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1968-1969 (699 pp.)-SEMINAIRE XVI: O'UN AUTRE A L'AUTRE
(SEMINAR XVI: FROM ONE OTHER TO THE OTHER)-ANONYMOUS VERSION, 1981
Lacan took a stand in the crisis of the university that followed May 1968: •. If psychoanalysis cannot be articulated as a kllowledge and taught as such, it has no place in the university, where it is only a matter of knowledge" and he rejected nonconceptualization. For him, structure is the real and can be taught thanks to the mathematical logic that analysts should learn, for it took the place of the question of the existence of God. Focusing on the Other and the objet a, Lacan analyzed and combined Pascal, Marx, and the logic of the link between I (the unbroken line [trait unaire) of L'ldentification SO) and a under the form
! = I + a a
with a series of transformations. To that, add questions on feminine jouis�sanee (is its locus the Other or the Thing? 43), on the nullibiquiti of~the phallus that testifies to the fact that jouissallce is real but cannot be symp,ol-
"',
216 00881 ER
ized, on the Phallus as a symbol that is lacking or outside system, and the repetition of the graphs of desire (36 and 46). Remember that this seminar is seven hundred typed pages long!
Lacan chose the right moment to declare that he read Marx when he was twenty, on his way to the hospital. How could he prove it? "His own volume [was I fall ing to pieces." He had not waited for the recent research on "Marx's structuralism" (an allusion to Althusser and his students at the E.N.S.) in order to discover in the third part, the fifth chapter of Capital.' Marx, he said, had invented "surplus-value" [pills-vallie] and he had invented the objet a. lie stated that he was going to construct the pills-de-jollir so as to isolate the objet a, and he was going to do so by homology (and not analogy, what a nightmare!) with "surplus-value" [pills-value]. In the algorithm of fantasy, 55 0 (/ (65), "the being of a is the plus-de-jollir." Moreover, "at the level of the enunciation," perversion reveals "the plus-de-jollir in its bare form." The relation between the plus-de-jouir and surplus value Ipills-vaille I is the func�tion of the objet a. Everybody, no doubt, agrees. As for the perverse, like "the man of faith or the crusader," he has given to God his true plenitude by giving 1I hack to the Other. Hence, a is in A (the small other is in the big Other); However, (/ makes a hole in A, as shown by the figure of the cross�cap All, }OIl;,uCIIlce is excluded, the Other is the locus where it is known, a is the effect of fall that results from it. After going from a to A, one must go fmm A to 1I. One can understand why the disciples fought to figure out whether the title should be spelled de /'autre a /'Autre or de L'AlItre a /'autre. In this very debate over the title, what was at stake for everyone was his plus�de-joui,..
Pascal's Pari appeared in the seminar so as to complicate everything. On the one hand, Lacan said, "I mainly talk about a dead God, maybe in order to better free myself from my relation to a dead Freud." On the other hand, however, Pascal in Le Pari raises the question of the existence of God. In fact, the only true question is that of the subject: Does J exist? Do I exist? "The nothing that life is," which is at stake for Pascal, is the plus-de-jouir. The assumption of the loss creates the gap [beance] between the body and its jouissance: such is indeed the well-known effect of the objet a (the lost ob�ject) in the field of the Other. For Pascal, the central point is "the infinite nothing"; the only salvation is grace, for God's mercy is bigger than His justice. Grace allows proximity to the desire of the Other in its various forms:
"I ask myself what you want," "I ask you what you want," which leads to "Thy Will be Done!" However, this sentence is said to a faceless Other. God's will, for not being our will, comes to lack; then, for lack of God, we arc Icft with the Father as dead, the Father as a name (the pivot of discourse) and as the relation of jouissance to castration. "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 locus of the Other." Such is the
The Worn of Jacque. Lacan 217
Lacanian pathos. "After seventy years of analysis, still nothing has been for�mulated about male man," he admitted. This may explain the effect upon him of Michel Foucault's talk on "the name of the author."
In June Lacan read the letter that F1aceliere, the director of the E.N.S., sent him in March to tell him that his teaching privileges on the premises of the E.N.S. were suspended. Lacan left the rue d'Ulm with the stirrings of protest.
72
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Lacan takes a stand in the crisis of the university that follows May 1968: "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." He rejects nonconceptualization: structure is the real. Dealing with the passage from objet a to the Other and from the Other to objet a, Lacan analyzes and combines Pascal, Marx and the logic of the link between l, the unbroken line, the trait unitaire of L'identification and a as follows:
