Talk:Seminar XXVI

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 XXV Seminar XXVII →

La topologie et le temps
Seminar XXVI
La topologie et le temps Cover images vary across circulating transcripts and later editorial publications.
French Title	La topologie et le temps
English Title	Topology and Time
Seminar Information
Seminar Date(s)	1978–1979 (academic year)
Session Count	Weekly sessions (exact count varies by transcription tradition)
Location	Paris
Psychoanalytic Content
Key Concepts	Topology • Borromean knot • Imaginary • Symbolic • Real • Cut • Scansion • Logical time • Après-coup • Sinthome • Jouissance • Lalangue • Act • End of analysis
Notable Themes	Topology as “writing” of the Real; temporality of signification and retroaction; session time and the analytic cut; knotting and stabilization; transmission of the late clinic
Freud Texts	Freud on repetition, Nachträglichkeit (retroaction), symptom formation, and termination (background orientation)
Theoretical Context
Period	Late period (topological/Borromean teaching)
Register	Primacy of the Real and the knotting of the three registers
Chronology
Preceded by	Seminar XXV
Followed by	Seminar XXVII

La topologie et le temps (La topologie et le temps; English: Topology and Time) is Jacques Lacan’s twenty-sixth annual seminar (Séminaire XXVI), delivered in Paris during the 1978–1979 academic year. It belongs to Lacan’s late teaching, in which topology—especially the Borromean knot and related surfaces—serves as a formal “writing” for the articulation of Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real. The seminar links this topological approach to the problem of time in psychoanalysis: the temporality of meaning (including retroaction), the time-structure of interpretation, and the analytic use of scansion and the cut as operations that produce effects at the level of jouissance rather than at the level of “understanding” alone.

Often read in continuity with Seminar XXIII (Le sinthome), Seminar XXIV (L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre), and Seminar XXV (Le moment de conclure), Seminar XXVI contributes to the late Lacanian effort to reconceive the clinic around the Real and around the subject’s singular mode of knotting, rather than around a purely interpretive hermeneutics of symptoms.

Introductory overview

From the early 1950s onward, Lacan redefines the psychoanalytic subject as a subject of the signifier and relocates analytic truth in the effects of speech addressed to the Other. By the late 1970s, however, his conceptual center of gravity shifts: the symptom is no longer treated primarily as a message to decode, but also as a mode of tying together the registers and localizing jouissance.

Seminar XXVI takes this late orientation into a specific problematic: how to think time—clinical time, logical time, and the time of the act—when psychoanalysis is no longer framed as the progressive accumulation of meaning. The seminar’s working hypothesis is that topology provides a non-psychological formalism for articulating the subject’s consistency and its failures: not by representing experience, but by writing relations (linking, cutting, knotting) that can be modified in analysis. Time, correspondingly, is treated less as clock-time and more as a structure produced by cuts and retroactive effects in discourse.

In later commentary, the pairing of “topology” and “time” is often taken to name a single concern: how the Real is inscribed (or fails to be inscribed) in the speaking being (parlêtre), and how analytic operations—session scansion, interpretive intervention, and the analytic act—produce temporal effects that reorganize the subject’s relation to the symptom and to jouissance.

Historical and institutional context

Late Lacan after the École freudienne de Paris

The seminar is delivered in the final phase of Lacan’s teaching, after major institutional conflicts and reorganizations in the French psychoanalytic field. Biographical scholarship situates the late seminars in a period marked by debates over training, the transmission of Lacan’s doctrine, and the institutional fate of the École freudienne de Paris (EFP). While Seminar XXVI is not primarily an institutional text, its focus on formalization and transmission (mathemes, knots, topology) is frequently read as responding to the question of how psychoanalysis can be transmitted without becoming a psychology of opinions or a doctrine of interpretation-as-commentary.

Place in the late seminar sequence

The seminar follows Seminar XXV (Le moment de conclure), which foregrounds the problem of concluding and the end of analysis, and it extends the earlier late concern with lalangue, equivocation, and the Real of the symptom. The focus on time also retroactively reconnects late Lacan to earlier texts, especially “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty” (1945), where Lacan proposes a tripartite temporal logic (“the instant of seeing,” “the time for understanding,” “the moment of concluding”).

Textual transmission and editorial status

As with several late seminars, Seminar XXVI circulated for years through transcripts, notes, and working editions. Secondary scholarship emphasizes that Lacan’s late teaching relies heavily on oral delivery, puns, and diagrammatic demonstration; consequently, variants in transcription can affect how particular formulations are understood. Academic citations therefore commonly specify the edition or transcript tradition used when quoting session material.

Conceptual framework and methodology

Topology as a “writing” of the Real

Lacan’s late use of topology does not propose a mathematical model of the psyche in the empirical sense. Rather, topology functions as a formal language for articulating relations that ordinary descriptive discourse tends to psychologize: the link between Imaginary identifications, Symbolic articulation, and the Real of jouissance and impossibility.

In this framework, topological figures (e.g., the Möbius strip, torus, Klein bottle, projective plane, and the Borromean knot) are not illustrations of lived experience but operators that allow one to reason about:

• how a surface is constituted by a cut,
• how inside/outside distinctions can be produced by a single twist,
• how rings hold together only by their linkage, and
• how a failure of linkage can produce a collapse of consistency.

Late Lacan often treats the Real as what resists symbolization; topology is used to formalize this resistance without reducing it to ineffability or mysticism. In this sense, topology is allied to Lacan’s insistence that psychoanalysis is oriented by the Real and by the limits of meaning, not by interpretive “sense-making” alone.

Time as retroaction and scansion

A central Lacanian thesis about time is that meaning is retroactive: what comes later can determine what was earlier, a logic often linked to Freud’s Nachträglichkeit and translated in Lacanian contexts as après-coup (deferred action, retroaction). In analysis, the significance of an event or signifier can change with a later intervention; the analytic “past” is not a stable record but is rewritten by subsequent articulations.

Lacan’s clinical technique also mobilizes time through scansion: the strategic use of session length, interruption, and cutting to produce an effect in the analysand’s discourse. In Lacanian accounts, the cut is not a managerial device but an interpretive operation: it punctuates the signifying chain at a point of jouissance or equivocation, producing a temporal torsion that can reorient repetition.

Linking topology and time

Seminar XXVI is frequently glossed as arguing that time in analysis is not simply linear duration but is structurally produced by cuts and linkages. If a subject’s consistency depends on how registers are knotted, then temporal phenomena—waiting, urgency, repetition, sudden certainty, acting-out, interruption—can be approached as effects of knotting and unknotting rather than as mere psychological states.

This approach also reframes the end of analysis: “concluding” is not only a temporal endpoint but a re-knotting that changes the subject’s relation to the symptom and to the Other’s supposed knowledge.

Key themes, concepts, and case studies

The Borromean clinic: knotting, unknotting, and stabilization

The Borromean knot becomes a key clinical and theoretical reference in late Lacan: three rings are linked such that if one ring is cut, the other two fall apart. Lacan uses this structure to propose that the registers hold together only through their linkage; consistency is not a substance but a relation.

In the clinic, this implies that:

• disturbances can be understood as failures or fragilities of linkage (a “slip” or “lap” of the knot),
• symptoms may function as stabilizing ties (especially in psychosis or borderline configurations, in later Lacanian readings), and
• analytic work may aim less at eliminating the symptom than at enabling a different stabilization—often articulated as a “know-how” (savoir-y-faire) with the symptom.

Although Lacan’s detailed clinical vignettes in the late seminars are often allusive, secondary clinical literature links the Borromean framework to practical questions of interpretation: when interpretation produces meaning without stabilizing jouissance, it can intensify destabilization; hence the late emphasis on interventions that target the Real and respect the symptom’s function as a tie.

Surfaces and the logic of the cut

Lacan’s use of surfaces such as the Möbius strip is often associated with the idea that a cut produces structure: the “subject” is not given but produced by operations (division, signification, separation). The Möbius strip also formalizes how inside/outside distinctions can be reversed, a motif that resonates with Lacan’s recurrent claim that the unconscious is not an inner depth but is “outside” in speech and signifier effects.

Within Seminar XXVI, the cut is also a temporal operator: cutting does not merely stop; it produces a before/after that reorders what has been said. This connects topology (cutting a surface) to time (producing a new sequence of effects).

Logical time and the “moment of concluding”

A major intertext for Seminar XXVI is Lacan’s earlier essay on logical time. There Lacan distinguishes three temporal moments:

• the “instant of seeing,”
• the “time for understanding,” and
• the “moment of concluding.”

In late Lacan, these moments are no longer treated primarily as a model of group logic, but as a way to conceptualize psychoanalytic time: interpretation and the act can precipitate a conclusion that is not justified by complete knowledge. The analytic act may require decision under conditions of non-totalizable truth—an idea often summarized (in later Lacanian idiom) as an orientation to the Real rather than to completeness of sense.

Après-coup: rewriting the past in analysis

Time in analysis is centrally marked by retroaction. An interpretation can make a previous signifier “be what it will have been,” altering the subject’s past as narrated and experienced. The late topological approach reframes this: retroaction is not merely a narrative revision but can be understood as a structural re-knotting—an alteration in how signifiers are linked to jouissance and to the body.

In practical terms, this provides a way to conceptualize why analytic change can appear discontinuous: a single intervention can reorganize a chain and thereby reconfigure a long-standing repetition.

The sinthome and temporal consistency

Building on Seminar XXIII, Seminar XXVI remains within the horizon of the sinthome: the singular formation that ties registers and supports a subject’s consistency. One implication is temporal: a subject’s “time” (their rhythms of repetition, urgency, delay, and compulsion) may be bound to their sinthome as a way of managing jouissance. Concluding analysis, in this perspective, does not end time but modifies the subject’s temporal economy: how they repeat, how they wait, how they decide, and how they make use of their symptom.

Theoretical significance and clinical implications

Re-orienting interpretation: from meaning to operation

In many commentaries, late Lacan is read as shifting the axis of interpretation from meaning to operation: interpretation is judged by what it does—by its effects on the subject’s knotting and jouissance—rather than by whether it provides a persuasive explanation. Topology supports this shift by providing a vocabulary of operations (cut, link, tie, slip) rather than of representations.

Clinically, this can imply:

• privileging interventions that produce a punctum of equivocation rather than explanatory speech,
• attending to how a symptom stabilizes, and
• timing interventions so that the cut produces a usable effect (not merely surprise or compliance).

Session time and scansion as analytic technique

The seminar’s focus on time underscores the Lacanian emphasis on scansion. In this technique, session length is not standardized; it can be used to interrupt at a point where the subject’s discourse reveals a knotting of signifier and jouissance. This interruption functions as an interpretation by cut: it leaves a remainder that works outside the session, changing the analysand’s relation to what was said.

Secondary clinical accounts caution that scansion is not a universal recipe: the analyst must consider the subject’s structure and stability. In cases where the symptom is a fragile tie, untimely cuts can destabilize; conversely, in neurotic repetition, the cut can interrupt the satisfaction of endless sense-making and open a different relation to desire.

The end of analysis as re-knotting

In continuity with Seminar XXV, Seminar XXVI supports a view of the end of analysis as a re-knotting rather than a purification. The subject does not emerge free of symptoms; instead, analysis aims at a new relation to the symptom (sinthome) and to the Other’s knowledge. In this framework, time is central: concluding is a temporal act, but one produced by a structural shift in how the subject’s discourse is knotted.

Reception and legacy

Within Lacanian psychoanalysis

Within Lacanian schools, Seminar XXVI is frequently taught as a key text in the late topological period, paired with Seminar XXIII–Seminar XXV to introduce the Borromean clinic and its implications for technique and termination. Its emphasis on topology has also reinforced a distinctive strand of Lacanian pedagogy focused on diagrams, knotting demonstrations, and the careful differentiation of the three registers as linked rings rather than as psychological “domains.”

Because the seminar’s textual status often depends on transcripts, its reception can be shaped by editorial choices and by local traditions of reading and demonstration. Nonetheless, the broader legacy is visible in how later Lacanian clinical writing increasingly treats stabilization, knotting, and the sinthome as central to clinical direction—particularly in discussions of psychosis, “ordinary psychosis,” and diverse modes of supplementation.

In philosophy, cultural theory, and interdisciplinary work

Outside clinical psychoanalysis, the late Lacan’s topology has provoked both fascination and skepticism. Supporters regard it as an attempt to formalize the limits of language and the Real without collapsing into hermeneutics; critics see a risk of obscurantism or misplaced mathematical analogy. Interdisciplinary scholarship often treats the topological turn as part of a broader 20th-century effort to rethink subjectivity via formal structures (linguistics, logic, topology) rather than via introspective psychology.

The seminar’s focus on time has also influenced readings of psychoanalytic temporality—especially retroaction—and has been used in debates over whether analytic change is incremental or discontinuous, interpretive or performative, semantic or real.

See also

• Jacques Lacan
• Seminars of Jacques Lacan
• Seminar XXIII
• Seminar XXIV
• Seminar XXV
• Seminar XXVII
• Topology
• Borromean knot
• Knot theory
• Möbius strip
• Klein bottle
• Projective plane
• Imaginary
• Symbolic order
• Real
• Lalangue
• Jouissance
• Sinthome
• Symptom
• Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty
• Après-coup
• Scansion
• Analytic act
• End of analysis
• Transference
• Subject supposed to know

Further reading

• Lacan, Jacques. La topologie et le temps (Séminaire XXVI, 1978–1979). Unpublished/variously published seminar text established from transcriptions (edition and pagination vary).
• 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. “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty” (1945), in Écrits.