Index of this post
Headings as given by Jacques-Alain Miller – Editor
Published
Published in French Pas tout Lacan & transcript
Information on Session 19th January 1955 & its Mathemes Lutecium
References
Citations
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Headings as given by Jacques-Alain Miller – Editor (1988)
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19th January 1955 : The circuit : Chapter VII
Subheadings
Maurice Merleau-Ponty and understanding,
Conservation, entropy, information,
Pleasure principle and reality principle,
Gribouille’s apprenticeship,
Reminiscence and repetition
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Published
Chapter VII p77-91 of ‘The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II The Ego in Freud’s theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis: 1954-1955’, Translated Sylvana Tomaselli, With notes by John Forrester, Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, Published and date: Cambridge University Press, 1988
Seminar II available from www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Texts by request.
General notes & references at, Seminar II The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (1954-1955) : from 17th November 1954 : Jacques Lacan, this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19541117) or https://web.archive.org/web/20220718142618/https:/lacanianworks.net/?p=1141
Published in French, Pas tout Lacan & transcript
UNEDITED
– Published unedited, from transcriptions of tape recordings, at http://staferla.free.fr / Séminaire 2 : Le moi
Leçon 20 25 mai 1955, see http://staferla.free.fr/S2/S2%20LE%20MOI.pdf
From Staferla, The primary sources for this working paper are:
– ‘Le moi…’, available on the E.L.P. website (stenotype).
– ‘Le moi…’, a document in “university thesis” format.
-An image of the stenographer’s typed manuscript,
École lacanienne de psychanalyse – E. L. P. – (http://ecole-lacanienne.net ) / Lacan-Bibliothèque
Séminaire II at http://ecole-lacanienne.net/bibliolacan/stenotypies-version-j-l-et-non-j-l/
Session of 19th January 1955, https://ecole-lacanienne.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/1955.01.19.pdf
EDITED
-Le Séminaire, Livre II, Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse, Texte establi par Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris: du Seuil, 1978
Information on Session 19th January 1955 & its Mathemes from Lutecium
From Topologos Lutecium, Les Mathèmes de Lacan, Recherche, Table des Matières, de Jacques B. Siboni
See https://www.lutecium.org/mathemes/node115.html for Seminar II
19th January 1955 https://www.lutecium.org/mathemes/node122.html
Jacques Lacan’s Mathemes – an Introduction
Here is the English version via an internet translation of a Mathematics Thesaurus taken from written texts and from Dr. Lacan. It covers all the texts written by Lacan and all the seminars he held in 1953 at 1979. Accompanying this thesaurus, there is a search tool allowing to visualise the citations comprising one or more mathemes, these appearing in chronological order.
A Mathematics Thesaurus for 19th January 1955
Translated via the internet and reproduced without the links given on the site
2.7 Petite référence ; 19 janvier 1955
2.7 Small Reference; 19th January 1955
[Elements established from the text [Lac55, Jan 19, 1955]]
The pleasure principle is the restoring tendency toward equilibrium for an organism conceived as a machine.
The repetitive tendency is distinct from the restoring tendency.
Language is something material that is the instrument of speech.
* The unconscious is the discourse of the other.
* The discourse of the other is the superego.
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References
These are a work in progress – June 2026. JE
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Reference to Gribouille*
P85 of Sylvana Tomacelli’s translation, I’m not saying that analysands are incapable of learning. You can teach people to play the piano – though it has to exist – and you notice, for instance, that having learned to play the piano with large keys, they can play on a piano with small keys, on a harpsichord, etc. But this is only a matter of determinate segments of human behaviour, and not, as in analysis, of man’s destiny, his conduct when the piano lesson has ended and he goes and visits his girlfriend. Then what he learns is more or less the same as Gribouille.
You know the story of Gribouille. He goes to a funeral, and says – Many happy returns! He gets himself in a mess, gets his hair pulled, goes back home – Come now, you don’t say ‘Many happy returns’ at a funeral. you say – May God rest his soul! He goes back out, comes upon a wedding – May God rest his soull And he still gets into trouble.
Well that is what learning is, so analysis shows us, and that is what we come upon in the first analytic discoveries – trauma, fixation, reproduction, transference. What in the analytic experience is called the intrusion of the past into the present pertains to this order. It is always the learning of someone who will do better next time. And when I say that he will do better next time, that means that he’ll have to do something completely different next time.
* The term “Gribouille” primarily refers to a character in a folktale (who throws himself into the water to avoid the rain), the famous cartoon puppet from the children’s television program L’Île aux enfants, or the popular expression meaning to draw clumsily. The Story of the True Gribouille is a tale written by George Sand in 1851.
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-Reference to Repetition : 1843: Søren Kierkegaard Available https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.128273/2015.128273.Repetition_djvu.txt
P87-88 of Sylvana Tomaselli’s translation, I would like to get you to understand at what level the need for repetition is situated. And once again, we will find our reference some way away.
4
Kierkegaard. who was, as you know, a humorist, discussed the difference between the pagan world and the world of grace, which Christianity introduces. Something of the ability to recognise his natural object, so apparent in animals, is present in man. There is being captured by form, being seized by play, being gripped by the mirage of life. That is what a theoretical. or theorial, or contemplative, or Platonic thought refers itself to, and it isn’t an accident that Plato places reminiscence at the centre of his entire theory of knowledge. The natural object, the harmonic correspondent of the living being, is recognisable because its outline has already been sketched. And for it to-have been sketched, it must already have been within the object which is going to join itself to it. That is the relation of the dyad. Plato’s entire theory of knowledge – Jean Hyppolite won’t contradict me – is dyadic.
But for certain specific reasons, a change occurred. Sin is from then on present as the third term, and it is no longer by following the path of reminiscence, but rather in following that of repetition, that man finds his way. That is precisely what puts Kierkegaard on the track of our Freudian intuitions, in a small book called Repetition. I recommend reading it to those who are already somewhat ahead. Those who don’t have much time should at least read the first part.
Kierkegaard wants to avoid precisely those problems which stem from his accession to a new order, and he encounters the dam of his own reminiscences, of who he thinks he is and of what he knows he will never be able to become. He then tries the experiment of repetition. He returns to Berlin where, during his previous stay he had experienced infinite pleasure. and he retraces his own steps. You will see what happens to him. seeking his well-being in the shadow of his pleasure. The experiment fails totally. But as a result of that, he puts us on the track of our problem, namely, how and why everything which pertains to an advance essential to the human being must take the path of a tenacious repetition.
I’m getting close to the model which I want to leave with you today, so you can see the meaning of man’s need for repetition. It’s all to do with the intrusion of the symbolic register. Only, I’ll illustrate it for you.”
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Citations
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p80-81 of Sylvana Tomaselli’s translation
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– Lacanian Biology and the Event of the Body : 12th & 19th May 1999 (Paris VIII) : Jacques-Alain Miller, see this site /5 Authors A-Z (Miller) or https://web.archive.org/web/20220718142621/https://lacanianworks.net/1999/05/lacanian-biology-and-the-event-of-the-body-12th-19th-may-1999-paris-viii-jacques-alain-miller/
p25 Miller ‘Lacan, coherent with his point of departure, at once denies biological relevancy to death, conceived as the return of the animate to the inanimate. [See SEXVIII p38*] He develops it in Seminar II.’
p80-81 of Sylvana Tomaselli’s translation, ‘Freud here offered them the opportunity for yet one more misunderstanding, and in chorus they all succumb to it, in their panic.
‘The minimum tension can mean one of two things, all biologists will agree, according to whether it is a matter of the minimum given a certain definition of the equilibrium of the system, or of the minimum purely and simply, that is to say, with respect to the living being, death.
‘Indeed one can consider that with death, all tensions are reduced, from the point of view of the living being, to zero. But one can just as well take into consideration the processes of decomposition which follow death. One then ends up defining the aim of the pleasure principle as the concrete dissolution of the corpse. That is something which one cannot but see as excessive.
‘However, I can cite you several authors for whom reducing the stimuli to the minimum means nothing more nor less than the death of the living being. That is to assume that the problem has been resolved, that is to confuse the pleasure principle with what we think Freud designated under the name of the death instinct. I say what we think, because, when Freud speaks of the death instinct, he is, thank God, designating something less absurd, less anti-biological, anti-scientific.
‘There is something which is distinct from the pleasure principle and which tends to reduce all animate things to the inanimate – that is how Freud puts it. What does he mean by this? What obliges him to think that? Not the death of living beings. It’s human experience, human interchange, intersubjectivity. Something of what he observes in man constrains him to step out of the limits of life.
‘No doubt there is a principle which brings the libido back to death, but it doesn’t bring it back any old how. If it brought it back there by the shortest paths, the problem would be resolved. But it brings it back there only along the paths of life, it so happens.
‘The principle which brings the living being back to death is situated, is marked out behind the necessity it experiences to take the roads of life – and it can only take that way. It cannot find death along any old road.’ :
* Beyond the Pleasure Principle : 1920 g : Sigmund Freud, see this site /3 Sigmund Freud (19200101 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts), SE XVIII p38, It follows that the phenomena of organic development must be attributed to external disturbing and diverting influences. The elementary living entity would from its beginning have had no wish to change; if conditions remained the same, it would do no more than constantly repeat the same course of life. In the last resort, what has left its mark on the development of organisms must be the history of the earth we live in and of its relation to the sun. Every modification which is thus imposed upon the course of the organism’s life is accepted by the conservative organic instincts and stored up for further repetition. Those instincts are therefore bound to give a deceptive appearance of being forces tending towards change and progress, whilst in fact they are merely seeking an ancient goal by paths alike old and new. Moreover it is possible to specify this final goal of all organic striving. It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the instincts if the goal of life were a state of things which had never yet been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons-becomes inorganic once again-then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones’.
The attributes of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception. It may perhaps have been a process similar in type to that which later caused the development of consciousness in a particular stratum of living matter. The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavoured to cancel itself out. In this way the first [instinct] drive came into being: the [instinct] drive to return to the inanimate state.
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-Sur l’intelligence artificielle : 20th May 2026 : Eric Laurent (Video with English subtitles), see this site /5 Authors A-Z (Laurent)
Laurent, 4:58 minutes, Lacan believed that this human intelligence has above all an animal aspect.
JE suspects this point is made many times in Lacan. The following is a start,
Seminar II 19th January 1955, p80-81 of Sylvana Tomaselli’s translation, see quotation above.
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P87-88 of Sylvana Tomaselli’s translation
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– Some relations between Jacques Lacan and Søren Kierkegaard: Seminars II, VII, X, XVII, XX & two Écrits : 16th December 2016 : Julia Evans, see this site /5 Authors A-Z (Evans or Index of Julia Evans’ texts)
See above for quote of p87-88 of Sylvana Tomaselli’s translation
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p89 of Sylvana Tomaselli’s translation
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-The Seminar of Barcelona on Die Wege der Symptombildung : probably Autumn 1996 : Jacques-Alain Miller, see this site /5 Authors A-Z (Miller) or https://web.archive.org/web/20220718142641/https://lacanianworks.net/1996/09/the-seminar-of-barcelona-on-die-wege-der-symptombildung%E2%80%A8-probably-autumn-1996-jacques-alain-miller/
Miller p50, * Seminar II, he makes of the super-ego the key to the symptoms
P89 of Sylvana Tomacelli’s translation, At the point we have reached, I propose, looking ahead, that you conceive of the need for repetition, such as it concretely manifests itself in the subject, in analysis for instance, as the form of behaviour staged in the past and reproduced in the present in a way which doesn’t conform much with vital adaptation.
Here we rediscover what I’ve already pointed out to you, namely that the unconscious is the discourse of the other. This discourse of the other is not the discourse of the abstract other, of the other in the dyad, of my correspondent, nor even of my slave, it is the discourse of the circuit in which I am integrated. I am one of its links. It is the discourse of my father for instance, in so far as my father made mistakes, which I am absolutely condemned to reproduce – that’s what we call the super-ego. I am condemned to reproduce them because I am obliged to pick up again the discourse he bequeathed to me, not Simply because I am his son, but because one can’t stop the chain of discourse, and it is precisely my duty to transmit it in its aberrant form to someone else. I have to put to someone else the problem of a situation of life or death in which the chances are [p90] that it is just as likely that he will falter, in such a way that this discourse produces a small circuit in which an entire family, an entire coterie, an entire camp. an entire nation or half of the world will be caught. The circular form of a speech which is just at the limit between sense and non-sense, which is problematic.
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