This Text is part of the Conferences and Conversations in North American Universities.

Title: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, December 2, 1975

Published by University of Missouri, M. I. T.: http://web.missouri.edu/~stonej/t67894312xxxv.html

Translated by Jack W. Stone

NOW available at www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Lacan

An edited version is also available, p31 to 38 of The Lacanian Review , Issue 05 : July 2018 : Translated by Jack W Stone & Russell Grigg : Retitled, ‘MIT lecture on Topology’

Both versions, translations by {i} Jack W. Stone {ii} Jack W. Stone with Russell Grigg, published bilingually at www.Freud2Lacan.com /Lacan (187. Lacan: Seminar at MIT: December 02, 1975)

Published in French:

Title: 1975-12-02, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Scilicet n° 6/7, 1975, p53-63

Now published electronically at ‘pas tout Lacan’, École Lacanienne de la Psychanalyse

Available https://ecole-lacanienne.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/1975-12-02.pdf

Index/Contents

Opening : Linguistics is that by which psychoanalysis could hook on to science. But psychoanalysis is not a science; it is a practice.

Topology p5

Questions to Roman Jacobsen** p11

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** Usually translated as Roman Jakobson

From Wikipedia : Roman Osipovich Jakobson (Russian: Рома́н О́сипович Якобсо́н, IPA: [rɐˈman ˈosʲɪpəvʲɪt͡ɕ (j)ɪkɐpˈson]; 11 October [O.S. 29 September] 1896 – 18 July 1982) was a Russian linguist and literary theorist. A pioneer of structural linguistics, Jakobson was one of the most celebrated and influential linguists of the twentieth century. With Nikolai Trubetzkoy, he developed revolutionary new techniques for the analysis of linguistic sound systems, in effect founding the modern discipline of phonology. Jakobson went on to extend similar principles and techniques to the study of other aspects of language such as syntax, morphology and semantics. He made numerous contributions to Slavic linguistics, most notably two studies of Russian case and an analysis of the categories of the Russian verb. Drawing on insights from C. S. Peirce’s semiotics, as well as from communication theory and cybernetics, he proposed methods for the investigation of poetry, music, and the visual arts including cinema.

Through his decisive influence on Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, among others, Jakobson became a pivotal figure in the adaptation of structural analysis to disciplines beyond linguistics, including philosophy, anthropology and literary theory; his development of the approach pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure, known as “structuralism”, became a major post-war intellectual movement in Europe and the United States.

In 1949 Jakobson moved to Harvard University, where he remained until his retirement in 1967. His universalizing structuralist theory of phonology, based on a markedness hierarchy of distinctive features, achieved its canonical exposition in a book published in the United States in 1951, jointly authored by Roman Jakobson, C. Gunnar Fant and Morris Halle. In the same year, Jakobson’s theory of ‘distinctive features’ made a profound impression on the thinking of young Noam Chomsky, in this way also influencing generative linguistics. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960.

…

In his last decade, Jakobson maintained an office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was an honorary professor emeritus. In the early 1960s, Jakobson shifted his emphasis to a more comprehensive view of language and began writing about communication sciences as a whole. He converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in 1975.

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Lacan on the blackboard p12

Question of Mr Quine***, The aim (but) of analysis is to un-make the knot? p13 : ‘One could advance that if Freud demonstrates something, it is that sexuality makes a hole, but the human being hasn’t the least idea what this is. A woman presents herself for the man by a symptom; a woman is a symptom for the man. ‘

The Soul p13

Do the knots have three dimensions? P14

Question of Mr. Quine***: solid models give us an idea of the third dimension. It is only vision that misses it. P14

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***From Wikipedia : Willard Van Orman Quine (/kwaɪn/ KWYNE; known to his friends as “Van”; June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as “one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century”. He was the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1956 to 1978.

Quine was a teacher of logic and set theory. He was famous for his position that first-order logic is the only kind worthy of the name, and developed his own system of mathematics and set theory, known as New Foundations. In the philosophy of mathematics, he and his Harvard colleague Hilary Putnam developed the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument, an argument for the reality of mathematical entities. He was the main proponent of the view that philosophy is not conceptual analysis, but continuous with science; it is the abstract branch of the empirical sciences. This led to his famous quip that “philosophy of science is philosophy enough.” He led a “systematic attempt to understand science from within the resources of science itself” and developed an influential naturalized epistemology that tried to provide “an improved scientific explanation of how we have developed elaborate scientific theories on the basis of meagre sensory input.” He also advocated holism in science, known as the Duhem–Quine thesis.

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Impromptu on Analytic Discourse p15

a $

S2 S1

Jacques Lacan’s references

Sigmund Freud has many references but not to a particular work

***

P1 of Jack Stone’s translation, As we were speaking of it a little while ago, Mr. Quine asked me what I owed to Claude Lévi‐Strauss: I owe him a lot, if not everything. That doesn’t prevent me from having a wholly other notion of structure than his.

***

P4 of Jack Stone’s translation, In Greek science, we see this harmony of the spheres by which one is now a little surprised and of which one can say with Pascal that it no longer exists.

Citation

The Soul p13 quoted in, The Unconscious Testifies to a Real of Its Own : 15th January 2019 : Yves Vanderveken, see this site /5 Authors A-Z (Vanderveken or Index of Authors’ texts) or www.LacanianWorksExchange.net

Vanderveken: “No one disputes that the brain is the instrument which makes thinking possible – in spite of the serious games of Jacques Lacan, indicating that he himself thought … with his feet (3) : Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2nd December 1975 (MIT lecture on topology) : Jacques Lacan

p6 of Jack W. Stone’s translation : 4. – The soul.

The only thing that seems to me to substantify the soul is the symptom.

Man would think with his soul. The soul would be the tool of thought. What would be the soul of this so-called tool?

The soul of the symptom is something hard, like a bone.
We believe we think with our brain.
 Me, I think with my feet, it is only there that I encounter something hard; at times, I think with the platysmas (peauciers) of my forehead, when I bang into something. I have seen enough electro-encephalograms to know that there is no shadow of a thought there.