Presented on the 28th September 2013 in Dublin as part of the ICLO-NLS (Irish Circle of the Lacanian Orientation – New Lacanian School) Annual Seminar “The Names of the Real in the 21st Century”.
Published in Hurly Burly Issue 10 December 2013, p148-166.

Translated from the French by Florencia F.C. Shanahan. With thanks to Phil Dravers and Jon Wheeler.
Available at www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Other Authors A-Z (Monribot)

Note on translation of “there is no sexual relation”

This is translated from ‘il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel’

– Seminar XVII 11th March 1970, p116 of Russell Grigg’s translation : What the master’s discourse uncovers is that there is no sexual relation, I have already put this to you in strong terms. See Seminar XVII Psychoanalysis upside down/The reverse side of psychoanalysis (1969-1970) : from 26th November 1969 : Jacques Lacan, at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19691126 or Index of Lacan’s texts

– Seminar XVII 11th March 1970, pVIII 19 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : What analytic discourse uncovers when we explore the discourse of the Master is that there is no sexual relationship. See Seminar XVII Psychoanalysis upside down/The reverse side of psychoanalysis (1969-1970) : from 26th November 1969 : Jacques Lacan, at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19691126 or Index of Lacan’s texts

– Seminar XX 12th December 1972, P12 of Bruce Fink’s translation : namely, the truth, the only truth that can be indisputable because it is not, that there’s no such thing as a sexual relationship … See Seminar XX Encore (1972-1973) : from 21st November 1972 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19721121 or Index of Lacan’s texts

– Seminar XX 12th December 1972, PII 2 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : Namely, this truth, the only one that can be incontestable because it is not, that there is no sexual relationship. See Seminar XX Encore (1972-1973) : from 21st November 1972 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19721121 or Index of Lacan’s texts)

– (P27 of Staferla), 18th December 1973 Seminar XXI, 18.12.73 p4 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : When I tell there is no sexual relationship… See Seminar XXI Les non-dupes errant (1973-1974) : from 13th November 1973 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19731121 or Index of Lacan’s texts)

– Psychoanalysis in its reference to THE sexual relationship [rapport] : 3rd February 1973 (Milan) : Jacques Lacan, translated by Anthony Chadwick, see this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19700311),

– In this text, 28th September 2013, Florencia Shanahan translates it as ‘there is no sexual relation’

Summary : Anthony Chadwick, Cormac Gallagher, Bruce Fink translate ‘rapport’ as relationship. Florencia Shanahan, Russell Grigg translate as relation.

Comment on Lacan’s use of ‘rapport’ rather than ‘relation’

In translating Seminar IV, with the translation group [see Seminar IV The Relation from Object (La relation d’objet) & Freudian Structures (1956-1957) : from 21st November 1956 : Jacques Lacan, this site /4 Jacques Lacan 19561121], it has been found necessary to distinguish Lacan’s use of ‘rapport = relationship’ & ‘relation = relation (as in a mathematical sense). The French word is put in brackets after the translation.

Further, Bruno de Florence (Seminar VII 10th February 1960, Comment on courtly love & translation of ‘rapport’ : 21st October 2013 : Bruno de Florence, see this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (de Florence) states : The French word RAPPORT also has the mathematical meaning of RATIO.

Maybe the nearest we can get is ‘there is no sexual relationship (ratio)

January 2024

References

P148 – the table of sexuation – Seminar XX Encore (1972-1973) : from 21st November 1972 : Jacques Lacan, see this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19721121 or Index of Lacan’s texts), 13th March 1973 Seminar XX, 13.3.1973 pVIII 1 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation

P149 These formulae must be read together with two previous writings from the Écrits: “The Signification of the Phallus” (1958) and “Guiding Remarks for a convention on Female Sexuality” [1960].

See The Meaning (or Signification) of the Phallus : 9th May 1958 (Munich) : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19580509 or Index of Lacan’s texts) and Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality : 5th September 1960 (Amsterdam) : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19600905 or Index of Lacan’s texts)

P149 Already in1894, Freud indicated that sexuality produced a ‘hole’ in the psychical apparatus.

Probably On the grounds for detaching a particular syndrome from neurasthenia under the description ‘Anxiety [Angst] Neurosis’ [Über Die Berechtigung, Von Der Neuras-Thenie Einen Bestimmten Symptomen-Komplex Als ‘Angstneurose’ Abzutrennen] : 1894 [1895] : Sigmund Freud, SE III p85-115. Quote from James Strachey’s translation, p56 of Volume 10 of Penguin Freud Library : Anxiety [Angst] neurosis, on the other hand, is the product of all those factors which prevent the somatic sexual excitation from being worked over psychically.

P149 The idea of the non-relation is not new for Lacan. He had already evoked the false evidence of the sexual act in his Seminar Logic of the Fantasy [l]. Foot note [1] 1 Lacan, J., The Seminar Book XlV, The Logic of Fantasy, lesson of April 12, 1967. Unpublished.

See Seminar XIV The logic of phantasy (1966-1967) : from 16th November 1966 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19661116) 12th April 1967, pXVI 167 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : A function that is always sliding, a function of substitution, which is equivalent almost to a sort of juggling and which, never allows us in any case to posit in the act – I mean in the sexual act – the man and the woman opposed in some eternal essence.

And nevertheless … I would efface what I said about the “great secret” as being that there is no sexual act, precisely by the fact, that it is not a great secret! That it is obvious, that the unconscious ceaselessly cries it at the top of its voice and that this indeed is why psychoanalysts say: “Let us close its mouth when it says that, because if we repeat it along with it, people will no longer seek us out!” What is the point if there is no sexual act?

So then, the accent is put on the fact that there is sexuality (de la sexualité).

In effect, it is indeed because there is sexuality that there is no sexual act! But the unconscious, perhaps, means that one lacks it! In any case, it really seems to be so! Only for this to have its impact, it must be accentuated from the first that the unconscious says it.
You remember the anecdote about the parish priest who preaches, huh? He preached against sin. What did he say? He was against it … (laughter). Well then, the unconscious which, for its part, also preaches in its way about the subject of the sexual act, well then, it is not for it!

It is from there, first of all, that one must begin to conceive of what is involved when it is a question of the unconscious. The difference between the unconscious and the (7) parish priest deserves all the same to be picked out at this level. The fact is that the parish priest says that sin is sin, instead of, perhaps, the unconscious which for its part makes a sin of sexuality. There is a little difference.
On this point, the question is going to be of knowing how the following is proposed to us: that the subject has to measure himself against the difficulty of being a sexed subject.

P149 He returns to this topic in the Seminar From an Other to the other [2] Footnote 2 Lacan, J., Le Séminaire, livre XVl, D’un Autre d l’autre, Seuil, Paris, 2006, p.207.

See Seminar XVI From an other to the Other (1968-1969) : from 13th November 1968 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19681113) 5th March 1969 Seminar XVI, 5.3.1969 pVIII 5 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : You see then the prudence with which I am bringing forward my assertions here. I spoke about horizon; I spoke about field. I did not speak about sexual act, since moreover for those who were already here two years ago, I posed for the question of the act different premises, undoubtedly, than those that take it as a given that there is a sexual act. They will remember that I concluded that by taking as an aim the question of the sexual act, we can state that by taking the act with the structural emphasis where alone it subsists, there is no sexual act. We will come back to it. Moreover you can be sure that it is indeed in order to return to it from another angle, that of this year, the One that goes from an other to the Other, that we find ourselves on this path where there deserves nevertheless to be recalled what we concluded using a different approach.

P149 … and also in “Television” [3]. 3 Lacan, J., Televlsion: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, transl. by D.Hollier et at, Norton & Co, New York/London, 1990, p. 8.

See Television : Broadcast 31st January 1974, Edited & recorded October & November 1973 : Jacques Lacan interviewed by Jacques-Alain Miller at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19740131 or Index of Lacan’s texts) p8 of Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson’s translation, possibly : I will go further: I expect of the supposed analysts nothing more than their being this object thanks to which what I teach is not a self-analysis. On this point, they alone, among those who are listening, are sure to understand [entendre] me. But even in understanding nothing an analyst plays this role I have just defined, and as a consequence Television thus assumes it just as well.

I would add that these analysts who are such only insofar as they are object-the object of the analysand-it happens that I do address them, not that I am speaking to them, but that I speak about them: if only to disturb them. Who knows? This could have some effects of suggestion.

Would you believe it? There is one situation in which sug­gestion is powerless: when the analyst owes his default to the other, to the person who has brought him to “the pass,” as I put it, of asserting himself as analyst.

Happy are those cases in which fictive “passes” pass for an incomplete training; they leave room for hope.

P149 Lacan proceeds according to this very same movement. In order to address what “there is no such thing as” – the sexual relation – he must start from “there is such as thing as “. Lacan reminds us of this many times in the form: “There is such a thing as One [Y a d’l’Un”] [6] Footnote 6 Lacan, J., The Seminar Book XX, Encore, trans. By B. Fink, Norton & Co., NewYork/London,1998, p.5.

See Seminar XX Encore (1972-1973) : from 21st November 1972 : Jacques Lacan, see this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19721121 or Index of Lacan’s texts), 21st November 1972 Seminar XX, 21.11.72 pI 6 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : What then is at stake in love?

As Psychoanalysis puts forward with an audacity that is all the more unbelievable as its whole experience goes against it, that what it demonstrates is the contrary, love is to make One. It is true that people talk about nothing but that for a long time, about the one. Fusion, Eros, is supposed to be a tension towards the One.

There is something of the One. It is on this that I supported my discourse last year, and certainly not to contribute to this original confusion, that of desire which only leads to aiming at the gap in (6) which it can be shown that the One only steams from the essence of the signifier. [Note this translation of ‘Y a d’l’Un’ is different, but includes a translation of ‘d” = de, of, though something is an addition]

P150 This statement is not new for Lacan. He had said it at least six times in his Seminar of the previous year, Ou Pire…[0r worse…].

See Seminar XIX …Ou pire …Or worse (1971-1972) : from 8th December 1971 : Jacques Lacan, this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19711208 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)

P150 “There is such a thing as One [Il y’a de l’UN]” [should be ‘There is [something] of the One’] means that there is jouissance, but that this jouissance is always One’. Jacques-Alain Miller, in his course on the “Paradigms of jouissance”, enumerated the possibilities of jouissance. ln the last paradigm, he gives the whole series of possible “One-jouissances”. [5] Footnote 5 Miller, J.-A., Paradigms of Jouissance”, transl. by J. Jauregui, in Lacanian Ink, lssue 17, Autumn 2000 pp 10-47

See Paradigms of Jouissance : 24th, 31st March & 7th April 1999 (Paris VIII) : Jacques-Alain Miller at this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Miller or Index of Authors)

P150 Jouissance is the property of a living body; it is the substance of the living being – Aristotle would say that it is matter. Lacan demonstrates that the only possible jouissance for the living body is fundamentality ‘One’.

First of all, this means that the One is not a jouissance that allows for “universaI fusion” [6]. Footnote 6 Lacan, J., The Seminar Book XX, Encore, op. cit. p. 10.

See Seminar XX Encore (1972-1973) : from 21st November 1972 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19721121 or Index of Lacan’s texts). 21st November 1972 Seminar XX, pI 12 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : What is essential in the feminine myth of Don Juan is indeed that, it is that he has them one by one, and that is what the other sex, the masculine is, as regards women.

This indeed is why the image of Don Juan is of capital importance. It is in what is indicated by the fact that after all he can make a list of them, and that once there are names, they can be counted. If there are mille e tre, it is indeed because they can be taken one by one and that is the essential.

As you can see, we have here something quite different to the One of universal fusion. If the woman were not not-all, if in her body it were not the not-all that she is as sexed being, none of all of that would hold up.

P151 Let us note that it is not so much the subject who enjoys during masturbation: it is the organ itself. ln his écrit on the Signification of the Phallus, Lacan speaks indeed of a “cult of the organ”.

See The Signification (or Meaning) of the Phallus : 9th May 1958 (Munich) : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19580509 or Index of Lacan’s texts) A reference to the ‘cult of the organ’ has not been found. The only reference to masturbation is p76 of Jacqueline Rose’s translation : We know that Freud used this term [phallic phase] to specify the earliest genital maturation – as on the one hand characterised by the imaginary predominance of the phallic attribute and masturbatory pleasure [jouissance], and on the other by a localising of this pleasure for the woman in the clitoris, which is thereby raised to the function of the phallus.

P152 However, this single term is enough to differentiate two different positions before the phallic jouissance. It is thanks to this, Lacan says, that the “two halves of humanity” are differentiated. They are differentiated from the phallic function.

See probably p79 of Jacqueline Rose’s translation, The Signification (or Meaning) of the Phallus : 9th May 1958 (Munich) : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19580509 or Index of Lacan’s texts) : Let me make clear that to argue for man’s relation to the signifier as such has nothing to do with a ‘culturalist’ [?could be cultist?] position in the ordinary sense of the term, such as that which Karen Horney found herself anticipating in the dispute over the phallus and which Freud himself characterised as feminist. The issue is not man’s relation to language as a social phenomenon, since the question does not even arise of anything resembling that all too familiar ideological psychogenesis, not superseded by a peremptory recourse to the entirely metaphysical notion, underlying the mandatory appeal to the concrete, which is so pathetically conveyed by the term ‘affect’.

It is a question of rediscovering in the laws governing that other scene (eine andere Schauplatz) which Freud designated, in relation to dreams, as that of the unconscious, the effects discovered at the level of the materially unstable elements which constitute the chain of language: effects determined by the double play of combination and substitution in the signifier, along the two axes of metaphor and metonymy which generate the signified; effects which are determinant in the institution of the subject. What emerges from this attempt is a topology in the mathematical sense of the term, without which, as soon becomes clear, it is impossible even to register the structure of a symptom in the analytic sense of the term.

It speaks in the Other, I say, designating by this Other the very place called upon by a recourse to speech in any relation where it intervenes. If it speaks in the Other, whether or not the subject hears it with his own ears, it is because it is there that the subject, according to a logic prior to any awakening of the signified, finds his signifying place. The discovery of what he articulates in that place, that is, in the unconscious, enable us to grasp the price of the division (Spaltung) through which he is thus constituted.

The phallus is elucidated in its function here. In Freudian doctrine, the phallus is not a fantasy, if what is understood by that is an imaginary effect. Nor is it as such object (part, internal, good, bad, etc. …) in so far as this term tends to accentuate the reality involved in a relationship. It is even less the organ, penis or clitoris, which it symbolises. And it is not incidental that Freud took his reference for it from the simulacrum which it represented for the Ancients.

For the phallus is a signifier, a signifier whose function in the intrasubjective economy of analysis might lift the veil from that which it served in the mysteries. For it is to this signified that it is given to designate as a whole the effect of there being a signified, inasmuch as it conditions any such effect by its presence as signifier.

P153 0bviously, there are differences according to sex. For example, in his Seminar Les non dupes…, Lacan situates children as object a for women, whereas a woman may be an object a for a man.

See Seminar XXI Les non-dupes errant (1973-1974) : from 13th November 1973 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19731113 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts), It has not been possible to trace this reference. A possibility, (P27 of Staferla), 18th December 1973 Seminar XXI, 18.12.73 p4 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : It refers, nothing more – in any case this is what I will limit myself to today, simply… to shift, anyway, is that not so, what I have just traced out about the tradition, about the metaphor of knowing = let us say that it refers first of all to the happening. To the things that happen, let us say when a man meets a woman. And why not? Because it is in general the fish that people try to play to death; when I say: ‘when a man meets a woman’, huh, it is because I am modest, I mean by that that I do not claim to go as far as speaking about what happens when a woman meets a man… because my experience is limited, huh.

(62) I would like to suggest the following to you, anyway, since we have started from two extreme points, I propose to you, in connection with the commandment of divine love, that I evoked for you the last time in challenging you to say yes or no, huh, does it make two or three? You remember perhaps, anyway those who were there. So then, I modify it slightly: what effect does it have on you if I state ‘thou shalt love thy neighbour (ta prochaine) as thyself? That makes you sense something all the same, huh, which is that this precept found the abolition of the difference between the sexes. When I tell there is no sexual relationship, I did not say that the sexes are confused, far from it! Without that all the same, how could I even say that there is no sexual relationship, what would that mean?

P155 ln this sense, feminine exception is not a comfortable privilege. Lacan goes as far as saying that one must be “gifted” [8] to situate oneself on that side – and the fact of being a man in the civil sense, as Saint John of the Cross was, does not change the difficulty. Footnote 8 Lacan, J., The Seminar Book XX, Encore, op. cit., p.76.

See Seminar XX Encore (1972-1973) : from 21st November 1972 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19721121 or Index of Lacan’s texts). 20th February 1973 Seminar XX, certainly references St John of the Cross, but not being gifted. OR 20.2.73 pVII 19 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, There are some people, and precisely, most of them women, or else gifted people, like St John of the Cross – because one is not obliged, to put oneself on the side of Ɐχ.Φχ. One can also put oneself on the side of the not-all. There are men who are just as good as women. That happens! And who at the same time find themselves just as happy about it. They glimpse, let us say, despite – I did not say despite their phallus – despite what encumbers them under that heading, they experience the idea that somewhere, there might be an enjoyment which is beyond. These are what are called mystics.

P156 As we can see, masculine sexuality is reducible to the logic of the fantasy that this arrow recalls. This is to show that a woman is desired by a man. Freud calls reducing the partner to an object the “tendency to debasement in the sphere of love”.

On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love (Contributions to the Psychology of Love II) : 1912 : Sigmund Freud, SE XI p177-190. See www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Freud (1912)

P156 Similarly, Lacan, in his “Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality,” reminds us of the value of “fetish” that a woman may have for a man.

See Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality : 5th September 1960 (Amsterdam) : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19600905 or Index of Lacan’s texts), p96 of Jacqueline Rose’s translation : The study of the framework of perversions in the woman opens up a different bias.

1.Since it has been effectively demonstrated that the imaginary motive for most male perversions is the desire to preserve the phallus which involved the subject in the mother, then the absence in women of fetishism, which represents the virtually manifest case of this desire, leads us to suspect that this desire has a different fate in the perversions which she presents.

For to assume that the woman herself takes on the role of fetish, only raises the question of the difference of her position in relation to desire and to the object.

P156 Thus, Lacan argues, a woman can enter a man’s fantasy ‘without limits’, with the toxic effects we all know. This is how a man “may be a ravage for a woman”, as Lacan argued.[10]

Footnote 10 Lacan, J., Le séminaire livre XXlll, Le sinthome, Seuil, 2005, p. 101 .

See Seminar XXIII The Sinthome or Joyce and the Sinthome (1975-1976) : beginning on 18th November 1975 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19751118 or Index of Lacan’s texts) 17th February 1975 Seminar XXIII, 17.2.76 pVII 13 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : I allowed myself to say that the sinthome, is very precisely the sex to which I do not belong, namely, a woman. If a woman is a sinthome for every man, it is quite clear that there is a need to find (120) another name for what is involved in the case of a man for a woman; since precisely the sinthome is characterised by non-equivalence. One may say that man is for a woman anything you please, namely an affliction [Adrian Price translates as ravage], worse than a sinthome, you may well articulate it as you please, a devastation even, but, if there is no equivalence, you are forced to specify what is involved in the sinthome.

P158 To put it another way, if “The” woman does not exist, the signifier S[A+/ (A barred)] does exist: this signifier, says Lacan, “designate[s] nothing other than the jouissance of The woman”.[11] 11 Lacan, J., The Seminar Book XX, Encore, op. cit., p.84 [TN:Translation modified].

See Seminar XX Encore (1972-1973) : from 21st November 1972 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19721121 or Index of Lacan’s texts), 13th March 1973 Seminar XX, 13.3.73 pVIII 10 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : This assuredly is confirmed by this effect, tangible effect, that to say anything at all, which is the very watchword of the discourse of the analysand, is what leads to the Lustprinzip, and what leads there in the most direct way, and without there being any need for this accession to higher spheres which is the foundation of Aristotelian ethics inasmuch as I evoked it briefly for you earlier, in so far as in short it is only founded on the coalescence, on the merging of this small o [a] with the capital S of O [A] barred – S(Ø)(A+/). It is only barred, of course, by us. That does not mean that it is enough to bar for nothing to exist of it. It is certain that if, by this S(Ø)(A+/), I designate nothing other than the enjoyment of The woman, it is assuredly because here is where I highlight the fact that God has not yet made his exit.

So then here is more or less what I wrote for your use. In short, what was I writing to you? The only thing one can do that is a bit serious: a love letter.

P158 First, it means that a woman may be interested in the penis may even fetishise it, as argued by Lacan[12]. But this is not equivalent to the masculine fetishisation. Footnote 12 Lacan, J., “The signification of the Phallus” in Écrits, The First Complete Edition in English, transt. By B. Fink, Norton & Co., New York/London, p. 583.

See See The Meaning (or Signification) of the Phallus : 9th May 1958 (Munich) : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19580509 or Index of Lacan’s texts) p84 of Jacqueline Rose’s translation : These ideals gain new strength from the demand which it is in their power to satisfy, which is always the demand for love, with its complement of reducing desire to demand.

Paradoxical as this formulation might seem, I would say that it is in order to be the phallus, that is to say, the signifier of the desire of the Other, that the woman will reject an essential part of her femininity, notably all its attributes through masquerade. It is for what she is not that she expects to be desired as well as loved. But she finds the signifier of her own desire in the body of the one to whom she addresses her demand for love. Certainly we should not forget that the organ actually invested with this signifying function takes on the value of a fetish. But for the woman the result is still a convergence onto the same object of an experience of love which as such ideally deprives her of that which it gives, and a desire which finds in that same experience its signifier. Which is why it can be observed that the lack of satisfaction proper to sexual need, in other words, frigidity, is relatively well tolerated in women, whereas the Verdrängung inherent to desire is lesser in her case than in the case of the man.

In men, on the other hand, the dialectic of demand and desire gives rise to effects, whose exact point of connection Freud situated with a sureness which we must once again admire, under the rubric of a specific depreciation (Erniedrigung) of love.

P158 Then, we have another function of this arrow [2). The signifier being pointed at in capital Phi is an S, destined to cipher all jouissance on the man’s side. This is how it is presented in Seminar V. lt is very attractive for a woman who is confronted by the indecipherable of a real jouissance.

See Seminar V The Formations of the Unconscious (1957-1958) : from 6th November 1957 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19571106)

P159 A woman knows that a man needs a ‘phallicisation’ of the feminine body for him to be able to desire her, and this arrow is a way of embodying the phallus for him. It is the logic of the girl phallus, to use Fenichel’s term. Hence the question: can a woman find identificatory support there, through this arrow (2)?

See The Symbolic Equation – Girl = Phallus : 1936 : Otto Fenichel, this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Fenichel or Index of Authors)

P160 … a woman may pass via a man in order to access her Other jouissance. Lacan already highlighted this in 1960 in Guiding remarks…[13] “A man”, says Lacan, “serves here as a ‘relay’ so that a woman becomes this Other to herself, as she is to him”. Footnote 13 Lacan, J., Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality” in Écrits, op. cit., p. 616.

See Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality : 1958 [Presented in Amsterdam, 5th September 1960] : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19600905 or Index of Lacan’s texts), p93 of Jacqueline Rose’s translation, Section title – VIII Frigidity and the subjective structure, 2. A principle which can be simply stated: that castration cannot be deduced from development alone, since it presupposes the subjectivity of the Other as the place of its law. The otherness of sex is denatured by this alienation. Man here acts as the relay whereby the woman becomes this Other for herself as she is this Other for him.

It is in this sense that an unveiling of the Other involved in the transference can modify a defence which has been taken up symbolically.

By which I mean that, in this case, defence should first be conceived of in the dimension of masquerade which the presence of the Other releases in its sexual role.

If we start by taking this veiling affect as our reference for object positions, …

P160 Second, the Other jouissance is not limited by the pleasure principle. To put it in terms of Lacan’s Seminar X, no detumescence of the organ sets a limit or puts an end to it: there is no castration. ln this regard, the ‘without limit’ is a factor that is anguishing or uncanny.

Seminar X The Anguish (L’angoisse) (1962-1963) : begins 14th November 1962 : Jacques Lacan, see this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19621114) 6th March 1963 Seminar X, pXIII 116-117 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : The sting is an instrument, and in many cases – I do not want to give you a course in comparative anatomy today, I would ask you to refer to the authors, if necessary I will indicate them to you – the sting is an instrument: it is used for hooking on. We know nothing about the amorous enjoyments of the black beetle or the cockroach. Nothing indicates however that they are deprived of it. It is even rather probable that jouissance and sexual union are always in the closest possible relationship.

And what does it matter! Our experience as men and the experience that we can presume to be those of mammals who most resemble us conjoin the locus of the jouissance and the instrument, the sting.

While we take the thing as being self-explanatory, nothing indicates that even where the copulatory instrument is a sting or a claw, an object for hooking on, in any case neither a tumescent nor detumescent object, jouissance is linked to the function of the object.

That jouissance, orgasm in our case, to limit ourselves to ourselves, coincides with as I might say the putting out of action, the putting out of operation of the instrument by detumescence, is something that altogether deserves that we should not hold it to be something, as I might say, which is as Goldstein expresses it, part of the Wesenheit, an essential part of the organism. This coincidence of approach has nothing rigorous about it once one begins to think about it; and then it is not, as I might say, in the nature of human things.

P161 Clinically, feminine jouissance induces a particular form of love, of an ‘erotomaniac’ kind. lt is not the psychiatric erotomania seen in paranoid psychoses, but a feminine love, as evoked by Lacan[15]. This love is the product of feminine jouissance as unsayable, S[A&/,A barred]. Footnote 15 Ibid., p. 617

See Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality : 1958 [Presented in Amsterdam, 5th September 1960] : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19600905 or Index of Lacan’s texts), p94 of Jacqueline Rose’s translation, End of section 3 in title – VIII Frigidity and the subjective structure, : … At the last turn in this palace of mirages, one ends up at the splitting of the object, having missed in Freud’s admirable unfinished paper on ‘the splittin g of the ego, the fading of the subject which accompanies it.

Perhaps it will be this end point which finally lifts the illusion from the splitting in which analysis has got stuck by making good and bad into attributes of the object.

Inasmuch as the position of the sexes does differ in relation to the object, it is by all the distance which separates the fetishistic from the erotomanic form of love. We should find this standing out in the most common experience.

P161 We used to correlate God with the Name-of-the Father, at the heart of the symbolic big Other. ln Seminar XI, Lacan even says: “God is unconscious”.

See Seminar XI The Four Fundamental Concepts (1963-1964) : from 15th January 1964 : Jacques Lacan, at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19640115 or Index of Lacan’s texts), 12th February 1964 Seminar XI, p59 of Alan Sheridan’s translation : Thus the encounter, forever missed, has occurred between dream and awakening, between the person who is still asleep and whose dream we will not know and the person who has dreamt merely in order not to wake up.

If Freud, amazed, sees in this the confirmation of his theory of desire, it is certainly a sign that the dream is not a phantasy fulfilling a wish. [Dream burning child, The Interpretation of Dreams : 6th November 1899 (published as 1900) : Sigmund Freud SE IV & V, See this site /3 Sigmund Freud (November 1899)]

For it is not that, in the dream, he persuades himself that the son is still alive. But the terrible vision of the dead son taking the father by the arm designates a beyond that makes itself heard in the dream. Desire manifests itself in the dream by the loss expressed in an image at the most cruel point of the object. It is only in the dream that this truly unique encounter can occur. Only a rite, an endlessly repeated act, can commemorate this not very memorable encounter—for none can say what the death of a child is, except the father qua father, that is to say, no conscious being.

For the true formula of atheism is not God is dead—even by basing the origin of the function of the father upon his murder, Freud protects the father—the true formula of atheism is God is unconscious.

The awakening shows us the waking state of the subject’s consciousness in the representation of what has happened —the unfortunate accident in reality, against which one can do no more than take steps! But what, then, was this accident?

P161 It is very different in Seminar XX, Encore, for the big Other no longer has the same status: it is no longer the locus of the Symbolic. The big Other is now the locus of femininity and what is most real about it. God now has a real side that must be interpreted as “based on feminine jouissance”[16].

God thus becomes a version of the Other sex in the real. Here is why the love of the mystics for God is a valid illustration of feminine love: Footnote 16 Lacan, J., The Seminar Book XX, Encore, op. cit., p. 77.

See Seminar XX Encore (1972-1973) : from 21st November 1972 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19721121 or Index of Lacan’s texts), 20th February 1973 Seminar XX, 20.2.73 pVII 20 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, As a result of which, naturally, you are all going to be convinced that I believe in God. I believe in the enjoyment of The woman in so far as it is more, on condition that you put a screen in front of this more until I have explained it properly.

In fact all they were seeking, all these honest people in the entourage of anyone at all, of Charcot and others, in order to explain that mysticism, was all about fucking. But the fact is that if you look closely at it, it is not that, not that, not that at all. This is perhaps what ought to make us glimpse what is involved in the Other, this enjoyment that is experienced of which one knows nothing. But is this not what puts us on the path of ex-sistence? And why not interpret one face of the Other, the face of God since it was from that, through that that I tackled the business earlier, a face of God as supported by feminine enjoyment?

P162 Lacan said: “All women are mad”.

No reference has been found for this quotation.

P162 In Seminar XX, Lacan situates hysteria as an ethics “outside-of-sex” [Horsexe][17], in reference to Le Horla, a novel by Guy de Maupassant. Footnote 17 Ibid., p.85 [translation modified].

See Seminar XX Encore (1972-1973) : from 21st November 1972 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19721121 or Index of Lacan’s texts), 13th March 1973 Seminar XX, 13.3.73 pVIII 11 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, That within this, he evokes philia for us as representing the possibility of a bond of love between two of these beings, is indeed something which by manifesting the tension towards the Supreme Being, can just as easily (11) be reversed from the way in which I expressed it. Namely, that it is in the courage to support this intolerable relation to the Supreme Being that friends, the philoi, recognise and choose one another. The outside-sex (hors-sexe) of this Ethics is manifest to the point that I would like to give it the accent that Maupassant gives it by announcing somewhere this strange term of Horla. The outside-sex is the man on whom the soul speculates. There you are!

P162 ln hysteria, this means avoiding confrontation with the Other sex and remaining on the teft side of the formulae – the side of the subject and of the Phallus. A hysteric woman may want to seduce a man, true, but in fact – and above all – she goes as far as the part of the man “[faire l’homme][18] despite her feminine appearance. She “fait l’homme” psychically, in the sense that the subject is always on the ‘man’ side of the formulae.Footnote 18 Ibid.

See Seminar XX Encore (1972-1973) : from 21st November 1972 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19721121 or Index of Lacan’s texts), 13th March 1973 Seminar XX, 13.3.73 pVIII 12 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : But it turns out, it turns that women also are âmoureuses. Namely, that they âment l’âme [also translated as ‘soulove’ by Bruce Fink, âment sounds the same as aiment-[they] love]. What indeed could be this soul that they âment in the partner, nevertheless hommo to the hilt, and from which they will not get out? This can only in effect lead them to this ultimate term, and it is not for nothing that I describe it as such: ysteron, as it is put in Greek, of hysteria, in other words to play the man [faire l’homme], as I have said.

P162 ln short, Lacan says that she is homosexual[19], not in the common sense of homosexuality, but in the Latin sense of the word homo-hominis, ‘man’. Footnote 19 Ibid., p.84.

See Seminar XX Encore (1972-1973) : from 21st November 1972 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19721121 or Index of Lacan’s texts), 13th March 1973 Seminar XX, 13.3.73 pVIII 11 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : If it (10) were true, the soul [l’âme] could only say itself – that is what I wrote to you – because of what allows a being, a speaking being to call it by its name, to put up with the intolerable in its world. Which presupposes that it is foreign to it, namely, phantastical. Which only esteems (considère) this soul here, in this world, by its patience and its courage in facing up to it. All of this is affirmed by the fact that right up to our time, the soul has never had any other meaning.

Well then, here is where French ought to bring me some help. Not that of homonymy as can happen sometimes in a tongue, as in d’eux [of/from them] with deux [two], or this peut [(he/she) can] with peu [little], il [he] peut peu, which is all the same there to be of some kind of use to us, and it is here that the tongue can be of use. The soul, in French, at the point that I am at, I can only make use of it to say that it is what one souls (qu’on âme): j’âme, tu âmes, il âme [I souls, you souls, he souls]. You see that here we can only use writing, even to the extent of including in it jamais j’âmais [I never souled/loved].

The existence then of the soul, can certainly be put in question (mise en cause) – that is the proper term – by asking oneself whether it is not an effect of love. As long in effect as l’âme âme l’ âme, there is no sex involved. Sex does not count in it. The development from which it results is hommo –with two ‘m’s – hommosexuelle, as is perfectly readable in history.

OR

See Seminar XX Encore (1972-1973) : from 21st November 1972 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19721121 or Index of Lacan’s texts), 13th March 1973 Seminar XX, 13.3.73 pVIII 12 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : By being themselves, because of that hommosexuelles, if I may express myself thus, or hors-sexe; it being difficult for them not to sense from then on the impasse that consists in the fact that they mêment (same) [JE : sounds the same as m’aiment – love themselves, même=same] themselves in the other. Because after all there is no need to know one is other in order to be so. Since where the soul finds itself to be, it is differentiated for its part from the woman and that from the very origin. She is diffâmed [could be translated as defamed, however, ‘dit-femme’-said woman & ‘diffâme’ are homonyms in French; the latter also contains ‘âme-soul’ as possibly in diff-âmed or de-souled]. The most notorious [fameux] things that have remained in history about women, are properly speaking everything infamous [‘infamant’ – phonetically speaking ‘fameux’ and ‘infamant’ both contain ‘femme’-woman] that one can say about them.

P163 Thus, there is an opposition between the hysteric and feminine positions. However, Lacan softens this opposition in Seminar XX by saying that hysterics are still feminine subjects. This means that a hysteric woman is not-all hysteric. As a sexed being, as a speaking-being, she is also on the ‘woman’ side, whether she wants to be or not! 0n the left-hand side, she certainly “plays the part of the man”. It is a virile identification with the subject. But on the right-hand side, the feminine side, she at least seeks to know something about her own feminine being, that is to say, she seeks to “know herself as Other”, as Lacan puts it. To do this, she find a solution, even if it is an inadequate and rather inefficient one[20]. Footnote 20 Ibid., p.85.

See Seminar XX Encore (1972-1973) : from 21st November 1972 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19721121 or Index of Lacan’s texts),

There are major differences in the translations, one from tapes the other edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, & the transcription at Staferla should be consulted (see below) :

13th March 1973 Seminar XX, 13.3.73 pVIII 12 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation – see above – : By being themselves, because of that hommosexuelles, if I may express myself thus, or hors-sexe; it being difficult for them not to sense from then on the impasse that consists in the fact that they mêment (same) themselves [JE : sounds the same as m’aiment – love themselves, même=same] in the other. Because after all there is no need to know one is other in order to be so.

OR

13.3.73 pVIII 13 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : We might perhaps, as long as it lasts, see a little flash, a little flash of something that might concern the Other. The Other in so far as it is with this that the barred The, The woman, The woman has to deal with.

P163 Her attempt is a dead end, because it is an imaginary solution: she tries to identify with the Other woman. To say this, Lacan uses a strange formula with a neologism: hysterics, says Lacan, “love each other as the same in the Other”[21]. In French, the neologism “se mêment”, makes the verb ‘love myself’ [m’aimer] phonetically resonate with the word ‘same’ [même]. This means literally that the hysteric loves herself in her who is the same as her, as an idealised feminine figure, which she will reduce to a neighbour in the mirror, in the hope that she will get to know a bit more about her own femininity. Footnote 21 Ibid., [TN: ln French, the text reads, “se mêment dans l’Autre”]

P183-184 of the transcription published at Staferla, put Séminaire XX or 20 de Jacques Lacan in the search engine, and go down until Staferla emerges : Mais il se trouve… il se trouve que les femmes aussi sont âmoureuses, c’est-à-dire qu’elles âment l’âme.

Qu’est-ce que ça peut bien être que cette âme qu’elles âment dans le partenaire, pourtant hommo jusqu’à la garde[ Rires ], et dont elles se sortiront pas ?

Ça ne peut en effet les conduire qu’à ce terme ultime…

et c’est pas pour rien que je l’appelle comme ça

…ὔστερον [ usteron ] que ça se dit en grec : de l’hystérie, soit de « faire l’homme » comme je l’ai dit, à être de ce fait « hommosexuelles », si je puis m’exprimer ainsi, ou « horsexe » elles aussi.

Leur étant difficile de ne pas sentir dès lors l’impasse qui consiste à ce qu’elles se « mêment »

dans l’autre, car enfin il n’y a pas besoin de se savoir autre pour en être, puisque là d’où l’âme trouve à être, on l’en diff, on l’en différencie, elle la femme, et ça d’origine n’est-ce pas, on la « diffâme ».

Ce qu’il y a de plus fameux dans l’histoire, à rester des femmes, c’est à proprement parler tout ce qu’on peut en dire d’infamant.

See pVIII 12 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation quoted above.

p163 For example, an illustration of this strategy is Dora’s quest, as she loses herself for hours in Raphael’s painting of The Sistine Madonna at the Dresden Museum. Dora tries to search her feminine being via specular narcissism. She looks for a feminine identification via the imaginary.

See Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria (‘Dora’) : 1901 [1905] : Sigmund Freud, SE VII p7-114. Available, bilingual, from www.Freud2Lacan.com /homepage (FRAGMENTS OF AN ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF HYSTERIA, 1905 (Bruchstűck einer Hysterie-Analyse) (Dora))

Also see Seminar IV The Relation from Object (La relation d’objet) & Freudian Structures (1956-1957) : from 21st November 1956 : Jacques Lacan, 23rd January 1957 Seminar IV, p9-10 of Earl Court Collective’s translation (www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Lacan) : That is, again, this adoration expressed by a quite obvious symbolic association, given in the case study – namely, the Sistine Madonna.[16 SE VII p96] Mrs. K. is the object of adoration of all those who surround her, and it is as a participant in this adoration that Dora is ultimately situated in relation to her. Mr. K is the means by which she normalises this position, in an attempt to reintegrate something that brings the masculine element into the circuit, and it is effectively at the point when Mr. K tells her neither that he is courting her nor that he loves her, nor even approaches her in a manner intolerable for a hysteric, but when he tells her “Ich habe nichts an meiner Frau” [‘I get nothing out of my wife.’] that she slaps him[17 SE VII p98].

P164 But in fact, as “Other to herself”, Dora can only experience her femininity from her own body, even if this strange experience does not provide her with any knowledge about “the thing”. As Lacan states: “…there is no need to know you are Other, to be there”[22]. Footnote 22 Ibid.

See Seminar XX Encore (1972-1973) : from 21st November 1972 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19721121 or Index of Lacan’s texts),

13th March 1973 Seminar XX, 13.3.73 pVIII 12 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : from then on the impasse that consists in the fact that they mêment (same) themselves [JE : sounds the same as m’aiment – love themselves, même=same] in the other. Because after all there is no need to know one is other in order to be so. Since where the soul finds itself to be, it is differentiated for its part from the woman and that from the very origin. She is diffâmed [could be translated as defamed, however, ‘dit-femme’-said woman- & ‘diffâme’ are homonyms in French; the latter also contains ‘âme-soul’ as possibly in diff-âmed or diff-souled].

P184 of Staferla’s transcription : qui consiste à ce qu’elles se « mêment » dans l’autre, car enfin il n’y a pas besoin de se savoir autre pour en être, puisque là d’où l’âme trouve à être, on l’en diff, on l’en différencie, elle la femme, et ça d’origine n’est-ce pas, on la « diffâme ».

-Staferla’s transcription via an internet translation : which consists in them “mingling” themselves within the other, because in the end there’s no need to know oneself other, in order to be from it [en], since wherever the soul finds itself to being, on l’en dif- not translated, one is differentiated from it, she, the woman, and that’s its origin, isn’t it, it’s “differentiated” from it.

Further texts by Patrick Monribot

-The Work of the Symptom : 2001 : Patrick Monribot

Published La Cause freudienne No 49, Paris 2001, In English Psychoanalytical Notebooks No 10 – Formation of the Analyst, 2003, p155-166. Download, translated by Howard Britton, at www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Authors A-Z (Monribot)

-Lacanian Interpretation : 21st January 2009 (Ghent) : Patrick Monribot

Text delivered to the ‘Kring of the New Lacanian School’, in Ghent, towards the VIIth NLS Congress – Lacanian Interpretation, May 2009, Paris. Circulated by [nls-messager] as VII Congress NLS – Communique No 8 on 19th April 2009. English translation from p18. Download, translated by Adrian Price, at www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Authors A-Z (Monribot)