Lacan: The Apparatus

The formalism, and whether it does any work

A course on the thought of Jacques Lacan.

Psychology

What you will learn

• Says why Lacan writes letters rather than words, and what the emptiness of a letter is for.
• Reads $ as the split subject, and connects the bar to the account of the ego and of language given in Foundations.
• Distinguishes S1 from S2, and explains why a master signifier means nothing on its own.
• States the formula that a signifier represents a subject for another signifier, and says what it rules out.
• Explains 'there is no Other of the Other' and why it makes any claim to a final authority an imposture.
• Distinguishes the cause of desire from the object of desire, and gives a case where the difference is visible.
• Explains why the gaze and the voice count as objects on this account.
• Explains object a as surplus, and the analogy with surplus value in the master's arrangement.

Course outline

1. Why Letters — The apparatus begins with a decision about vocabulary. The ordinary words — subject, knowledge, desire — arrive already full of the reader's intuitions, and those intuitions are precisely what the…
2. The Cause, Not the Object — Object a is the letter Lacan considered his most significant contribution. It names the cause of desire rather than its object: not the thing wanted, but what makes wanting start. The concept does…
3. Four Positions — Take the four letters, arrange them, and rotate the arrangement a quarter turn at a time. Four positions come out, and Lacan calls each a discourse: master, university, hysteric, analyst. They are…
4. Does It Do Any Work? — The tier has been asking one question of each piece of the apparatus: what does it let us say that we could not say without it? This module asks it of the mathematics, which is where the answer is…

Works read in this course

• Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (1969-70) — the Grigg translation (Norton 2007) — the four discourses, and the formula that a signifier represents a subject for another signifier.
• Écrits (1966) — the Fink translation (Norton 2006) — 'The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire', where the graph is built and where there is no Other of the Other.
• Seminar XX, Encore (1972-73) — the Fink translation (Norton 1998) — the late work on jouissance and sexuation.
• Fink, The Lacanian Subject (1995) — Princeton UP — the sympathetic expositor, and the source of this tier's sharpest concession about object a.
• Sokal and Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense (1998) — Picador — the adversarial case on the mathematics, quoted at its actual scope.

Terms introduced

the barred subject, S1 and S2, object a, the four discourses

Part of the Simposeum course library.