Talk:Seminar XXIV

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 XXIII Seminar XXV →

L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre
Seminar XXIV
French Title	L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre
English Title	One Knew That It Was a Mistaken Moon on the Wings of Love (common rendering)
Seminar Information
Seminar Date(s)	1976–1977 (academic year)
Session Count	Weekly sessions (count varies by transcription)
Location	Paris (late public seminar venue; institutional setting varies by year)
Psychoanalytic Content
Key Concepts	Unconscious • Lalangue • Equivocation • Signifier • Letter • Jouissance • Sinthome • Borromean knot • Real • Symbolic • Imaginary • Interpretation
Notable Themes	Late reformulation of the unconscious (“knowledge without knowing”); the one-bungle (l'une-bévue); interpretation by equivocation; topology and knotting; the status of writing and the letter; continuity with Seminar XXIII and transition to Seminar XXV
Freud Texts	Freud’s writings on slips, parapraxis and dream-work (background); Freudian theory of unconscious formations (as reworked by Lacan)
Theoretical Context
Period	Late period (Borromean/topological teaching)
Register	Primacy of the Real with knotting of Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real
Chronology
Preceded by	Seminar XXIII
Followed by	Seminar XXV

L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre is Jacques Lacan’s twenty-fourth annual seminar (Séminaire XXIV), delivered during the 1976–1977 academic year in Paris. The seminar belongs to Lacan’s late teaching, characterized by an intensified focus on the Real, on topology (especially the Borromean knot), and on the psychoanalytic consequences of writing and the letter.

The title is itself a dense exercise in Lacanian wordplay and translation difficulty. It turns on l'une-bévue—a pun commonly heard as an allusive re-spelling of the German Unbewusst (“unconscious”), reframed as “the one-bungle / one-blunder / one-misstep,” foregrounding error, equivocation, and the autonomy of linguistic effects from conscious intention. A frequently cited English rendering—One Knew That It Was a Mistaken Moon on the Wings of Love—preserves the title’s deliberate homophony and poetic distortion (s'aile à mourre ≈ “wings to die / love to death”), while indicating Lacan’s emphasis on the sonic material of language and on interpretation as an operation on speech rather than a recovery of hidden content.

Seminar XXIV is commonly read as a bridge between Seminar XXIII (Le sinthome), where Lacan’s reading of James Joyce helped crystallize the concept of the sinthome, and Seminar XXV (Le moment de conclure), which continues the late rethinking of the end of analysis and of the analytic act in relation to knotting and the Real.

Introductory overview

In earlier phases of Lacan’s teaching, the unconscious is famously approached as “structured like a language,” with an emphasis on the signifier, metaphor/metonymy, and the Symbolic order. By the mid-1970s, Lacan does not simply abandon this framework; rather, he relocates it within an expanded problematic: the unconscious is approached through the Real of lalangue (a Lacanian neologism emphasizing the bodily, sonic and idiosyncratic dimensions of speech), and through the ways in which enjoyment (jouissance) is knotted to speech and writing beyond meaning.

Seminar XXIV frames the unconscious as a kind of “knowledge” (savoir) that operates without being consciously known (insu): a knowing that manifests as slips, puns, compulsive repetitions, and symptom formations, but whose efficacy is inseparable from how language is materially heard and repeated. The seminar’s stress on the “one-bungle” (l'une-bévue) highlights that the unconscious is not primarily a hidden interior “thing,” but an event in speech and writing—an error that functions, insists, and produces effects.

Historical and institutional context

Late Lacan and the post-1968 seminar landscape

Seminar XXIV belongs to the final decade of Lacan’s teaching (1970s), after the consolidation of his influence within French intellectual life and after major institutional disputes within psychoanalysis. Lacan’s late seminars were delivered in public settings and attracted mixed audiences of clinicians, philosophers, students, and writers, reflecting the broad diffusion of Lacanian psychoanalysis beyond clinical circles.

The seminar also follows Lacan’s sustained turn (from roughly the late 1960s onward) to formalization through mathemes and topology, where the classical triad of registers—Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real—is increasingly treated not as a conceptual taxonomy but as a problem of “knotting”: how a subject holds together (or fails to hold together) in a workable arrangement that supports speech, desire, and social link.

Relationship to Seminar XXIII and Seminar XXV

Seminar XXIV is closely continuous with the immediately preceding Seminar XXIII (Le sinthome), whose reading of James Joyce foregrounds the idea that a symptom can function as a unique stabilizing invention rather than simply a formation to be “decoded” and dissolved. It is likewise a preparation for Seminar XXV (Le moment de conclure), which develops questions of concluding, tying-off, and the end of analysis in the horizon of knot theory and the Real.

Within this arc, Seminar XXIV is often interpreted as sharpening two interconnected theses:

• that the unconscious is inseparable from lalangue—the contingent, embodied material of one’s language history; and
• that interpretation must increasingly be conceived as an operation on equivocation and jouissance (rather than on meaning alone).

Conceptual framework and methodology

From “language” to lalangue

Lacan distinguishes language (as a communicative and grammatical system) from lalangue, a term used to emphasize the unconscious’s attachment to the sound-patterns, accidents, and private resonances that precede and exceed standardized meaning. In this perspective, what matters clinically is not simply what a subject “means,” but how signifiers are enjoyed, repeated, and knotted to the body.

Lalangue is therefore linked to the Real: it designates the dimension of speech where sense breaks down into homophony, rhythm, and affect-laden fragments—precisely the terrain in which slips, jokes, and “mistakes” (bévues) can have disproportionate subjective force.

The unconscious as “unknown knowledge” (insu que sait)

The seminar’s title foregrounds a paradox: something “unknown” (insu) nevertheless “knows” (sait). This phrasing resonates with Lacan’s longstanding emphasis on the subject’s division (barred subject), but shifts the accent toward the impersonal workings of knowledge in speech: the unconscious is not a second mind with its own intentions, but a structured insistence that is legible in linguistic events and their effects on jouissance.

This is one reason Lacan’s late teaching often treats unconscious formations less as messages to be translated than as knots to be modified: the analytic intervention aims at how the subject is fastened to certain signifiers and enjoyments.

Topology and knotting as clinical formalization

In the late seminars, Lacan uses the Borromean knot as a formal model for the interdependence of the three registers: if one ring is cut, the other two fall apart. The model supports a structural thesis: the subject’s consistency depends on a specific way of holding together Imaginary identifications, Symbolic articulations, and Real jouissance.

Seminar XXIV continues this topological orientation, often discussed in secondary literature as part of Lacan’s “Borromean turn.” Rather than treating topology as metaphor, Lacan presents it as a mode of writing that can register real relations—relations that do not reduce to narrative meaning.

Key themes, concepts, and case studies

L'une-bévue: the unconscious as blunder

The seminar’s signature term, l'une-bévue (literally “the one-bungle”), is widely glossed as an oblique phonetic detour through Freud’s German Unbewusst (unconscious). The substitution is clinically motivated: it underscores that the unconscious appears first as a stumble in speech, a wrong word, a comic displacement, or a “mistake” that nevertheless says something more than the speaker intends.

In Lacan’s approach, such mistakes are not accidental noise around an intended message. They are points where the signifier’s autonomy is most visible—where desire and jouissance intrude in the form of error. This is continuous with Lacan’s earlier work on the formations of the unconscious (e.g., jokes, dreams, slips), but with a late emphasis on the Real of the signifier’s sound and on the bodily uptake of speech (how it “affects” and is enjoyed).

Interpretation by equivocation

A major theme of late Lacan—prominent in discussions of Seminar XXIV—is interpretation as equivocation rather than explanation. The analyst does not primarily supply meanings; instead, the analyst intervenes by cutting, punctuating, and producing resonances that shift the subject’s relation to their signifiers and to jouissance.

Equivocation operates on homophony, ambiguity, and the multiple senses of a signifier. This approach is aligned with the emphasis on lalangue: because the unconscious is hooked into sound and repetition, interpretation can operate through sound and repetition, not only through semantic paraphrase.

The status of writing and the letter

Lacan’s late work increasingly privileges writing—including mathemes and topological figures—as a way of approaching the Real. This continues his earlier distinction between speech and the letter, where the letter names a minimal material support of the signifier that can produce effects independently of meaning.

In the “Borromean” period, writing is not merely a record of speech; it becomes a clinical and theoretical tool for formalizing how the subject holds together. The seminar’s playful title itself can be read as a demonstration: the unconscious is approached through how letters and sounds slide, mislead, and generate new “knowledge” as an effect.

The sinthome and singular solutions

Although the concept of the sinthome is elaborated most explicitly in Seminar XXIII, Seminar XXIV is often read as extending its clinical consequences: a symptom may function as a stabilizing invention that knots together the registers and secures a livable relation to jouissance.

This emphasis supports a clinical shift. Rather than treating the goal of analysis as the elimination of symptoms as such, the late teaching explores how a subject may come to “know how to do with” (savoir-y-faire) their symptom—how to modify their relation to it so that it becomes less mortifying and more workable. Secondary clinical literature often treats this as a hallmark of late Lacanian practice, even while noting that Lacan’s own formulations remain deliberately non-programmatic and resistant to technique manuals.

Love, “mistaken moon,” and the Real of relation

The title’s English rendering (“mistaken moon on the wings of love”) is frequently read as staging Lacan’s late preoccupation with the limits of relation and meaning. In Lacan’s broader late doctrine, love is often approached as what attempts to write a relation where no complete symbolic relation is available (a motif continuous with his earlier thesis that there is no fully writeable sexual rapport).

Within this horizon, “love” becomes a privileged site for misrecognition, metaphor, and fantasy, but also for real effects: the subject is bound by signifiers of love, names, and promises in ways that can stabilize or devastate. The “mistaken moon” suggests the poetic glamour of illusion, yet also the structuring force of such illusion—how it carries the subject (“on wings”) and how it can mislead.

Theoretical significance and clinical implications

Rethinking the unconscious after structuralism

Seminar XXIV is frequently positioned as a late reworking of Lacan’s structuralist moment rather than its negation. The signifier remains central, but its status changes: it is less a unit in a formal linguistic system than a material event in lalangue that binds jouissance. This shift is often summarized in secondary literature as a movement from “the unconscious structured like a language” to an unconscious bound to the Real of lalangue and to knotting.

The result is a model in which truth effects persist, but truth is no longer the exclusive horizon of analysis; the analytic process must also reckon with satisfaction, fixation, and the Real remainder that does not yield to sense.

Clinical orientation: from decoding to knot-modification

In earlier Lacan, interpretation can be described (with qualifications) as revealing the signifying logic of a symptom, displacing the ego’s imaginary coherence and allowing repressed signifiers to be articulated. Late Lacan adds another axis: the symptom is also a mode of jouissance and a support of consistency. Interpretation, therefore, must be attentive to the risk of destabilization and to the subject’s singular inventions for tying the registers together.

This orientation has informed Lacanian approaches to difficult clinical presentations (including certain cases of psychosis and “ordinary” or non-florid psychotic structures discussed in later Lacanian circles), where stabilization can depend on specific signifying and practical supports rather than on interpretive unveiling alone.

The end of analysis and “knowing-how”

While Seminar XXIV is not primarily a treatise on termination, its emphasis on savoir (knowledge) and on the sinthome contributes to late Lacanian reflections on the end of analysis: not the achievement of full self-knowledge, but a transformed relation to one’s signifiers and jouissance—often framed as acquiring a “know-how” with one’s symptom.

This theme is developed further in the neighboring late seminars and commentaries, where “concluding” is associated with tying-off, with a stabilization of the subject’s mode of enjoyment, and with a reduced dependence on the Other’s supposed knowledge.

Reception and legacy

Transmission and textual status

Unlike several earlier seminar volumes that were stabilized in widely cited French and English editions, Seminar XXIV has had a more complex transmission history in scholarship, with reliance on transcripts and editorial variants. Academic discussions therefore often cite established seminar chronologies, biographical reconstructions, and secondary expositions rather than a single universally standardized pagination.

Because of this transmission complexity, interpretive debates sometimes attach to phrasing, session boundaries, and the status of Lacan’s late neologisms. Nonetheless, the seminar’s conceptual influence—especially around lalangue, equivocation, and the “one-bungle”—is evident in the broader reception of late Lacan.

Influence in Lacanian clinical theory

Within Lacanian schools and clinical circles, Seminar XXIV is frequently cited as part of the late reorientation toward the Real and toward singular symptom-solutions. The seminar’s title is itself used as a teaching device: it exemplifies how the unconscious is approached through sound, error, and the materiality of the signifier, and it supports an interpretive ethic of equivocation rather than suggestion or explanation.

Broader intellectual reception

In the humanities, late Lacan’s attention to writing, topology, and equivocation has been influential in fields such as literary theory, philosophy of language, and studies of modernist and avant-garde texts, where the materiality of language and the limits of sense are central concerns. The continuity with the Joyce-focused Seminar XXIII has also contributed to cross-disciplinary discussions of style, invention, and the relation between symptom and writing.

See also

• Jacques Lacan
• Seminar XXIII
• Seminar XXV
• Lacanian psychoanalysis
• Unconscious
• Lalangue
• Equivocation
• Sinthome
• Borromean knot
• Real
• Symbolic order
• Imaginary
• Jouissance
• Letter
• James Joyce
• Écrits

Further reading

• Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Jacques Lacan. Columbia University Press, 1997.
• Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1996.

• Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton University Press, 1995.
• Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Harvard University Press, 1997.
• Lacan, Jacques. “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud” (1957), in Écrits (1966).

14 décembre 1976	Séminaire XXIV (1976-1977): "L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre"	mp3
Text in French

11 janvier 1977	Séminaire XXIV (1976-1977): "L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre"	mp3
Text in French

The punning French title of this seminar is based on a fanciful French translation of the German word for the unconscious, "Unbewusste," as "une-bévue," which means a blunder or a mistake. As written, the title might be translated as "The unknown that knows about the one-blunder chances love." But as spoken, with written puns ignored, the French title might be rendered most simply as "L'insuccès de l'une-bévue, c'est l'amour," which means "Love is the failure of the one-blunder."