“There is a dynamic of knots; it serves for nothing (sert á rien), but, finally, it grips (serre).”-Jacques Lacan, Le Sinthome : Session of 10th February 1976
Translated by Jack Stone, (pVI 6 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation)

From Jack Stone’s Joyce/Lacan/SintHome Page : published at http://web.missouri.edu, at http://web.missouri.edu/~stonej/index.html#jack :

Publication in French

-École lacanienne de psychanalyse – E. L. P. – (http://ecole-lacanienne.net ) / Lacan-Bibliothèque /at http://ecole-lacanienne.net/bibliolacan/stenotypies-version-j-l-et-non-j-l/

An internet translation of the Introduction to Lacan-Bibliothèque, titled, Seminars – Jacques Lacan – J.L. and not J.L. versions

The École lacanienne de psychanalyse’s library makes all of Jacques Lacan’s seminars available to the Internet public, in the basic form of available stenotypes. A stenographer assisted Jacques Lacan in each of his seminar sessions, from 1953 to 1980. At the end of each session, she typed up the stenotype tapes, in duplicate or triplicate, using a process that had been famous for a century: carbon paper.

For most of the seventies, J.L. versions were supplemented by others which, whatever their merits, were not of the same quality. While they sometimes correct errors, it is never out of the question for them to add others of their own, which are all the more difficult to perceive since, unlike J.L., their texts often have a typographical quality that is not matched by an equal critical effort.

It goes without saying that all these documents are in image format (.pdf).

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– Two sources of transcription are used to produce a French transcription at http://staferla.free.fr/Séminaire XXIII. P2 of Staferla:

Ce document de travail a pour sources principales :

– Le sinthome, fichiers mp3 des séances, disponibles sur le site de Patrick VALAS.

– Le sinthome, version CHOLLET sur le site E.L.P.

Le texte de ce séminaire nécessite l’installation de la police de caractères spécifique, dite « Lacan », disponible ici :

http://fr.ffonts.net /LACAN.font.download (placer le fichier Lacan.ttf dans le répertoire c:windowsfonts)

Les références bibliographiques privilégient les éditions les plus récentes. Les schémas sont refaits.

N.B. Ce qui s’inscrit entre crochets droits [ ] n’est pas de Jacques LACAN.

An internet translation,

The main sources for this working document are:

– Le sinthome, mp3 files of the sessions, available on Patrick VALAS’s website.

– Le sinthome, CHOLLET version on the E.L.P. website.

The text of this seminar requires the installation of a specific font, called “Lacan,” available here:

http://fr.ffonts.net /LACAN.font.download (place the file Lacan.ttf in the c:windowsfonts directory)

The bibliographical references give priority to the most recent editions. The diagrams have been redrawn.

N.B. Anything written between square brackets [ ] is not by Jacques Lacan.

-published in book form, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, as LACAN, J.: Le séminaire livre XXIII : Le sinthome: Paris , Seuil 2005

In translation

– Cormac Gallagher’s translation, from original tapes, no editing,

available at wwwLacaninIreland.com /Seminars is in two parts, go to ‘Joyce and the Sinthome Part 2’

Session title, VI Wednesday 10th February 1976, Page numbers pVI 1-15

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– Translation by Adrian Price : Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller :

The Sinthome – The Seminar of Jacques Lacan – Book XXIII : Polity Press 2016

Chapter Headings/Session title as defined by Jacques-Alain Miller

Seminar XXIII : 10th February 1976 : Chapter V

Was Joyce mad?

Sub-headings : The jouissance of the real

Redemption or castration

The real within the entanglements of the true

Compensating for a de facto Verwerfung

The value of the proper noun

Page numbers p62-73

Reading Notes for 10th February 1956

P172 of Adrian Price’s translation, Chapter V, of Reading Notes to Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XXIII. : 2005 : Jacques Aubert. See this site /5 Authors A-Z (Aubert or Index of Authors’ texts)

Scribbledehobble: the full title is Scribbledehobble: The Ur-Workbook for Finnegans Wake, Ed. Thomas E. Connolly, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1961. Dt Lacan is clearly confusing this academic with Cyril Connolly (1903-1974), editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Horizon (1940-1949) which published British authors from the 1930s and ’40s, alongside some French and American writers. Cyril Connolly is surely better known as the author of The Unquiet Grave; A Word Cycle by Palinurus (1944, reprinted in 1961), a voyage into the mind of a writer haunted by the wandering ghost of Palinurus, the helmsman of Aeneas’ ship’. One may wonder whether it is not in relation to this background figure of ‘A-Father’, who also comes from Troy, albeit in a different way, that Lacan, turning his interest to the story of Ulysses, finds this Connolly again. See also footnote 3 on p. 7 of the second volume of Joyce’s complete works in French, OEuvres (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), about Conolly Norman, who seems to have been the first Irish psychiatrist to come across Freud’s work.[6]

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. . . letters . . . unpublishable.: in fact, most of these letters (with the exception of those of 8 and 9 December 1909, to which Jacques Lacan nevertheless had access even prior to the I975 publication of Selected Letters), which were absent from Volume I had been published in Volumes II and III (1966).

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. . . Tweedledum and Tweedledee.: Joyce uses these two names in his 24 June 1921 letter to Harriet S. Weaver. in Letters, Vol. I, ed. S. Gilbert. New York: Viking, 1966. P. 167.

A batch of people in Zurich persuaded themselves that I was gradually going mad and actually endeavoured to induce me to enter a sanatorium where a certain Doctor Jung (the Swiss Tweedledum who is not to be confused with the Viennese Tweedledee, Dr. Freud) amuses himself at the expense (in every sense of the word) of ladies and gentlemen who are troubled by bees in their bonnets.

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Cranly questions him . . .: A Portrait of the Artist, p.243.

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In Stephen Hero, there are traces.: notably where Joyce plays with the ‘enigma of a manner’ (p. 27), the fantasies of heroism, of ‘egoism’, of redemption,[7] and then the slide towards the poetic route offered by Franciscan literature. See, too, the note on ‘a book of himself’, above.

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. . . the Church diplomatic.: see Stephen Hero, p. 172. See also the passages mentioning the Jesuits and their duplicity in A Portrait of the Artist, such as p. 184 and p. 189.

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. . . his calling.: see A Portrait of the Artist, pp. 172-3 and p. 252, entry of l6 April.

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p166, References to Stephen Hero are from the 1963 New Directions edition, edited by J. J. Slocum and H. Cahoon, which includes five additional manuscript pages that were missing from earlier editions; references to ,4 Portrqit of the Artist as a Young Man are from the 1977 Viking Press edition, which follows the same pagination as the 1964 Crirical Library corrected text, edited (with criticism and notes) by Chester G. Anderson; the edition of Ulysses referenced below is the Oxford World’s Classics edition (which reproduces the original 1922 Shakespeare & Co. text).

References for 10th February 1956

For the whole Seminar consult

Seminar XXIII The Sinthome or Joyce and the Sinthome (1975-1976) : beginning on 18th November 1975 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19751118 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)

10th February 1956

pVI 1 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, Jacques Aubert, who is there in the front row, sends me from time to time, from Lyon – it is good of him to do it – the indication of some supplementary authors. He is not innocent in the matter. But who is innocent? He is not innocent because he has also perpetrated things on Joyce.

See Presentation at Lacan’s Seminar : 20th January 1976 (Paris) : Jacques Aubert. See this site /5 Authors A-Z (Aubert)

pVI 2, It is clear that here I am distorting something in Freud. I am trying to note, to point out that enjoyment belongs to the Real. This leads me into enormous difficulties. First of all, because it is clear that the enjoyment of the Real comprises what Freud had glimpsed, comprises masochism; and it is obviously not from that step that he started. Masochism is the major part of the enjoyment the Real gives. He discovered it, he had not immediately foreseen it.

It is certain that by entering onto this path you are drawn on, as is evidenced by the fact that I began by writing Ecrits Inspirés. It is a fact that that is how I began. And that is why I, why I should not be too astonished to find myself confronting Joyce. This indeed is why I dared to ask this question, a question that I asked earlier, was Joyce mad? Which is: what was it that inspired his writing?

See “Inspired” writings – Schizography : 12th November 1931 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19311112)

pVI 7, reference to Pierre Soury and Michel Thomé, My good friends, Soury and Thomé, noticed that, they managed to decompose the relationships of the Borromean knot and the torus. They noticed the following (diagram VI-3), which is that the couple of two circles folded onto one another, for this is what is at stake, you see clearly that this one, by being folded back, is liberated, this is even the whole principle of the Borromean knot. They noticed that this can be inscribed in a torus made like that. And that this is even why if one (101) makes pass along here the infinite straight line which is not excluded from the problem of knots, far from it, this infinite straight line which is made differently than what we can call the false hole, this infinite straight line makes of this hole a true hole. Namely, something that is represented as flattened out. For there always remains this question of flattening something out. Why is it appropriate?

pVI 8, reference to Immanuel Kant, Curious thing, I will say that it is a sexual relationship; even though I say that there are none such. But it is a funny sexual relationship.

There is something about which we think, of course, but we think rarely about it. We rarely think about it because it is not a habit of ours to clothe our right hand with the glove that goes on our left hand by turning it inside out. It is somewhere in Kant. But anyway, who reads Kant? It is very pertinent in Kant. It is very pertinent. There is only one thing about which – since he took this comparison of the glove, I do not see why I would not also take it! There is only one thing that he did not think about, perhaps because in his time gloves did not have buttons, which is that in the inside-out glove the button is inside. This is an obstacle all the same, to the comparison being completely satisfying! But if you have all the same carefully followed, in short, what I have just said, the fact is that the gloves that (102) are at stake are not completely innocent, the inside-out glove is Nora. This is his way of considering that she fits him like a glove.

pVI 9-10, untraced references to Sigmund Freud, We must continue with our round.

Imagination by being the redeemer, in our tradition at least, is the (103) prototype of what not unintentionally I write as per-version (père-version). It is in the measure that there is a relationship from son to father, and this for a very long time, that there arose this loony idea of the redeemer. Freud had all the same tried to extricate himself from that, from this sadomasochism, the only point in which there is a supposed relationship between sadism and masochism. The sadism is for the father, the masochism is for the son. There is between them strictly no relationship. We must really believe that it happens like this (VI-4), namely, that there is an infinite straight line that penetrates into a torus. I think that I am giving enough of an image like that. One must really believe in the active and the passive to imagine that sadomasochism is something explained by a polarity.

Diagram figure VI-4

Freud very clearly saw something which is much older than this Christian mythology, which is castration. The fact is that the phallus, is transmitted from father to son. And that even this involves, this involves something which cancels out the phallus of the father before the son has the right to bear it. It is essentially in this way, which is manifestly a symbolic transition, that Freud refers, that Freud refers to this idea of castration.

This indeed is what led me, which led me to pose the question about the relationships of the Symbolic and the Real. They are very ambiguous; at least in Freud. It is indeed here that the question of the critique of the true arises. What is the true, if not the true Real?

pVI 10-11 reference to Martin Heidegger, And how distinguish, except by using a metaphysical term, the ‘Echt’ of Heidegger, how distinguish the true Real from the false? For Echt is all the same on the side, on the side of the Real. Here indeed is where the whole metaphysics of Heidegger is brought to a halt. In this little piece on ‘Echt’, he admits, as I might say, his failure. The Real is found (104) in the entanglements of the true. And this indeed is what led me to the idea of knot which proceeds from the fact that the true is self-perforating due to the fact that its use creates meaning out of nothing (de toute pièce). This because it slides, because it is sucked in by the image of the corporal hole from which it is emitted, namely, the mouth in so far as it sucks.

Related text (note the date)

A Lacanian Psychosis : 12th February 1976 : An encounter between Gérard Primeau & Jacques Lacan, See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19760212)

Citations

– pVI 2-3 Cormac Gallagher’s translation cited in

Introduction to Russell Grigg’s translation of Motives of Paranoiac Crime : December 1933 : Jacques Lacan

The mystery of the Papin Sisters and the knot of Paranoia : September 2020 : Laura Sokolowsky. Published at Motives of Paranoiac Crime : December 1933 : Jacques Lacan, see this site /4 Jaques Lacan (19331201)

Sokolovsky, To take Lacan as a block is also to consider that his first explorations into psychosis (his 1932 thesis on the case of Aimée [i] is its highest achievement) can be reread in the light of his final teaching. In the Seminar Le Sinthome, [ii], when he is considering Joyce’s relationship to writing, Lacan himself refers to his article in “Ecrits [iii] – ‘Inspirées’: Schizographie” of l93I (published by Massan, Paris) (iv). What were Joyce’s writings inspired by, he asks?

[i] On Paranoid Psychosis in its relationships with the personality, followed by first writings on Paranoia (Aimée) : 7th July 1932 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19320101 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)

[ii] Seminar XXIII : 10th February 1976 : pVI 2 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, www.LacaninIreland.com

pVI 2-3, And that is why I, why I should not be too astonished to find myself confronting Joyce. This indeed is why I dared to ask this question, a question that I asked earlier, was Joyce mad? Which is: what was it that inspired his writing?

Joyce left an enormous quantity of notes, of scribblings, scribbledehobble. That is how someone called Connolly, whom I knew at one time – I don’t know if he’s still alive – entitled a manuscript that he extracted, that he extracted from Joyce.

The question is in short the following: how to know, from his notes, and it is not by chance that he left so many, because anyway his notes, were drafts. Scribbledehobble is not random, it must well have been that he wanted that, and even that he encouraged those called researchers to go looking for them. He wrote an enormous number of letters. There are three volumes of them, as thick as that, which have come out. Among these letters, there are some that are quasi- unpublishable… I say quasi because you can well imagine that when all is said and done this is not something that would stop someone from publishing them. There is a final volume, Selected Letters, brought out by the priceless Richard Ellmann in which he publishes a certain number of them which had been considered as unpublishable in the first tomes. This whole hotchpotch is such that you cannot find your way in it. In any case, for my part I admit that I cannot find my way in it. I find my way, I find my bearings in it, by a certain number (96) of little threads, of course. I get a certain idea of his goings on with Nora from, from my, I am saying from my practice. I mean from the confidences that I receive, since I am dealing with people that I train so that they take pleasure in telling the truth.

Everyone says that if, if I manage that, anyway, I say everyone, Freud says that if I manage it, it is because they love me. They love me thanks to what I tried to pinpoint about the transference. Namely, that they suppose that I know. Well! It is obvious that I do not know everything. And, in particular, that in reading Joyce, this is the frightful thing about it, the fact is that I am reduced to reading him.

How know from reading Joyce what he believed about himself? Since it is quite certain that I did not analyse him. I regret it. Anyway, it is clear that he was little disposed to it.

[iii] Écrits : October 1966 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19661001 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)

[iv] “Inspired” writings – Schizography : 12th November 1931 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19311112) for quotation from pVI 2 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation.

–pVI 12 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, cited in

Chomsky with Joyce : 11th April 2005 (Paris) : Éric Laurent, see this site /5 Authors A-Z (Laurent or Index of Authors’ texts)

and Extracts from Éric Laurent ‘Lost in cognition’ : 22nd March 2016 : Circulated on NLS’s Messager , see this site /5 Authors A-Z (Laurent)

-p4 Laurent, Lost in Cognition/Chomsky with Joyce, “Suddenly, in December 1975, a glimmer of light came peeping through. Lacan had just got back from the US and was speaking about Chomsky (Lacan, 2005a, pp. 27–43 [1]). We were acquainted with Chomsky. We had been able to take advantage of the lessons of Jean-Claude Milner, who was and has long remained the leading French Chomskyan. We thought, therefore, that we might find something here, some point of support. Next, in February 1976 [2], a lesson of the Seminar ended with the following declaration: “Mad […]? […] this is not a privilege, […] in most people the symbolic, the imaginary and the real are tangled up […].” (Lacan, 2005a, p. 87)”

“We were starting to understand. For some of his audience a door was opening: we were hearing the flipside to “On a question prior to any possible treatment of psychosis” (Lacan, 2006, pp. 445–458 [3]). What had been established, or so we believed, as a radical distinction between madness as a result of foreclosure, and that which is not affected by foreclosure, was now being displaced. Between neurosis and psychosis, which hitherto stood apart like two distinct continents, there emerged a passage of generalisation. We didn’t understand everything, but an altogether different world was fanning out for us, which we were just starting to glimpse. Likewise, the knots looked to be a theoretical instrument that was highly abstract (a long way from where we were standing) and yet clinical and pragmatic. The many indications about rectifying the “slipped knot” by means of the sinthome lay in this direction.”

Lost in Cognition – Psychoanalysis and the Cognitive Sciences : 2008 (French), 2012 (Hebrew), 2014 (English) : Éric Laurent, see this site /5 Authors A-Z (Laurent or Index of Authors) or Chomsky with Joyce : 11th April 2005 (Paris) : Éric Laurent, see this site /5 Authors A-Z (Laurent or Index of Authors’ texts)

References:

[1] 9th December 1975, Seminar XXIII, pII IV of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : www.LacaninIreland.com, See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19751118 or 19751209 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)

[2] 10th February 1976, Seminar XXIII, pVI 12 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation.

And what I am raising as a question, since what is at stake, is whether yes or no Joyce was mad, why after all would he not have been? All the more so in that this is not a privilege, if it is true that in (106) most, the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real are entangled to the point they are continued from one to the other, if there is not an operation that distinguishes them in a chain, properly speaking, the Borromean knot, of the supposed Borromean knot, for the Borromean knot is not a knot, it is a chain. Why not grasp that each of these loops is continued for each one into the other in a way that is strictly not distinguished and that at the same time, it is not a privilege to be mad.

[3] Points 1 to 4, Section I – Towards Freud, p179-184 of Alan Sheridan’s translation of On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis – two most important parts of Seminar III : December 1957-January 1958 : Jacques Lacan, see this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19580131 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts.)

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Commentary

Chomsky with Joyce : 11th April 2005 (Paris) : Éric Laurent, see this site /5 Authors A-Z (Laurent or Index of Authors’ texts)

Passed Over Stories : 6th November 2005 (Paris) : Jacques Aubert, see this site /5 Authors A-Z (Aubert or Index of Authors’ texts)