Seminar XXIV
| Le moment de conclure | |
|---|---|
| Seminar XXV | |
Representative cover image for Lacan’s Seminar XXV | |
| French Title | Le moment de conclure |
| English Title | The Moment to Conclude / Time to Conclude |
| Seminar Information | |
| Seminar Date(s) | 15 November 1977 – May 1978[1] |
| Session Count | 12 + (published fragmentary transcripts)[2] |
| Location | Paris |
| Psychoanalytic Content | |
| Key Concepts | Lalangue • Desire of the Analyst • Unconscious as Writing • Non‑rapport sexuel • Transferential Desire |
| Notable Themes | Ending of analysis; language and body; desire; critique of psychoanalytic science; late Lacanian thought |
| Chronology | |
| Preceded by | Seminar XXIV |
| Followed by | Seminar XXVI |
Le moment de conclure (Le moment de conclure; English: The Moment to Conclude or Time to Conclude) is the twenty‑fifth yearly seminar delivered by Jacques Lacan in the academic year 1977–78. It is one of Lacan’s late seminars and was given after his seminal works on the sinthome and the unconscious as structured like a language. Although no definitive published edition in the Éditions du Seuil “Champ freudien” exists, the seminar is known through various transcripts and recordings of lessons delivered in Paris from November 15 1977 through spring 1978.[1][2]</ref>
The title—literally “The Moment to Conclude”—signals Lacan’s reflective and summative tone, as he articulates positions about psychoanalytic practice, desire, language, and the place of the analyst in what he regards as the late period of his teaching. The seminar continues threads from previous years, particularly the emphasis on language and the unconscious while foregrounding the notion that psychoanalysis must come to terms with its own mode of conclusion and limits.[2][1]
Historical and institutional context
Lacan’s late seminars and École freudienne de Paris
Seminar XXV belongs to Lacan’s late teaching. Following his influential explorations of the sinthome in Seminar XXIII (1975–76), and his structural examinations of the unconscious and Lalangue across the 1970s, Lacan’s Seminar XXV is delivered at a moment when his health was declining and his institutional role as founder of the École freudienne de Paris was consolidating his legacy. However, unlike many earlier seminars, XXV never received a formal Seuil edition; it survives in partial transcripts and published excerpts, and was known to circulate among Lacanian scholars and clinicians through photocopies and later online PDFs and audio recordings.[2][1]
This seminar appears in standard lists of Lacan’s seminars (preceded by Seminar XXIV: L’insu que sait de l’une‑bévue, s’aile à mourre and followed by Seminar XXVI: La topologie et le temps).[3]
Structure and methodology
Unlike earlier seminars with established published texts, Seminar XXV is known through fragmentary lesson headings and thematic indexues that point to key motifs such as pulsions, the Oedipus complex, language and desire, and reflections on psychoanalytic practice. The surviving transcripts suggest a series of at least 12 lessons, with titles including “Pulsión,” “Tragedia Edípica,” “La demanda pasa por el deseo,” and “La neurosis es natural?”.[4]
Lacan’s method in this seminar remains discursive and reflective: rather than systematizing formal topological dispositifs (as in Seminar XXIV or XXVI), he repeatedly returns to psychoanalytic core questions—such as the relation between language and the body, the desire of the analyst, and the conditions under which analysis must conclude.
Key themes and concepts
Psychoanalysis and “conclusion”
The framing concept of Seminar XXV is the *moment of concluding* psychoanalysis. Lacan situates this not as “closing” or terminating analysis in an ego‑psychological sense, but as confronting the epistemological and ethical limits of psychoanalysis as a discipline. The title announces a reflective stance: psychoanalysis must acknowledge what it can and cannot conclude about the human subject’s relation to language, desire, and jouissance.
Although published transcripts do not include a canonical closing formulation, in the first lesson Lacan announces the title and stakes of the seminar by stating: “There you are, I entitled my seminar—can you hear?—I entitled my seminar this year: ‘Time to conclude’… what I have to say to you, I am going to say it.”[5]
Language, Writing, and the Unconscious
A central concern in Seminar XXV is the relationship between language and the unconscious. Echoing Lacan’s longstanding thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language, the late seminar focuses on what Lacan sometimes refers to as Lalangue—the materiality of language as it imprints on the subject’s body and unconscious prior to any structured symbolic order. Transcripts emphasize that “writing is in the unconscious,” connecting dream content, slips, and witticisms to a form of inscription that eludes conscious intention.[6]
This emphasis on language as writing (and not simply symbolic representation) resonates with Lacan’s later topology‑inflected work, where the unconscious is conceived as inscribed on the body and in speech. In Seminar XXV, Lacan pursues the question of how psychoanalysis can “conclude” only by recognizing that language itself exceeds any final closure.
Desire of the Analyst and Transferential Desire
Another motif in the seminar relates to the desire of the analyst. Transcripts indicate Lacan’s interrogation of what the analyst desires, and how this positions the analyst in relation to the analysand’s own desire. Rather than treating desire as something to be “resolved” or “satisfied,” Lacan’s late teaching emphasizes the transferential dimension: the analyst’s desire is not a knowable object, but a function of the analytic relation itself.
While precise formulations survive only in excerpts and secondary indexes, the seminar includes lessons entitled “El deseo del analista: S.S.S.” (the desire of the analyst) and reflections on how the analyst must “operate by realizing the slope of words” rather than intervening on contradictions explicitly posed by the analysand.[7]
Critique of Psychoanalytic Science and the “Science” of Psychoanalysis
Seminar XXV contains Lacan’s late reflections on the status of psychoanalysis relative to science. In the opening lessons, Lacan seems to engage with critiques of psychoanalysis as a science (for example, referencing Karl Popper’s skepticism about psychoanalysis) and insists that psychoanalysis must be taken seriously even when it does not meet conventional criteria for scientific knowledge.[8]
This critique reiterates Lacan’s longstanding position that psychoanalysis is not reducible to empirical science; its domain concerns the subject spoken in language and the insistence of desire. “Time to conclude” thus signals a refusal to capitulate analytic practice to scientistic reductionism.
Non‑rapport Sexuel and the Hole in Language
Late commentators connecting Seminar XXV to broader Lacanian themes note that Lacan’s late work foregrounds the impossibility of a sexual rapport (Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'Module:Exponential search' not found.)—a position first made explicit in Seminar XX (Encore) and revisited by Lacanians reading XXV as deepening the critique of any notion of harmony or closure in desire and language.[9]
The “hole,” or absence of sexual rapport, stands as a structural gap in the symbolic order. Seminar XXV’s emphasis on concluding psychoanalytic inquiry can be read as confronting this gap—the recognition that desire is always structured around an absence that cannot be wholly resolved.
Theoretical significance and clinical implications
Seminar XXV’s significance lies less in the introduction of novel formal topological constructs than in its reflective assessment of psychoanalytic practice and its philosophical stakes. By invoking language as writing and emphasizing the analyst’s desire, Lacan underscores that psychoanalysis cannot conceive of a final mastery of desire or signification; the moment to conclude is never a final closure but an acknowledgment of the limits internal to analytic discourse.
Clinically, this perspective reframes termination of analysis: not as strengthening an ego or resolving neurosis, but as the subject’s arrival at a recognition of their own divided relation to language, desire, and the Other. Ending analysis thus requires attending to how the subject’s speech bears the inscription of unconscious processes rather than retrieving an origin or final truth.
Reception and legacy
Because Seminar XXV was never published in a definitive Seuil edition, its reception in Lacanian scholarship is more specialized than earlier seminars with widespread circulation. Nonetheless, references to “Le moment de conclure” appear in bibliographies of Lacan’s seminars and in discussions of his late teaching focused on language, desire, and the limits of psychoanalysis.[10]
Scholarship on Lacan’s late work situates Seminar XXV alongside Seminar XXIV and Seminar XXVI as part of the culminating phases of his seminar series. Commentators interested in Lacan’s engagement with language and body, as well as reflections on the analytic act itself, often draw on transcripts and audio recordings to assess how Lacan’s thought grapples with conclusion rather than closure.
See also
- Jacques Lacan
- Unconscious
- Lalangue
- Transferential Desire
- Non‑rapport sexuel
- École freudienne de Paris
- List of Seminars of Jacques Lacan
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Template:Cite web
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Transcripts indicate at least 12 lessons across 1977–78; no canonical Seuil edition exists.
- ↑ Template:Cite web
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Further reading
- Transcripts of Séminaire XXV: Le moment de conclure (online and print PDFs)
- Secondary analyses of Lacan’s late seminars and the question of speech, desire, and conclusion in psychoanalysis
| Date | MP3 | |
| 16 novembre 1976 | link | link |
| 14 décembre 1976 | link | link |
| 21 décembre 1976 | link | link |
| 11 janvier 1977 | link | link |
| 18 janvier 1977 | link | link |
| 08 février 1977 | link | link |
| 15 février 1977 | link | link |
| 08 mars 1977 | link | link |
| 15 mars 1977 | link | link |
| 18 avril 1977 | link | link |
| 10 mai 1977 | link | link |
| 17 mai 1977 | link | link |