Talk:Seminar XXV

19n-1978-SEMINAIRE XXV: LE MOMENT DE CONCLURE (SEMINAR XXV: TIME TO CONCLUDE)-1979 Only a version of the first meeting has been published, in Ornicar? under the title "Une pratique de bavardage" (A babbling practice). Lacan was exhausted and he attempted to take stock of his activities: ". do not have the slightest desire to do my seminar. This year, • have entitled it Time to conclude." Psychoanalysis is not a science, "because it is irrefu�table," as Karl Popper said. But it must be taken seriously: babbling does entail risks. The psychoanalyst is a rhetorician who "rhetoricizes" and "rec�tifies." "Words make things," but psychoanalysis precisely "deals with the inadequacy of words to things." Nothing is really new in all this. Let us end with the statement that "life is not tragic." It is "comic." Freud was wrong to choose the Oedipus complex, a tragedy, in order to give a name to "whac he was dealing with in the relationship that links the Symbolic, the Imaginary, . and the Real."