What astonishing success the Name of the Father has had Everyone finds something in it Who one s father is isn t immediately obvious hardly being visible to the naked eye Paternity is determined first and foremost by one s culture As Lacan said the Name of the Father creates the function of the father But then where does the plural stem from It isn t pagan for it is found in the Bible He who speaks from the burning bush says of Himself that He doesn t have just one Name In other words the Father has no proper Name It is not a figure of speech but rather a function The Father has as many names as the function has props What is its function The religious function par excellence that of tying things together What things The signifier and the signified law and desire thought and the body In short the symbolic and the imaginary Yet if these two become tied to the real in a three part knot the Name of the Father is no longer anything but mere semblance On the other hand if without it everything falls apart it is the symptom of a failed knotting Jacques Alain Miller Table of Contents Foreword by Jacques Alain MillerThe Symbolic the Imaginary and the RealIntroduction to the Names of the FatherBio bibliographical NotesTranslator s Notes On the Names of the FatherIf one can imagine a thinker as prescient eloquent or incisive as Lacan I challenge you to find them In 1963 on the wrong end of the Soci t Fran aise de Psychanalyse one of his most groundbreaking seminars On the Names of the Father was interrupted by his demotion from the position of didacticien. Lacan s longtime editor Jacques Alain Miller would write of the seminar Having concluded from his tribulations that psychoanalytic discourse had not authorized him to lift as he had intended the veil Freud had cast over the true mainspring of psychoanalysis and that he had been struck down for his sacrilegious act he signaled in a word to the wise in particular in the ironic title that he gave to a later Seminar Les non dupes errent that he would keep close to his chest truths that were too tempestuous. Drawing a stark distinction between psychology as a tool of maintaining the status quo and psychoanalysis as among other things a tool to elucidate the subject and resolve symptomatic behavior Lacan writes In the positivist perspective intelligence is but one affect among others based on the hypothesis of intelligibility This justifies a psychology of Tarot card readers which is concocted in places that are supposedly freest from this kind of claptrap endowed university chairs To positivists affect conversely is thus merely an obscure form of intelligence. What escapes people who study such teachings is the obscurantism to which they are subjected We know what it leads to to the ever intentional undertakings of a technocracy to the psychological standardization of subjects who are seeking jobs and to acceptance of the established boundaries of society as it currently exists head bent forward under the weighty standard of the psychologist. One can only imagine then after giving us a section like this what was lost in Lacan s keeping close to the chest after this psychoanalytic dust up Lacan takes aim not just at the psychoanalytic establishment which he had great reason to resent but also positivist thinking broadly For Lacan intelligence is not to be quantified and translated into a condition of capital investment Introduction to the Names of the Father is Lacan at his most honest clear and compulsively readable Those worried for the status of his Seminar after 1963 the story has a happy ending Lacan began his teaching again in January 1964 at the cole Normale Sup rieure with The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 96 Non si pu realmente consigliare un libro di L Si pu essere soltanto mossi da curiosit e da una buona dose di pazienza oltre che da a per il mistero Le parole di Lacan evocano non spiegano C qualcosa ma quel qualcosa avvolto da ru non mai pienamente decifrato giunge sempre di traverso L parla aggiunge torna indietro disorienta lascia appeso Questo testa rappresenta una toccata e fuga da quelle che sono le basi del suo insegnamento Tutto il suo sistema si basa da una profonda conoscenza di Freud nel quale riconosce tre strati a fondamento del suo pensiero l immaginario il simbolico e il reale L immaginario la costruzione allucinata che ci facciamo della realt che noi formiamo attraverso i simboli I simboli per se ben analizzati formano il simbolico cio le strutture alla base del nostro essere umani Infine il reale ci che sfugge alla nostra capacit linguistica Per tale motivo il desiderio si confronta sempre con il reale si desidera il soddisfacimento del proprio bisogno e allo stesso tempo quel vuoto che ci viene dall Altro quell assenza dell Altro che ci porta a riconoscere la nostra mancanza e la mancanza dell Altro Desiderare essere desiderati un vuoto che rimbalza tra il S e l Altro La religione il tentativo di dare senso a qualsiasi affioramento del Reale per questo L vede nel trionfo della scienza il trionfo della religione La prima occupandosi del Reale permette alla seconda di spiegarlo visto che il reale porta sempre con s un angoscia che va alleviata La religione ha come fine ci 96 Lacan is hard even impenetrable I had hoped for on the father generally but the lecture is overshadowed by his dismissal and so many points are set up but development deferred and cancelled 96 a swan song 96 Interesting book Nothing mind blowing I ve read a fair amount of Lacan and found that he s a peacock His reading of Hegel is absolutely erroneous too I don t blame Lacan for that the right wing Hegelian interpretation was popular in France at Lacan s time 96 This slim volume contains two texts by Jacques Lacan Taken by themselves they are not particularly important or enlightening so those unfamiliar with Lacan s work would probably be better reading something else For those who know his work however these two pieces offer a fascinating insight into two key moments in Lacan s career. The first text is The Symbolic the Imaginary and the Real which Lacan delivered to a select group of colleagues on July 8 1953 just before his Rome Report The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis that would apply structural linguistics to psychoanalysis in such a revolutionary fashion As Jacques Alain Miller notes Lacan s formulation of his three registers was inspired by Claude L vi Strauss s essay The Effectiveness of Symbols 1949 It should also be remembered that this talk occurs four months before Lacan begins Seminar I. What is notable about this first text is just how basic it appears compared to Lacan s later work Lacan seems to have worked out the main dialectic between symbolic and imaginary and this is mainly what he delineates here You spoke to us about the symbolic and the imaginary complains Serge Leclaire in the discussion afterward You didn t talk to us about the real p. The second text is Introduction to the Names of the Father which constitutes the first entry in Lacan s eleventh seminar from 1963 which he abandoned upon receiving the news that he had lost his status as a training analyst a fact he bitches and moans about throughout the whole seminar Lacan takes some time to warm up to his theme He opens with a meditation on anxiety the theme of Seminar X and warns about the dangers of psychology He makes an extraordinary remark about how Hegel s philosophy was a useful political move in undermining religion as a political and social order but ultimately concludes that Hegel s dialectic is false p. Freud of course designates religion as an illusion on the one hand but is fascinated by his mythical Moses on the other This leads into the most interesting part of the text in which Lacan uses the story of Abraham to show how Jewish tradition founds a patriarchal law that self consciously marks itself as different from one established by blood or biology covenant an act that is tied by Lacan to the father s name. El Shaddai is the one who chooses who promises and who creates through his name a certain alliance that is transmissable in only one way by the paternal berakah blessing 85 The Old Testament God is often wrathful indulging his own jouissance but Lacan seems to want to explore how particularly in the case of Abraham s sacrifice of Isaac he actually negates his own jouissance in order to make room for a desire that founds the Hebraic law Here we see a sharp divide between God s jouissance and what in this tradition is presented as His desire The point is to diminish the importance of biological origin This is the key to the mystery in which can be seen the Judaic tradition s aversion to what we see everywhere else The Hebrew tradition hates the practice of metaphysical sexual rites which during festivals unite the community with God s jouissance It highlights on the contrary the gap separating desire from jouissance p. 88 So why are the names of the father rather than just a singular designation as it originally appeared in Seminar III Lacan doesn t have a chance to explain fully but hints that it stems from the fact that Abraham s god Ha Shem meaning The Name is not yet a universal god There are other tribes with other Elohim and that means there are other names that may inscribe a paternal law. While the first text is mostly valuable from a historical point of view this second piece this brief introduction to Lacan s aborted seminar gives a sense that something important was lost The extended commentary on Abraham the covenant paternal law and jouissance promises so much only to remain unfulfilled because of political circumstances Thankfully Lacan did resume his teaching the next year with the brilliant Seminar XI but one can only wonder how much enlightening that work would have been if it had been preceded by a full consideration of the Names of the Father 96 NameS because the void of the Real where gods Be can be stopped up with any old Capital Phi provided it appears to complete the paternal metaphor As the previous lessons on the petit a qua r cause taught all origins from the species to the self are mythological structures The Names most archaic yet enduringly repeated are the foundling s fervent prayer for an answer rebounding as echoes misrecognized as divine nomination 96 O primeiro texto deste pequeno livro uma j ia para a cl nica psicanal tica Um texto acess vel e elucidativo O que j n o se pode dizer do segundo cheio de passagens inc gnitas e n o ditos No m nimo complexo 96 Agalma znenin arzusunun hedefledi ini sand ve nesneyi arzusunun nedeni ile kar t rmay son raddesine kadar g t rd nesnedir Alkibiades in l nl budur Sokrates in ona yapt g nderme buradan kaynaklan r Ruhunla me gul ol Alkibiades 132c yani bunun anlam Bil ki senin ard ndan ko tu un Platon un daha sonra ruhunu d n t rece i eyden yani imgenden ba ka bir ey de il Bu nesnenin hedef olarak de il l m n nedeni olarak i lev g rd n anla onun yas n tut O zaman kendi arzunun yollar n tan yacaks n Zira ben hi bir ey bilmeyen Sokrates in bildi i tek ey Eros un i levidir s 75 96 Lacan n kuram n n temellerinden biri olan T rk eye imgesel simgesel ve ger ek olarak evrilen d zlemleri anlamaya ancak sezgisel olarak yakla abiliyorum fakat tam olarak kavrayam yorum Baban n Adlar da yine kafa kar t r c bir okuma oldu o y zden 96
Jacques Marie mile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst psychiatrist and doctor who made prominent contributions to the psychoanalytic movement His yearly seminars conducted in Paris from 1953 until his death in 1981 were a major influence in the French intellectual milieu of the 1960s and 1970s particularly among post structuralist thinkers. Lacans ideas centered on Freudian concepts such as the unconscious the castration complex the ego focusing on identifications and the centrality of language to subjectivity His work was interdisciplinary drawing on linguistics philosophy mathematics amongst others Although a controversial and divisive figure Lacan is widely read in critical theory literary studies and twentieth century Jacques Marie mile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst psychiatrist and doctor who made prominent contributions to the psychoanalytic movement His yearly seminars conducted in Paris from 1953 until his death in 1981 were a major influence in the French intellectual milieu of the 1960s and 1970s particularly among post structuralist thinkers. Lacan s ideas centered on Freudian concepts such as the unconscious the castration complex the ego focusing on identifications and the centrality of language to subjectivity His work was interdisciplinary drawing on linguistics philosophy mathematics amongst others Although a controversial and divisive figure Lacan is widely read in critical theory literary studies and twentieth century French philosophy as well as in the living practice of clinical psychoanalysis site_link., At the beginning of the seminar one can hear Lacan s frustration as his analysand like confession of disgrace is conveyed to his students. I say that the meaning of Freud s discovery is radically opposed to that, 42 While he is absolutely right it will take Lacan a few years before he will correct this oversight in a satisfactory way: 62 Lacan then considers the role of the Church fathers that he uses to converge with Freud s views on religion
