This text was originally published in the notes to Seminar X, as well as in Seminar IV and in Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality, probably Winter 2019. The quotations from these texts are in date order –
-23rd January 1957 Seminar IV
-Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality : 1958 [Presented in Amsterdam, 5th September 1960]
-23rd November 1960 Seminar VIII
-18th January 1961 Seminar VIII
-16th January 1963 Seminar X
***
From Seminar IV : 23rd January 1957
-p6 of EC Collectives’ translation ((Alma Buholzer, Ganesh Anantharaman, Greg Hynds, Julia Evans, Jesse Cohn, Simon Fisher), 23rd January 1957, (Lacan is commenting on Sigmund Freud’s case of ‘Dora’),
Already in a first criticism or first approach to the problem, in an observation I made five years ago[11], I indicated that, in accordance with the hysterical structure, the hysteric is someone who loves by proxy: you can see this in a host of observations of hysterics. The hysteric is someone whose object is homosexual, and who approaches this homosexual object by way of identification with someone of the opposite sex.
[11] Between 1950 and 1953, Lacan conducted private seminars on three of Freud’s major case studies – Dora, The Wolf Man, and the Rat Man – at his residence in Paris. Lacan’s seminar on Dora provided the backdrop for his 1951 paper – see Intervention on the Transference (Paris), Seminar on ‘Dora’ (1950-1951) : 16th October 1951 : Jacques Lacan on this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19511016 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)
***
-P7 EC Collectives’ translation ((Alma Buholzer, Ganesh Anantharaman, Greg Hynds, Julia Evans, Jesse Cohn, Simon Fisher) of 23rd January 1957 : In other words, this situation rests on the distinction that I made with regard to primitive frustration, with regard to what can be established in the mother-child relation – that is, the distinction that the object belongs to the subject only after her being stripped of it. It is only after this frustration that her desire subsists, and this frustration only has a meaning insofar as the object subsists after the frustration has occurred. The situation rests on the differentiation that is made in the mother’s intervention at this point – that is, in another register, whether she gives or does not give and whether this giving is or is not a sign of love. Here the father is made to be the one who gives this missing object symbolically. But he does not give it, because he does not have it. The phallic deficiency of the [Dora’s] father is what traverses the whole observation as an absolutely fundamental and constitutive ingredient of the situation.
Further information, Seminar IV The Relation from Object [La Relation d’objet] & Freudian Structures (1956-1957) : from 21st November 1956 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19561121)
***
-Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality : 1958 [Presented in Amsterdam, 5th September 1960] : Jacques Lacan
See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19600905 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)
[p735,3 of French] p96 – 97 of Jacqueline Rose’s translation : A better equipped observation would surely bring out that what is involved is more a taking up of the object : what might be called a challenge taken up. Freud’s chief case, inexhaustible as always, makes it clear that this challenge is set off by a demand for love thwarted in the real and that it stops at nothing short of taking on the airs of a courtly love.
In that such a love prides itself more than any other on being the love which gives what it does not have, so it is precisely in this that the homosexual woman excels in relation to what is lacking to her.
Strictly speaking, it is not the incestuous object that the latter chooses at the price of her own sex; what she will not accept is that this object only assumes its sex at the price of castration.
Footnote : Love as “giving what you do not have” is a major theme in Seminar VIII
***
-Love as “giving what you do not have” is a major theme in Seminar VIII
See Seminar VIII Transference (1960 to 1961) : From 16th November 1960 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19601116 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)
p46 & 121 of Bruce Fink’s translation,
Seminar VIII : 23rd November 1960 :
p26 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : The second thing that I wanted to say – as you will see – that we rediscover at every moment, which will serve us as a guide, is that love is to give what one does not have. This you will also see arriving at one of the essential hinges of what we will have to encounter in our commentary.
Seminar VIII 18th January 1961 :
p105-106 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : But the good thing about feasts is precisely that at them there happen things which upset the ordinary order and that Poros falls asleep. He falls asleep because he is drunk, which is what allows Aporia to make herself pregnant by him, namely to have this offspring which is called Love and whose date of conception coincides then with the birth-date of Aphrodite. This indeed is why it is explained to us that Love will always have some obscure relationship with beauty, which is what is in question in the whole development of Diotima, and it is because Aphrodite is a beautiful goddess.
Here then the matter is clearly put. The fact is that on the one hand it is the masculine which is desirable and that, it is the feminine which is active, this at least is how things happen at the moment of the birth of Love and, when one formulates “love is giving what one does not have”, believe me, I am not the one who is telling you this in connection with this text in order to produce one of my hobby horses, it is quite evident that this is what is in question here because the poor Penia, by definition, by structure has properly speaking nothing to give, except her constitutive lack, aporia. And what allows me to tell you that I am not forcing things here, is that if you refer to number 202a of the text of the Symposium you will find the expression “to give what one does not have” literally written there in the form of the development which starting from there Diotima is going to give to the function of love, namely: aneu tou echein logon dounai – it fits exactly, in connection with the discourse, the formula “to give what one does not have” – it is a question here of giving a discourse, a valid explanation, without having it. It is a question of the moment when, in her development, Diotima is going to be led to say what love belongs to. Well, love belongs to a zone, to a form of affair, a form of thing, a form of pragma, a form of praxis which is at the same level, of the same quality as doxa, namely the following which exists, namely that there are discourses, ways of behaving, opinions – this is the translation that we give to the term doxa – which are true without the subject being able to know it.
Note : This quote is Footnote 2 to The Periphrastic Silence of Kiki Dimoula: A Tribute by George B. Mitropoulos, 18th March 2020 : Circulated by New Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis/Messager : Published by http://www.thelacanianreviews.com See http://www.thelacanianreviews.com/the-periphrastic-silence-of-kiki-dimoula-a-tribute/
***
–Seminar X : 16th January 1963
See Seminar X From the Anguish (De l’angoisse) (1962-1963) : from 14th November 1962 : Jacques Lacan on this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19630116)
pVIII 73-74 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation : That this place as such can be circumscribed by something which is materialised in this image, a certain edge, a certain opening, a certain gap where the constitution of the specular image shows its limits, this is the elective locus of anxiety.
This phenomenon of edge, in what opens like this window [diagram is missing] on privileged occasions, marks the illusory limit of this world of recognition, of the one that I call the stage. That it should be linked to this edge, to this framing, to this gap which is illustrated in this schema at least twice, in this edge here of the mirror and moreover in this little sign, that this is the locus of anxiety, is what you ought always to retain as the signal of what is to be sought for in the middle.
The text of Freud to which I would ask you to refer, for it is a text that is always more stupefying to read because of this double aspect of weaknesses, of inadequacies which always present themselves to novices at the beginning as the first things to be picked out in the text of Freud and of the depth with which everything that he comes up against – reveals the degree to which Freud was here around this very field that we are trying to designate, of course, it is necessary first of all for you to be familiar with the text of Dora – can, for those who heard my discourse on the Symposium, recall this dimension always eluded when transference is involved, and of the other dimension in parenthesis, namely that transference is not simply something that reproduces a situation, an action, an attitude, an old trauma, and repeats it; the fact is that there is always another coordinate, the one on which I put the accent in connection with the analytic intervention of Socrates, namely specifically in the case where I evoke a love present in the real, and that we can understand nothing about transference if we do not know that it is also the consequence of that love, that it is in connection with this present love – and analysts should remember it during analyses – of a love which is present in different ways, but that at least they should remember it, when it is there visible, that it is in function of what we could call this real love that there is established what is the central question of transference, namely the one the subject poses concerning the agalma, namely what he is lacking. For it is with this lack that he loves. It is not for nothing that for years I have been repeating to you that love is to give what one does not have. This is even the principle of the castration complex: in order to have the phallus, in order to be able to make use of it, it is necessary precisely not to be it.
[VIII 74 ] When one returns to the conditions where it appears that one is it – for one is it just as much for a man, there is no doubt about it, and for a woman we will say again through what incidence she is led to become it – well then it is always very dangerous.