"Do Not Be Frightened . . . "

Introducing Seminar XVI

A week from today, the first lecture in our new series will be recorded and delivered to all registered participants. And let me tell you: the key text in Lacanian psychoanalysis that we’ll be studying in this series — Lacan’s breakthrough 1968-69 seminar From an Other to the other (Seminar XVI) — is fierce!

Which is almost certainly why Lacan, just a few minutes into the first session of Seminar XVI, pauses to tell his audience: “Don’t be frightened, these are opening remarks, reminders of certainties, not truths.”

More important for our purposes is Lacan’s next move. Immediately after telling everyone they have nothing to fear, he loops back to the epigraph he’d scrawled on the board before the session began: “The essence of psychoanalytic theory is a discourse without words.”

As a prelude to our new series on Seminar XVI, I’d like to highlight Lacan’s use of the word “discourse” here, especially as it relates to several other key terms in this period of his thought — notably, language, the symbolic, and, crucially, the Other.

And I’d like to do so by recalling another epigraph of sorts — this one from Lacan’s opening remarks in The Logic of Fantasy (Seminar XIV) two years prior — an epigraph which we studied closely in our recent series on Seminar XIV (recordings and diagrams available here), and which Lacan, not coincidentally, repeats at the start of Seminar XVI:

Notice how Lacan arrives at this pronouncement in The Logic of Fantasy:

What is proper to the totality of signifiers, I will show it to you in detail, involves the following as necessary, if we simply admit that the signifier cannot signify itself: that there is something that does not belong to this set. It is not possible to reduce language, simply because of the fact that language cannot constitute a closed set; in other words: that there is no Universe of discourse.

In order to make sense of this pronouncement — not only as it appears in Seminar XIV but also as it crystalizes in Seminar XVI — I pulled a clip from the opening lecture in our series on The Logic of Fantasy:

And in order to extend this line of thought a bit further, especially as it relates to Lacan’s work on desire, fantasy, the Other, sexuation, and the drive, I pulled two more clips from our last series, both of which, I believe, put us squarely on the path to Seminar XVI:

Whether any of this allows us proceed fearlessly into Seminar XVI, as Lacan encourages us to do . . . well . . . I guess we’ll see next week!