Changes

 There are several reasons why this seminar is(one of the best-known\ ) of all the seminars held since 1964-1965, it is the only one that has been published; it has been shortened and reorganized by J.-A. Miller, and it makes the latest developments of Lacanian thinking relatively accessible; finally, it concerns a sensitive area, that of femininity, at a time when the Mouvement de Libe�ration Liberation des Femmes contested psychoanalytic theory. Lacan presented the doctrine of femininity here, and he defied women to say-to articulate�anything about their sexuality, about their jouissance, and about themselves. All this did not go without violence (pp. 69-70). Most of the notions had already been elaborated during the previous years and had been published in Radiophonie (77): the four discourses, the broad logical categories, the distance put between linguistics and Lacanian "lin�guistrylinguistry," the aphorism, "there is no sexual relation" -they all appeared as early as L'Envers de la psychanalyse (73). The "quantic formulas" used to write the absence of relation between the sexes-which does not mean the absence of a relation to the sex symbolized by the phallus-went back to Seminar XIX ... Ou pire (80). Several sessions at the H6pital Sainte�Anne Sainte-Anne the previous year (82) were devoted to l' amur and the love letter. Be�sidesBesides, Lacan quoted himself more and more often: here, he comments on L' Etourdit (82), but the text is full of explicit or implicit self-references. This phenomenon was unavoidable: to be at the same time a theoretician and a teacher whose audience changed led to these repetitions. However, more and more, what varied was the form more than the content. Since L' Etourdit, the plays on writing or the puns served this purpose. Here, the latest "trick" was to write We woman in order to indicate that she is not inscribed in the universal. However, the strict doctrine is fairly simple: woman would only enter in the sexual relation "quoad matrem" (as a mother) and man "quoad castra�tionem" (depending on castration?). Hence there is no real "sexual rela�tion," and love as well as speech make up for this absence. "There is woman only as excluded by the nature of words." Why should she complain since she reaches a supplementary jouissance? This infinitude places her in a par�ticular particular relation with "the god" [Ie dieu], Ie dieur," "the act of saying" [Ie dire], ... and with God who is on the side of the Name-of-the-Father. In any case, for man she is on the side of "the truth" and man does aa. Diellr is a neologism created by Lacan combining diell, god. and dire, to say. The Worb of Jacques Lacan 237 not know what to do with it .... Lacan said that he was the first one to feel that way. Topology (for the first time they played with pieces of string at the end of this seminar), Saint Paul, Freud, logic, and plays on words--everytbing was able to prove the validity of the Lacanian theory. If, by erasing the uncertain�tiesuncertainties, the text published by J.-A. Miller makes it more dogmatic and more pedagogical, it reveals clearly its main founding certainties. 85