Studying Lacan's Seminar VI

Dream, Symptom, and the Collapse of Subjectivity

Olga Cox Cameron, Carol Owens

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000375015
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psychology
• Categoría: Physiological Psychology

The second volume in the Studying Lacan's Seminars series, this book is the first comprehensive study of Lacan's Seminar VI: Desire and its Interpretation. A natural companion to Bruce Fink's recent translation of the seminar into English (2019), this book offers a genuine opportunity to delve deeply into the seminar, and a hospitable introduction to Lacan's teachings of the 1950s.

This important book brings together various aspects of Cox Cameron's teachings and systematic, careful, and critical readings of Seminar VI. Lacan's theorizing and conceptualizing of the object a, the fundamental fantasy, and aphanisis, as well as the ambiguous treatment of the phallus in his work at the time, are all introduced, contextualized, and explored in detail. The trajectories of his thinking are traced in terms of future developments and elaborations in the seminars that follow closely on the heels of Seminar VI – Seminars VII ( Ethics of Psychoanalysis ), VIII ( Transference ), IX ( Identification ), and X ( Anxiety ). Consideration is also given to how certain themes and motifs are recapitulated or reworked in his later teachings such as in Seminars XX ( Encore ), and XXIII ( The Sinthome ). Also included in this volume are two further essays by Cox Cameron, a most valuable critique of the concept of the phallus in Lacan's theories of the 1950s, and an overview of Seminar VI originally presented as a keynote address to the APW congress in Toronto 2014.

The book is of great interest to Lacanian scholars and students, as well as psychoanalytic therapists and analysts interested in Lacan's teachings of the 1950s and in how important concepts developed during this period are treated in his later work.

Part I

The chapters

Chapter 1

Introduction to the seminar¹

This, hopefully, is the book I would like to have had in hand myself when I first began to read Lacan’s seminars more than 30 years ago. Many of the early seminars – between IV and X say – are hugely wordy, and the initial experience of reading is like standing under an avalanche, a hail of brilliant ideas, stunning one into either admiration or indignant befuddlement. It takes a while to see that these huge unwieldy masses are actually carefully structured, and that working through each lesson with this overall structure in mind permits one to step out from under the avalanche and engage critically with what is being said. Hence the rather plodding approach adopted here. Many of the previous books published on different seminars turn out to be a series of highly engaging riffs by different authors on topics germane to the seminar in question, rather than a step by step commentary. My own approach stems from a youthful attempt to read Finnegans Wake, and the useful footholds provided by writers such as Anthony Burgess and Roland McHugh who by shadowing Joyce’s great work, illuminated it, releasing the baffled reader into the enjoyment of “laughters low”.

As with all the other seminars Lacan’s sixth seminar on desire confronts the reader with levels of complexity that are both exhilarating and daunting. What one must try to hold onto in this vertiginous venture is some exercise of one’s own intelligence. There is a fine line to be drawn between close reading and swamping one’s brain to the point of mere glazed iteration. In his delightful series of essays entitled The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton invokes Montaigne in the section on “Consolations for Intellectual Inadequacy” in order to put forward the view that boredom can sometimes be an indication of robustness of mind: “Though it can never be a sufficient judge (and in its more degenerate forms, slips into willful indifference and impatience), taking our levels of boredom into account can temper an otherwise excessive tolerance of balderdash” (2000, p. 158). As de Botton goes on to say, every difficult work presents us with the choice of judging the author inept for not being clearer, or ourselves stupid for not grasping what is being said. The challenge is to remain open to both possibilities.

One more warning before we start. Reading Lacanian theory as a series of successive stages in his thinking, elaborated over the course of 26 seminars, is on the one hand, standard teaching practice, and on the other, a fraught and foolish undertaking. Not that the stages aren’t there, but inceptions, reversals, foreshadowings, and retrospective inclusions blur the outlines of definitive departure. In his tenth seminar L’Angoisse, Lacan describes an insect creeping along a Moëbius strip. Starting on the inside, the insect, simply by crawling cussedly on, will pass without perceptible transition to the outer surface and back again, the apparently radical distinction between inside and outside having been effaced by the loop which creates one continuous surface. A novice reader of the seminars will empathize with this insect. So for example, “the cut”, a major feature of the topological seminars will appear without warning towards the end of this seminar on desire and without anything like the lengthy elaboration it will later receive in the ninth seminar Identification.

That said, in certain respects Seminar VI, Desire and its Interpretation, stands clear of this Moëbian structure. Gateway to the great middle seminars, it explicitly signals new directions. Unusually right from the start Lacan announces these departures. They are several, and they are significant. The earlier seminars had consistently relied on Freud’s sexed distribution of “being” and “having” as specifying the outcome of the Oedipus complex. From Seminar VI onward, this fulcrum will be increasingly tipped by a new emphasis on “being” heralded by the recognition in lesson two that he may have irked his listeners with too much juggling between being and having (Lacan, 2019, p. 35). A number of other earlier accents are also explicitly re-calibrated. Speaking of a stage in the specular experience he tells his listeners that “[W]‌e shall use all of this in a context that will give it a very different resonance” (ibid., p. 19). And towards the end of the year he punctures the tranquil possessiveness of the successfully assumed paternal metaphor by pointing out its status as fiction, the fact that this metaphor is just a mask for the metonymy of castration (cf. Cox Cameron, 2019; also Part III of this volume). The entire seminar will also be a rewriting of “the object”, now no longer metonymical (without quite ceasing to be so) but which by the end of Seminar VI is no longer an object at all in the strict sense of the word, but an index of impossibility. In lesson twenty-three he signals this re-write of the object which is he says “no longer simply a question of the function of the object as I tried to formulate it two years ago” (Lacan, ibid., p. 412). It is also in this seminar on desire that we can locate the inception of a new definition of the subject, a progressive re-write which will culminate in the gnomic statement three years later that it is the signifier which represents the subject for another signifier. The “big Other” too is rewritten. Without explicitly referring to his admirably clear definition of this big Other in his third seminar The Psychoses he effectively demolishes the status accorded it in the earlier seminar where the Other “is that before which you make yourself recognized. But you can make yourself recognized by it only because it is recognized first […] It is through recognizing it that you institute it […] as an irreducible absolute […]” (Lacan, 1993, p. 51). By the end of Seminar VI this necessary reciprocity has been bankrupted. On the 8th April 1959 he clarifies that; “I have absolutely no guarantee that this Other, owing to what he has in his system, can give me back […] what I gave him- namely his being and his essence as truth” (Lacan, 2019, p. 299).

Well aware that his critics decried Lacanian psychoanalysis as overly intellectualist, Lacan in the opening lessons of this seminar, mocks the poverty of so-called theories of affect and then goes on to situate this seminar right at its coalface.

The Lacanian vocabulary that has been the armature of his teaching, will continue to be used, but freighted now with these new meanings. The stated purpose of the five earlier seminars – a return to Freud – continues to be the banner under which Lacan advances, and one of the most remarkable features of the seminar on desire is a reading of Freud that is seemingly exact and faithful but also angled to reveal an altogether new dimension to psychoanalytic theory.

This dimension is tragedy. Over the next two years and to a lesser extent in Seminar VIII this dimension will be deepened and made explicit to the point that the final section of Seminar VII will bear the title “The Tragic Dimension of Psychoanalytic Experience”. In Seminar VI the opening up of this new dimension will be tightly, even impressively, corralled within the coordinates of Freudian doctrine. But by the end of Seminar VII when in the manner of all effective anamorphoses the hidden otherness begins to impose itself more insistently on the viewer, Lacan although still referencing this foregrounding of tragedy to Freud’s appropriation of Oedipus Rex via the Oedipus complex, acknowledges its inadequacy. He in fact then radically modifies the classic Freudian position, suggesting that if tragedy is at the root of our experience this is so “[I]‌n an even more fundamental way than through the connection to the Oedipus complex” (Lacan, 1992, pp. 243–244).

Rather extraordinarily the harbingers of this new topic had appeared for the first time in lesson thirteen of Seminar V right after a kind of rock hard installation of certainty and confidence supposedly attendant on the successful outcome of the Oedipus complex, where the subject, with the title deeds to the penis stuffed tranquilly in his pocket goes on his merry way into grown-up life (Lacan, 2017, p. 189). Following on the heels of this inspiring pen-picture, the phrase “the pain of being” a pivotal concept in Seminar VI appears for the first time; “this pain of being that, for Freud, seems to be linked to the very existence of living beings” (ibid., p. 229). In point of fact, this is a very Lacanian reading of Freud’s rather dry discussion of the interweave of Eros and Thanatos in “The Economic Problem of Masochism” (Freud, 1924c, pp. 159–173). Annihilation is spelt out in this lesson similarly to later in Seminar VI as “reducing his existence as desiring to nothing and reducing him to a state that aims to abolish him as a subject” (Lacan, 2017, p. 221), and the phrase “me phunai” “better not to be”, taken from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, attributed correctly in earlier seminars to the chorus now for the first time is (wrongly) cited as the final curse on existence of Oedipus himself, a misquote which will be hugely expanded on in Seminars VI, VII, and VIII. Also in this lesson, the Saint Augustine story which had featured in Lacan’s work since the 1940s reappears with a new tragic resonance. From the seminar on desire to that on anxiety it will be invoked as the specimen story for the founding catastrophe which marks the birth of the Imaginary. When one reads lesson thirteen of Seminar V from the vantage point of Seminar VI, it sounds like an overture. But as mentioned above, this is typical of the forward momentum of the seminars. Brush-strokes appear very briefly, vanish for extended periods, then reappear fully elaborated. While Lacan in Seminar VII can insist that as analysts, tragedy is at the forefront of our experience, this bias was much less visible in the early years of his seminar. It is true that already in Seminar II he quotes Oedipus, blind and crushed at Colonus: “Am I made man in the hour I cease to be?” (Lacan, 1988, p. 230), highlighting the bleakness of this essential drama of destiny. And already in Seminar II, for Lacan this ultimate suffering is captured in the phrase “me phunai”, translated as “better not to be”. But by Seminar VIII, Transference, this phrase will have undergone a number of metamorphoses and will now designate the true place of the subject as subject of the unconscious. By Seminar IX tragedy will have abruptly vanished from the seminar, giving way to topology.

While presenting as one of the longest, most unwieldy of Lacan’s seminars, the seminar on desire is in fact quite tightly organized, falling as it does into four sections: the dream of the dead father, the Ella Sharpe dream, Hamlet, and lastly, summarizing these three sections, Lacan indicates how they might usefully illuminate the everyday symptomatology of the psychoanalytic clinic. So in three different configurations, as he points out himself in lesson three, Lacan presents a father, a son, death, and the relation to desire. While the sections echo each other thematically they also each represent, and in entirely different ways, unheralded points of entry into a more expanded exploration of Lacan’s mantra “The unconscious is structured like a language” than the two rhetorical tropes, metaphor and metonymy, already well established in previous seminars.

Note

1I first encountered this seminar in 1989 via Cormac Gallagher’s translation. Cormac used the term “o-object” as a straight translation of Lacan’s objet a. Other translators, including Bruce Fink whose more recent translation is the one used here have chosen differently. Having worked with Cormac’s term for so many years, I like it best, and use it here, so as the reader will see, “o-object” is the term which appears in my own text, while remaining faithful to Fink’s translation in the quotations from the seminar itself.

References

• De Botton, A. (2000). The Consolations of Philosophy. London: Penguin.
• Cox Cameron, O. (2019). “The Phallus of the Fifties: Those Years of ‘Tranquil Possession’”, in, Owens, C. and Almqvist, N. (Eds.). Studying Lacan’s Seminars IV and V: From Lack to Desire. London: Routledge.
• Freud, S. (1924c). “The Economic Problem of Masochism”. S.E., XIX, pp. 155–172.

Lacan, J.:

The seminars:

• –––. (1988). The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in The Technique of Psychoanalysis, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, 1954–1955. (Ed.) Miller, J.-A. (Trans.) Tomaselli, S. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––. (1992). The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII. 1959–1960. (Ed.) Miller, J.-A. (Trans.). Porter, D. London: Routledge.
• –––. (1993). The Psychoses. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III. 1955–1956. (Ed.) Miller, J.-A. (Trans.) Grigg, R. London: Routledge.
• –––. (2017). Formations of the Unconscious, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V. (Ed.) Miller, J.-A. (Trans.) Grigg. R. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• –––. (2019). Desire and its Interpretation, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VI. (Ed.) Miller, J.-A. (Trans.) Fink B. Cambridge: Polity Press. Also (Trans.). Gallagher, C. Unpublished. www.lacaninireland.com

Chapter 2

“He did not know that he was dead”

Seminar VI begins with an extremely dense and difficult discussion of the relations between repression, representation, and the primary process. Vintage Lacan one might say – dense clouds of abstraction shot through with rays of poetry that pierce his listeners with sudden recognition – but right from the start he introduces his listeners to what will be the kernel, the pith of this year’s teaching, the non-opposition of subject and object in the fantasy. The first seven lessons comprise what I will isolate as Section 1.

Central to these lessons is an initial sketching out of the structure of fantasy which is also now a version of the structure of the subject. This section also provides a first outline of what will become the o-object, at this stage specifically linked to narcissistic passion.

He sets out his stall in the first lesson of the year. “we will ask ourselves, ‘What is desire?’” (Lacan, 2019, p. 5) and further on “[I]‌t will be our goal this year to try to define what fantasy is” (ibid., p. 10). However in typically Moëbian fashion, since he has not altogether abandoned this mode of advance, the first two lessons pick up on and expand the graph of desire, covering material he had been presenting to his audience for most of the second half of the previous year’s seminar (Lacan, 2017, pp. 313, 321, 371, 400, 444–445, 486–490) while now inserting into it the central new tenet of this year’s teaching, the installation of fantasy as essential defence. It is heartening to hear in les...