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1964-1965 (237 pp.)-SEMINAIRE XII: PROBLEMES CRUCIAUX POUR LA PSYCHANALYSE (SEMINAR XII: CRUCIAL PROBLEMS FOR PSYCHOANALYSIS)-ANONYMOUS VERSION, NO DATE
Explaining themselves and their work at the beginning, the transcribers of this seminar headed it with a bold epigraph: "In all my opening addresses to what I have to calI my audience I have warned that psychoanalysis is a remedy against ignorance; it has no effect on fucking imbecility." A word to the wise is sufficient. We want to ask, What about its effects on those who are suffering?
This seminar, coming after the foundations of psychoanalysis (55), would have originally been announced under a more philosophical title, "Les Posi�tions subjectives de \' existence et de \' clre" (The Subjective Positions of
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The Wom of Jacques Llcan 117
Existence and of Being). Indeed, the theoretician psychoanalyst would be confronted with an alternative that he cannot admit: in his experience, the subject is the pivot of praxis (practice linked to theory) but, in all formaliza�tions, one usually tries to exclude the subject.
For Lacan, the fundamental problem was that of the subject's relation to language. However, taking into account the Real in the trilogy of Symbolicl Imaginary/Real had transformed the problem. Thus, the crucial issues were the relations among identification, transference, and demand; we are already familiar with them from the previous seminars.
The problem of problems then became "offering a form, an essential to�pology for analytic praxis." The signifier returned, structured on the Moebius strip with the three fundamental forms of the hole, the torus or ring, and the "cross-cap." Euler's circles also returned, as the maze of the torus or of the spirals of the demand on the surface of the Klein bottle, which was a new star in this seminar. These figures were said to be constructed in a simple and combinatory way, but the commentary, on the other hand, was complicated. Apparently, no doubt, this bottle contains the secret of desire "as the split whereby a surface is revealed as a-cosmic," which would explain the "turning away in horror" from Merleau-Ponty's glove turned inside-out and from the nylon stocking turned inside-out in which sexual difference would be read. Still, some assertions are puzzling; there would be a relation only of analogy between the existence of that surface (a projection in a three dimensional space) and the immersion in a space, the space of the Other as the locus of speech. The torsion of the famous bottle would stem from the intervention of the Name-of-the-Father, of the desire of this Other desired as desiring (47). This desire of the Other would be hidden at the heart of the objet a, which has to be opened with a pair of scissors, and in the proper way, so as to allow one to be the master of desires. The interior 8 would be the relation of the objet a to 0, the big Other. When I read that the subject's certainty "is located in the pure lack of the sex," in "the impossible relation between sex and knowledge," that "all knowledge is instituted in an impassable horror as re�gards the place where the secret of sex is located," that "the impossible real is on the side of sex," I begin to feel concerned and want to ask for some explanations about such aphorisms made under the cover of topological science.
The seminar also included hundreds of comments on Pascal's Pari, "a des�perate attempt to solve the question we are trying to raise here, that of desire as the desire of the big Other [Grand Autre]"; on syllogism: "all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, hence Socrates is mortal"; and on the different relation to knowledge in psychosis (anxiety of the Other), in neurosis (demand to the Other), and in perversion (jouissance of the Other). I leave it up to the reader to fit these heterogeneous comments wherever he wants or can.
198 DOSS I ER
Notc that, for thc first timc, La<.:an organizcd "doscd scminars" whcrc onc was a<.:<.:cptcd at onc's own rcquest, thanks to a card ccrtifying the Master's acccptan<.:c. "Critical" studcnts su<.:h as Duroux and Miller gave talks there, later publishcd in Calliers pOllr I'Allalyse. In short, this seminar had two gcars and two spccds, which <.:orrcspondcd fairly well to the principles of the orga�nization of the E.F.P. (57). The ecole was said to be "something where a life style must be formed." And between the Name-of-the Father and the impos�sible Real, do we find the "throbbing gap of the unconscious" I beallce pal�pitallfe de l'illcolI.l'ciellfj'! Doesn't all this lack modesty and humor?
==Introduction==
