In 1995,
the State University of New York Press published a collection of essays on
Jacques Lacan’s famous eleventh seminar of 1964 (The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psycho-Analysis) entitled Reading Seminar XI. Shortly afterwards, in 1996, a larger
volume, Reading Seminars I and II, also appeared. Both of these collections are superlative
scholarly resources, containing pieces by many of the most important Lacanians
working today (especially those associated with Jacques-Alain Miller’s École
de la cause freudienne and its specific orientation towards Lacan). In addition, each of these volumes has, at
the end, a previously un-translated excerpt from Lacan’s original 1966 Écrits: “On Freud’s ‘Trieb’ and the
Psychoanalyst’s Desire” in Reading Seminars I and II and the extremely
rich essay “Position of the Unconscious” in Reading Seminar XI—both are
translated by Bruce Fink. The first
English translation of the Écrits, Alan Sheridan’s 1977 rendition, is an
abridged version of the French original, containing only about a third of the
original’s content. Bruce Fink has long
been promising to provide an English version of the full nine hundred page
French edition, and the two selections published at the end of Reading
Seminars I and II and Reading Seminar XI were supposed to be
tantalizing previews of this forthcoming complete translation. But, alas, the just-published Fink edition
of the Écrits (2002) is merely a re-translation of the abridged Sheridan
selections from 1977 (regardless, it merits mentioning that Fink has indeed
been able to skillfully resolve many of the problems with the earlier English
version, and that he has provided a cornucopia of helpful translator’s
footnotes accompanying Lacan’s essays). 
However, without Fink’s 1998 translation of another classic Lacanian
text, the twentieth seminar (Encore), there probably wouldn’t be a
collection of essays in English entitled Reading Seminar XX.

Reading
Seminar XX is both shorter than its two sister volumes, consisting of nine
essays totaling 192 pages in length, as well as not happening to include any
previously un-translated texts by Lacan. 
What’s more, two of the nine essays are duplications of previously
published material: Slavoj Žižek’s contribution
(“The Real of Sexual Difference”) is a collage of textual snippets from some of
his other recent publications, and Paul Verhaeghe’s “Lacan’s Answer to the
Classical Mind/Body Deadlock” is a reprint of a chapter from his 2001 book Beyond Gender:  From Subject to Drive (Žižek and
Verhaeghe are two of the clearest and cleverest Lacanian thinkers around, so,
for those who haven’t read these specific texts by them before, it’s not as
though their contributions aren’t extremely worthwhile). Also, when contrasted with the other
volumes, Jacques-Alain Miller’s name is conspicuously absent from the list of
contributors. Nonetheless, despite
these shortcomings, the other seven pieces in this volume are, overall, of a
high caliber; they manage to insightfully examine the broad swathe of issues
broached by Lacan in his 1972-1973 seminar, issues ranging from the libidinal
underpinnings of both love and sexuality to the philosophical fundaments of
epistemology. Suzanne Barnard’s
introduction deftly sets the stage for the contributors, explaining both the
historical significance of Lacan’s twentieth seminar (especially for feminism
and the multiple incarnations of the sex-versus-gender debate) as well as its
yet-to-be-exhausted potential for providing productive avenues of escape from
the dead-ends of sterile, hackneyed contemporary arguments.

In
“Knowledge and Jouissance,” Bruce Fink’s contention is that Lacan’s fundamental
task in the twentieth seminar is to demolish fantasies of harmonious,
integrated wholeness (i.e., notions dealing with a motif Lacan labels “the One”
[l’Un]) haunting nearly every corner of human reality. One of Lacan’s most notorious one-liners
comes from Encore: “Il n’y a
pas de rapport sexuel” (“There is no sexual relationship”). A key thesis of psychoanalysis is that all
features of higher-order cognitive processes are, in one way or another,
subliminatory, derivative permutations of libidinal mechanisms (for example,
Freud claims that an adult’s passion for abstract knowledge is a modified form
of childhood sexual curiosity à la a scopophilic drive). This isn’t to devalue or besmirch the
refined accomplishments of humanity—in the opening paragraph of his 1910 essay
on Leonardo da Vinci, Freud cautions against misperceiving psychoanalytic
investigations into culture as exercising a reverse Midas touch of sorts—but,
rather, simply to claim that the originary causal factors lying at the base of
human psychical development are libidinal in nature. Thus, in denying the existence of any kind of unified fusion
(exemplified in the enduring vision of the sexual relationship as one in which
the amorous partners completely lose themselves in each other) via a merging of
two into one—in the twentieth seminar, Lacan sneeringly refers to Hegel’s Aufhebung
as “philosophy’s pretty little dream”—Lacan is also concomitantly denying that
such oneness could be found in any of the transformed derivatives of human
sexuality, including intellectual endeavors like science (chasing after an
integrated “Theory of Everything”) and philosophy (mired for over two thousand
years in the pursuit of an irrefutable, systematic, and wholly consistent
“grand narrative” for reality at the most global of levels)—“The relation
between knowledge and the world was consubstantial with a fantasy of
copulation” (pg. 28). Fink shows
precisely how Lacan labors to rid psychoanalysis of the subtle and insidious
vestiges of these pervasive fantasies of complete and closed wholeness. For Lacanian psychoanalysis and its
radicalization of Freud, human subjectivity is condemned to being perturbed by
a series of irresolvable, constitutive antagonisms. The desiring subject as the “barred S” ($) strives to obtain a
full and absolute jouissance (i.e., a total and exhaustive enjoyment qua
complete satisfaction) that simply doesn’t exist, and yet crops up again and
again in the fantasmatic formations of the psyche—“it is the idea of a
jouissance that never fails and that never fails to diminish still further the
little jouissance we already have” (pg. 36). 
Hence, through Fink’s contribution, one can discern that Lacan implores
psychoanalysis to combat all the various denials, within both the conceptual
framework of metapsychology and the concrete realm of the therapeutic clinic,
of the sexual relationship’s non-existence. 
Speaking of “the One that the age-old fantasy requires,” Fink notes,
“Lacan’s goal is to eliminate all such fantasies from psychoanalytic theory and
practice” (pg. 28). As usual, Fink’s
commentary on Lacan is lucid, well organized, and edifying. He skillfully leads readers through various
Lacanian themes and ideas without getting unduly mired in jargon and
superfluous technical details (one of the all-time best summaries of Lacan’s complete
oeuvre is still Fink’s 1995 study The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance).

Colette
Soler, a Lacanian analyst practicing in Paris, has two pieces featured in this
volume: “Hysteria in Scientific
Discourse” and “What Does the Unconscious Know about Women?.” The former addresses the connection between
science and sexuality and the latter discusses Lacan’s perspective on feminine
sexuality. In “Hysteria in Scientific
Discourse,” Soler highlights two trends against whose backdrop analysis and its
parallel set of psychopathologies emerge: 
on the one hand, with the historical rise of science (including medical
science) as an “objective” discourse expunging all references to the
particularities of human subjectivity, analysis arises as a means of addressing
those psychical ailments that remain irreducible to science’s ontology by
virtue of their ties to subjective structure; and, on the other hand, with the
ever-increasing technological and economic “instrumentalization” of everyday
life, analysis registers the protests of bodies that refuse to smoothly
integrate themselves within the social machinery of production. Hysteria, involving both an incessant
interrogation of what Lacan calls the “discourse of the master”—science often
speaks with this voice of mastery—as well as psychosomatic conversion symptoms,
is thus the quintessential modern pathology (Soler reminds readers that Freud
discovers psychoanalysis primarily through his early dealings with female
hysterics). Soler, at one point in
“What Does the Unconscious Know about Women?,” provides a surprisingly
common-sense explanation for the analytic contention that the feminine
libidinal economy (in heterosexual cases, at least) is oriented in a somewhat
passive/reactionary fashion around masculinity and its “phallus.” She notes that a necessary precondition for
lovemaking to take place is, obviously, the presence of an erection in the
male. Consequently, women must attempt
to occupy the proper fantasy position within the masculine partner’s libidinal
landscape, that is, women must try to be right sort of “thing” that triggers
the appropriate physiological response in their partners. However, despite this emphasis on the topic
of feminine sexuality, Soler is careful to note that, for Lacan, both sexes are
caught in the game of “masquerade,” that the manipulation of semblances in the
displays of sexual identity are part of the human condition in general
(although Soler also contends that the techniques of manipulation and the
relation to the various “masks” of gender roles aren’t the same or symmetrical
for the sexes).

Another
French Lacanian analyst, Geneviève Morel, continues along certain lines present
in Soler’s contributions. In her
article “Feminine Conditions of Jouissance,” Morel focuses her attention on the
problem of frigidity in women, and uses this issue as a means for delineating
some of the vital preconditions for women achieving a relatively satisfying
sexual life. One of the reasons why
Lacan proclaims the non-existence of the “rapport sexuel” is that he
sees the partners involved as “relating” not so much to each other but,
instead, to their own fantasies and partial-object fixations (this being part
of what Lacan’s positioning, in the twentieth seminar, of objet petit a
as a mediating barrier between sexual partners entails, as well as what’s
conveyed by his earlier formulation in the eleventh seminar that, “I love
something in you more than you”). For
Lacan, unconscious fantasies and the various incarnations of objet a are
necessary possibility conditions for both men and women as regards entry into
the sexual field; physical attraction
to another is, to a certain degree, catalyzed by subject-specific “triggers”
(i.e., marks, features, qualities, etc.—Lacan’s “unary traits”), this being an
aspect of one of Freud’s insights into the amorous affairs of humanity. According to Morel, women are in an
especially awkward position here: they
must don the accoutrements of certain roles for their different partners, and
yet, if they over-identify with their partners’ fantasies or fall into
excessive doubt about their position vis-à-vis these others’ desires,
then (usually hysterical) symptoms develop, up to and including frigidity—“a woman
must engage in the masquerade, which is phallic by its very nature, in order to
be desired by a man, yet, if she alienates herself excessively in it, wanting
too much to be a ‘phallus-girl,’ she risks losing all of her sexual
satisfaction” (pg. 83).  Being a happy
woman is, evidently, an excruciatingly delicate balancing act.

In her
rather short contribution “Love Anxieties,” Renata Salecl, following Lacan,
portrays male-female relationships as instances of the proverbial two ships
passing in the night—“The major problem of male and female subjects is that
they do not relate to what their partners relate to in them” (pg. 93). That is to say, sexual (non-)relationships
are based on the interweaving of two-way misunderstandings. The reasons for this have already been
briefly touched upon above. In her
concluding paragraph, Salecl argues that both men and women have a tendency to
“split” their love objects, à la Freud’s examples of what he describes
as a masculine libidinal strategy of polarizing women into two diametrically
opposed categories: women are either
pure virgins or dirty whores, and certain men often find themselves in a state
of, on the one hand, desexualized, Platonic love with the former and, on the
other hand, carnal lust for the latter (what’s more, these men usually remain
stuck in this inconvenient position, unable to unify these two split poles in
the form of a single woman for whom they have both amorous affection and
physical attraction). Salecl claims
that men partition love and lust in this manner so as to avoid being consumed
by objects of desire that “horrify” them (for obsessional neurotic reasons),
whereas women multiply their actual and/or fantasized partners in an effort to
discern exactly what they are as objects of desire for their significant
other(s) (for hysterical reasons).

Andrew
Cutrofello, author of the excellent 1997 book Imagining Otherwise: Metapsychology and the Analytic A Posteriori
(a study primarily of the link between Kant’s theoretical philosophy and Lacanian
metapsychology), offers an extended philosophical discussion regarding “The
Ontological Status of Lacan’s Mathematical Paradigms.” Although several volumes on the Lacanian
appropriation of mathematics already exist in French, the English-language secondary
literature on Lacan has only just recently begun grappling with questions
concerning the various functions of mathematical models in Lacan’s work. Perhaps Alan Sokal’s venomous indictment of
this aspect of Lacanian theory as charlatanism has stimulated this sort of
scholarly research in the American reception of Lacan. Cutrofello does an elegant job not only of
explaining why Lacan decides to lay a certain amount of emphasis upon
mathematics, but also in showing how this focus is utterly central to the
Lacanian theory of subjectivity.

Lacan, following the French
historian of science Alexandre Koyré, views mathematics as playing an
irreducibly important role in the shift from pre-modern, Aristotelian science
(wherein knowledge of reality is ultimately conditioned by and grounded upon
perceptual observation) to modern, post-Galilean science (wherein scientific
knowledge is submitted to numerical systems involving elements of thought
devoid of direct reference to a perceived/perceivable reality). Comparing Kantian epistemology to, for
example, quantum physics as epitomizing the cutting edge of contemporary
science helps clarify matters here. In
the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant proceeds first from a “transcendental
aesthetic” and then to a “transcendental dialectic”—he begins by discussing how
legitimate forms of knowledge involve the relations between sensible intuitions
and the concepts of the understanding (i.e., the legitimacy of knowledge is
contingent upon thought remaining within the “limits of possible experience”),
and then subsequently endeavors to show that the employment of the ideas of
reason beyond the bounds of experience invariably leads to intellectual
deadlocks, impasses, and contradictions. 
For both Lacan and Cutrofello, even though Kant writes in the wake of
the dawn of modern science, his epistemology doesn’t yet grasp its full import
(if only because Kant doesn’t live to see modern scientific developments coming
to full fruition in the twentieth century). 
If a quantum physicist were today to write a sequel to the first Critique,
it would be a mirror-image inversion of Kant’s masterpiece. Undergraduate majors in physics are
typically told, when taking their first course in quantum physics, not to
bother trying to imagine for themselves the objects supposedly referred to by
the quantum equations; the professors warn them to simply “stick to the
mathematics,” since their efforts at conjuring up a mental image of sub-atomic
particles merely results in misleading or outright contradictory depictions
(for instance, objects that can be in two places at once, or objects that are
both waves and particles, and so on). 
Instead of, as with Kant, a dialectics of pure reason, one gets a
dialectics of intuition. The
anti-Kantian message of quantum physics is simply this: pure mathematical formulas provide
unmediated access to the brute material real of things themselves as they
really are (in Kant’s language, numerical ideas of reason furnish a direct embodiment
of things in themselves qua the ultimate substance of material reality);
however, any attempt to translate this mathematized real into perceptual
constructs (in Kant’s language, imaginable and/or perceivable objects of
macro-level experience) produces untenable antinomies for human thought. Cutrofello notes that, “The fact that
nothing in reality corresponds to negative, complex, or transfinite numbers,
that I cannot intuit Lobachevskian or Riemannian or n-dimensional space, does
not in the least compromise the truths I can grasp by thinking such objects”
(pg. 156). He goes on to observe that,
“there is a radical disjunction between the order of the mathematical and the
order of perception—or, to invoke Lacan’s dispute with phenomenology, that the
order of the signifier is radically other than the order of ‘lived experience’”
(pg. 156-157). Inspired by such
advances in the history of ideas, Lacan sees a great deal of promise in
portraying the subject of the unconscious not as analogous to perceivable
entities in the domain of experiential reality (i.e., a pre-modern,
phenomenological strategy), but as a “reality” (or, more precisely, a real)
akin to the mathematical functions governing the universe of modern science—“a
subject belongs first and foremost to something like a space of intersubjectivity—a
space, however, whose character can be conceived of only in numerical, not
geometrical, terms. Such a space might
be conceived of as a network of signifiers, and the way to propose a
mathematization of the subject would be to seek a model for understanding the
advent of subjectivity in the linking of signifiers” (pg. 162-163). Cutrofello draws the correct conclusion from
this: in Lacanian theory, a
phenomenology of the Imaginary (i.e., an investigation into the perceived,
experiential features of first-person, lived reality) is conditioned by and
subordinate to a structural delineation of the Symbolic (that is to say, the
subject [sujet] of the formal signifier determines the constitution of
the phenomenal contents subsisting within the dialectic between ego [moi]
and reality).

Suzanne Barnard gets the last word
in this volume with her closing essay “Tongues of Angels: Feminine Structure and Other
Jouissance.” Barnard examines the
consequences of Lacan’s shift, starting in the eleventh seminar, from the
Imaginary-Symbolic domain of desire to the Real of the drive. Whereas Soler and Morel devote themselves to
discussing the relevance of Lacan’s twentieth seminar to the topic of feminine
sexuality, Barnard spends some of her time exploring the status of the
masculine libidinal economy in light of later Lacanian notions—“Within
masculine structure, the drive remains haunted by the image of phallic
presence, despite the fact that the masculine subject’s place in the symbolic
is fixed by its exclusion… he
must remain at a certain distance from the object of his desire in order to
maintain his sexual position” (pg. 180). 
In Lacan’s terminology from the twentieth seminar, masculine subjects
cling to the structure of desire qua “phallic jouissance,” in
which they forever strive after a jouissance supposedly possessed by
some mysterious, non-castrated Other without ever obtaining precisely “it,” in
order to defend themselves from being overwhelmed by the Real of the drive qua
“other jouissance”—“This is what Lacan refers to as the risk of
annihilation that the masculine subject takes in approaching the object” (pg.
180). Men cling to their “castration”
(i.e., their deprivation of the libidinal “Real Thing”), since their very
masculinity, according to this analysis, is predicated upon it. Juxtaposing Morel and Barnard’s pieces (and
some of Salecl’s remarks too), one gains insight into a Lacanian conception of
the psychoanalytic difference between the sexes: the sexual life of the feminine (hysterical) subject is
jeopardized by becoming too perfect an object of desire for the masculine other
(Morel), whereas the sexual life of the masculine (obsessional) subject is
jeopardized by becoming too able to obtain the supposedly ideal object of
desire (Barnard). Given this
pathological “mutually assured destruction” resulting from too “perfect” a fit
between partners, is it any wonder that Lacan insists upon the non-existence of
sexual relationships? A certain degree
of mismatched dysfunctionality is necessary so as to sustain the quotidian
reality of a tolerable form of amorous bond.

Lacan’s twentieth seminar is, as
the standard refrain about his work so often goes, “notoriously
difficult.” Like Reading Seminar XX,
Encore itself is a relatively condensed and extremely complex
presentation of a wide range of material. 
However, unlike Encore, Reading Seminar XX will be
accessible not only for those already initiated into the intricacies of
Lacanian theory, but also for those simply seeking a bit of clarity apropos of
a more obscure period of Lacan’s teaching (without a doubt, the seminars of the
mid-1970s are far from easy to comprehend, even when one has read a great deal
of Lacanian texts). And, a really
valuable service rendered by this volume is to show how the predominant
feminist reception of Lacan has consistently treated Encore as, to use
Barnard’s phrase, a “straw text” (pg. 2), namely, a “phallogocentric”
caricature fit only for self-promoting, self-righteous derision. Reading Seminar XX is a productive
and highly readable contribution to the growing body of English-language
scholarship on the late Lacan.

© 2002 Adrian Johnston

Adrian Johnston, Ph.D.
holds a position as interdisciplinary research fellow in psychoanalysis at
Emory University.

Categories: Psychoanalysis