A Reading from Jacques Lacan's Seminar From an Other to the other II - [excerpt]

translated by Barbara P. Fulks

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Perhaps Lacan had not exploited until then all the virtualities of his Seminar VII. There is here a discontinuity with this Ethics, but what is cleared up here, jouissance, sublimation of jouissance, is lost a little later because of the prevalence that Lacan gives to the objet a. In Le transfert, for example, what distances the primacy of the real is the value of objet a as agalma discovered at the heart of Silène. This creates an enormous caesura in its development, since he begins then a long lecture on Plato's The Banquet, which leads him to the pedagogical presence in the analytic experience of the object agalma. The superb development of L'identification brings then some things on the side of the signifier, signifier and topology. Anxiety is not on the slope of addressing the logic of jouissance. I could continue the list as I am tempted to do and show you at each turn what is derived, if one considers that, with From an Other to the other, Lacan is starting over with The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, and he indicates that he is starting over with a vein of reflection that he had skipped before.

This implies that one is centered on an enigmatic real, at least in Seminar VII, in relationship to which the symbolic and the imaginary appear as turning around, but incapable of getting denser in rapport with this real. After The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, one has the notion that symbols as imaginary are semblants - a term that will not be stressed until D'un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant - the great break being there, on the one hand, symbolic and imaginary together, and, on the other hand, the real.

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