Lacan Jacques. Seminar XXII, R.S.I.

Text established by Jacques-Alain Miller.

Translated by Jack W. Stone, with the assistance of Ellie Ragland, Greg Hyder, Filip Kovacevic, and Zak Watson.

Introduction to this Publication

A wager which is that of my teaching, why not hold it to the extreme, since somewhere note has been taken of it, and not print it as it is?

The hesitation is not necessarily mine. My relation to [rapport au] the composite public who listens to me amply motivates it.

That I testify of an experience I have specified as being analytic and mine, is there supposed for veracious.

Seeing where this experience leads me by its statement (énoncé), has the value of a supervision [contrôle] (I know the words I employ).

The "categories" of the symbolic, of the imaginary and of the real are here put to the proof of a testament. If they imply three effects by their knot, if this is discovered by me not to be able to sustain itself except by the borromean relation, these are the effect of sense, the effect of jouissance, and the effect. I have said of non-rapport to specify it from what seems most to suggest the idea of a rapport, to wit, the sexual.

It is clear that these effects are implications of my categories themselves: which may be futile even if they indeed seem to be inherent to "thought."

I explain in the measure of my means what the knot, and a knot of a sort that mathematics is still little devoted to, can add of consistency to these effects. One will remark, however, to leave said consistency on the level of (au ras de) the imaginary takes here the value of

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distinguishing it in a triad which keeps its sense, even in demonstrating that the real is excluded from it.
This is the type of problem I find again at every turn (without looking for it, it should be said).
But the measure itself of the effects that I say can only modulate my dire. To add there the fatigue of this dire itself does not lighten for us the duty of accounting for it: on the contrary.

A marginal note, like page 8, may be necessitated to complete a circuit elided in the seminar. It is not the touching-up which is here "futile," but, as I stress, the mental itself, to the extent that it exists.

Jacques Lacan



Seminar of December 10, 1974

Real, symbolic, imaginary - these three words each have a sense. These are three different senses. But that they are different, does that suffice to make them three? If they are as different as I say, doesn't that create an obstacle? Where is the common measure?

The unity here could become a function of measure: one counts - one, two, three. It is still necessary to found the equivalence of these unities on a sign - to make two little lines, or to write equal. And if by chance they were others, so to say, the one to the other? We would

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indeed be in a difficult situation, and, after all, what would show it would be the sense itself of the word "other." But there isn't only one.

The first other - first because I begin with it - is defined, for example, by the distinction exterior/interior. It is that of Freud, whether or not he wanted it to be, in his second topic, which is supported by a geometry of the sack. The sac is supposed (censé) to contain - it is funny to say - the drives. It is this that he calls the Id (Ça). He obviously finds himself forced to add there a certain number of utensils: a sort of lunulla, which all at once transforms it into a vitellus, on which an embryo is differentiated. This is obviously not what he means, but his schema suggests it. And I will not tell you all that he is still forced to add, not counting I don't know what hachure he titles the Superego. Such are the disadvantages of imaged figurations.

This topology of the sack is indeed what we have business with in topology, insofar as the sack chalks itself on a surface, and makes a round, of which there is an interior and an exterior. It is with this that we are lead to write inclusion in a set. We utilise this sign, , from which one can slip to this, . If i  e, i  e - a manifest stupidity. There you have the first other. Only, there is another, which I have marked with an A, which is defined as not having the least rapport - so little as you imagine it.

When one begins to take words as one's vehicle, one finds oneself quickly in a trap, because my so little as you imagine it puts the imaginary back into the mix. With the imaginary, you have every chance of getting bogged down. With the imaginary, one has departed for the infinitesimal, and it is a real pain (mal de chien) getting out of it.

Let us begin again. That they are three, this real, this symbolic, and this imaginary, what does that mean?

There is a slope that leads you into homogenizing them. What is firm is - what relation do they have between them? It is here that I would like to clear for you a path this year.

We could begin by saying that the real is what is strictly unthinkable. This would make a hole in the business, and that would allow us to interrogate what there is of what, don't forget, I have started from - three terms inasmuch as they carry a sense.

What is this sense? In analytic practice, it is with sense that you operate. But on the other hand, you only operate to reduce it, since you always operate with the equivoke - I speak here of those who are worthy of the name of analysts.

The equivoke is not a sense. The equivoke is fundamental to the symbolic, to that by which the unconscious is supported, as I structure it. Sense is that by which something answers that is other than the symbolic, which is - there is no other way of saying it - the imaginary.

What is the imaginary? Does it even exist? - since you puff over it just in pronouncing the term. Well! I would say that if the speakingbeing demonstrates itself to be devoted to mental debility, it is because of the imaginary. This notion in fact has no other point of departure than the reference to the body. And the least of assumptions implied by the body is this: what represents itself for the speaking being is only the reflection of its organism.

Only, something quickly makes us stumble - from a body one presumes - it is even its definition - that it has specified functions in its organs. Such that an automobile, even a computer the last we heard, is also a body. To say it all, it does not go without saying that a body is alive.