship.

In critical theory and cultural studies

The concept of surplus-jouissance, connected to Marx’s surplus-value in Seminar XVI, has had a broad impact in critical theory, political philosophy, and cultural studies. Authors such as Slavoj Žižek have made it central to Lacanian readings of ideology, consumerism, and contemporary capitalism, often citing D'un Autre à l'autre as the seminar in which the concept is systematically introduced.

This reception has fed back into psychoanalytic discussions, where surplus-jouissance is now routinely invoked to analyze phenomena ranging from eating disorders to digital addiction, though such applications go beyond Lacan’s own horizons in 1968–1969.

Debates and criticisms

Critics of Lacan’s mid-period have sometimes questioned the extent to which analogies with Marx’s surplus-value and references to Pascal illuminate clinical practice, versus providing philosophical or ideological commentary. Others have noted the difficulty, in the absence of an official text, of fixing the precise formulations of Seminar XVI.

Nonetheless, even critics acknowledge that From an Other to the other marks a turning point in Lacan’s theorization of jouissance and of the social dimension of psychoanalysis, and that surplus-jouissance has become indispensable for understanding later developments in Lacanian theory.

See also

• Jacques Lacan
• Seminar XV
• Seminar XVII
• Objet petit a
• Jouissance
• Plus-de-jouir
• Surplus-value
• Karl Marx
• Blaise Pascal
• Name-of-the-Father
• Big Other
• Psychoanalytic act
• Desire of the analyst
• Feminine jouissance
• There is no sexual relationship
• University discourse

Further reading

• Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre XVI: D'un Autre à l'autre, 1968–1969. Unpublished; available in various French transcriptions used in Lacanian schools.
• Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
• Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London/New York: Routledge, 1996.

• Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Jacques Lacan. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
• Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.
• Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.