Talk:Seminar XIV

<seo_template></seo_template>

Jacques Lacan's Seminars : I · II · III · IV · V · VI · VII · VIII · IX · X · XI · XII · XIII · XIV · XV · XVI · XVII · XVIII · XIX · XX · XXI · XXII · XXIII · XXIV · XXV · XXVI · XXVII I. Freud's technical writings II. The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis III. The Psychoses IV. The Object Relations V. The Formations of the Unconscious VI. Desire and its Interpretation VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis VIII. Transference IX. Identification The Names of the Father X. Anxiety XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis XII. Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis XIII. The Object of Psychoanalysis XIV. The Logic of Fantasy XV. The Psychoanalytic Act XVI. From One Other to the Other XVII. The Reverse of Psychoanalysis XVIII. On a Discourse That Would Not Be Semblance XIX. Or Worse XX. Encore XXV. The Moment of Concluding XXVII. Dissolution ← Seminar XIII Seminar XV →

The Logic of Fantasy
Seminar XIV
Facsimile cover from a widely circulated transcription of Seminar XIV.
French Title	Le Séminaire, Livre XIV: La logique du fantasme
English Title	The Seminar, Book XIV: The Logic of Fantasy
Seminar Information
Seminar Date(s)	1966–1967 (academic year)
Location	École Normale Supérieure (Paris)
Psychoanalytic Content
Key Concepts	Fantasy • Objet petit a • Barred subject • Jouissance • Sexual difference • Phallus • Cogito • Topology
Notable Themes	Logical articulation of fantasy; relation of desire and drive; the status of objet petit a; subject and cogito; sexual act and non-rapport; Marxian value and sexual economy
Theoretical Context
Period	Middle period
Register	Symbolic/Real with emerging centrality of jouissance
Chronology
Preceded by	Seminar XIII
Followed by	Seminar XV

The Logic of Fantasy ([Le Séminaire, Livre XIV: La logique du fantasme] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)) is the fourteenth annual seminar delivered by Jacques Lacan during the 1966–1967 academic year at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris. The seminar remains officially unpublished; it is known through stenographic notes and later transcriptions, which nonetheless occupy a central place in Lacanian psychoanalysis and in commentary on Lacan’s “middle period”.

In Seminar XIV Lacan systematically develops the matheme S<>a (often rendered as $ <> a), proposed as the logical articulation of fantasy (fantasme) and of the relation between the divided subject and the objet petit a. The seminar revisits and extends themes first sketched in Les formations de l'inconscient (Seminar V) and in the Écrits essay “The Subversion of the Subject…”, where the fantasy matheme appears as a first “topology of the subject”.

The Logic of Fantasy is widely regarded as a hinge between Lacan’s structuralist linguistico-logical phase and his later elaboration of jouissance and sexual non-rapport, culminating in Encore (1972–1973). It deepens the status of the objet petit a as the real remainder of the signifying cut, explores the logical status of the fantasy as “frame” of the subject, and foregrounds the problem of the sexual act, the absence of a signifier for sexual difference, and the thesis that “there is no sexual rapport.”

Cover page of a widely circulated transcription of Seminar XIV.

Historical and institutional context

ENS, the École Freudienne, and the publication of Écrits

By 1966 Lacan had transferred his weekly seminar from the psychiatric setting of Hôpital Sainte-Anne to the École Normale Supérieure, where it attracted an audience of philosophers, linguists, mathematicians, and psychoanalysts. He had founded the École Freudienne de Paris in 1964, explicitly orienting his school around a “return to Freud” and a formalization of analytic concepts.

1966 also saw the original publication of Écrits at Éditions du Seuil, consolidating key papers from the 1950s and early 1960s, including “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious”, where the matheme $ <> a is first introduced. Seminar XIV, delivered in the immediate aftermath of Écrits, can be read as an attempt to rework and systematize those earlier insights in a more explicitly logical and topological framework.

Place in the sequence of seminars

The Logic of Fantasy follows Seminar XIII: L'objet de la psychanalyse (1965–1966), which concentrated on objet petit a as gaze and voice and on the topological status of the analytic object, and precedes Seminar XV: L'acte psychanalytique (1967–1968), devoted to the psychoanalytic act. In this sequence, Seminar XIV serves as a bridge between a focus on the object and a focus on the act: it asks how the subject is positioned by and in relation to the object a in fantasy, and what it would mean to “traverse” that fantasy in analysis.

Commentators often group Seminar XIV with other mid-1960s seminars (XI–XV) as marking Lacan’s gradual shift from a primarily structural-linguistic articulation of the unconscious toward a more explicit concern with jouissance, sexual non-rapport, and logical formalization.

Conceptual framework and methodology

The matheme of fantasy: S<>a

The guiding device of Seminar XIV is the matheme S<>a (commonly written $ <> a), representing the fundamental structure of fantasy. The symbol S (or $) designates the division of the subject––the barred subject—engendered by its insertion into the signifying chain. The lozenge or “diamond” sign <> marks a relation of implication or exclusion between the subject and a; it designates a purely relational function where the verb disappears in favour of an algebraic sign of structural relation.

The term a names the objet petit a, which Lacan had progressively elaborated since La relation d'objet, L'angoisse, and The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis as the remainder of the signifying cut, the object-cause of desire rather than its empirical object. In Seminar XIV, this configuration is treated as a logical formula expressing the subject’s fundamental positioning: fantasy, Lacan suggests, is “the logical articulation of the relation between the barred subject and a.”

Logical and topological ambitions

Throughout the seminar Lacan insists on the need for a “logic that is not yet a logic” in order to formalize analytic experience. He plays on the difficulty of any “logical calculus” of alienation, observing that “truth is related to desire”, which complicates the logician’s ideal of a neutral calculus. To think fantasy, the subject, and jouissance, Lacan mobilizes:

• elements of formal logic and set theory as metaphors for inclusion/exclusion and for the inexistence of a complete universe of discourse;
• topological figures (notably surfaces with a single side) to illustrate how “desire and reality are the right and wrong sides of the same surface”, such that transition from one to the other does not involve any break in texture.

Topology here serves to figure the continuity and torsion between desire, drive, and reality, and to suggest how fantasy might provide a passage (or an impasse) between them.

Key themes, concepts, and constructions

Objet a, the cut, and partial objects

In Seminar XIV Lacan reaffirms that the objet petit a is not an empirical object but the real remainder produced by the primal signifying cut that engenders the subject in the field of the Other. It is “primal” only in the sense that it is structurally correlated with the subject’s birth as barred; it is “forever lost” as an object yet persists as a cause of desire.

Lacan links a to the partial objects isolated in Freud’s account of the drive—the breast, feces, the phallus (as detachable organ), the gaze, and the voice—which circulate in fantasy and can be substituted for one another at the imaginary level. As the “frame” of the subject, a falls at the level of the fundamental act in which the subject is engendered by the repetition of the signifier; Lacan associates this with a “paternal” or phallic mark, since there is no direct signifier of sexual difference: “The phallus alone is the sex-unity.”

By defining a as the product of the signifying cut—“that which is real in the cut”—Lacan insists that the object is not simply “inside” or “outside” the body, but is a structural remainder that indexes the impossibility of closure in any universe of discourse.

Fantasy between desire and drive

A central question in The Logic of Fantasy concerns the logical status of a in relation to desire and drive. Is a to be located on the side of desire, as its cause, or on the side of the drive, as the object around which the drive circulates?

Lacan suggests that the question cannot be resolved without recourse to topology: he proposes a surface where “desire and reality” appear as “the right and the wrong sides” of the same structure, such that passage from one side to the other is continuous, “for the relation of texture entails no break.” On this model, fantasy would serve as the operator that allows passage from drive to desire and back again, sometimes binding them, sometimes disjoining them.

The fantasy $ <> a therefore does not merely screen or disguise an underlying reality. It is the minimal formal “scenario” in which the subject situates itself in relation to the cause of its desire. As later commentators emphasize, fantasy “frames” reality in the sense that it structures what counts as reality for the subject and where the subject can locate its own jouissance.

Truth, desire, and the Platonic interlude

Lacan repeatedly acknowledges the tension between logical formalization and the fact that, in psychoanalysis, “truth is related to desire.” Using Diotima from Plato’s Symposium, he recalls the figures of Penia (lack) and Poros (resource), asking “to what point, between the two, one can let obscurity go.” Penia, the academic figure of lack, symbolizes a logic that would merely register absence; Poros, associated with inventive desire, suggests a logic animated by the subject’s relation to the Other’s desire.

From this vantage point, the “logic” of fantasy is not a neutral calculus but a formalization that must take account of the subject’s implication in what is being calculated. Lacan can thus declare, in one emphatic formulation, that “the logic of fantasy is the most fundamental principle of any logic that deals with formalizable impasses.”

Cogito, subject, and “Cogito ergo es”

A substantial part of Seminar XIV returns to Descartes’ cogito ergo sum in order to rethink the analytic subject. Lacan replays and transforms the cogito in multiple variants:

• “Either I think or I am”;
• “Either I do not think or I am not”;
• “I am where I do not think; I think where I am not.”

These formulas, already present in earlier work, are pushed further in The Logic of Fantasy toward the paradoxical expression cogito ergo es (“I think therefore you are”). The shift from sum (“I am”) to es (“you are”) emphasizes the fundamental dependence of the speaking subject on the Other (Autre): it is in addressing an Other that the subject situates itself as cogitating and existent.

Lacan also plays on the German Es (the id), glossed as “the non-I, the impersonal 'it'.” He asks whether this Es is a reservoir of drives, a “cauldron (with a hole in it) of Freud’s witches,” or a conglomerate of signifiers, thus triangulating the Cartesian cogito, the Freudian Es, and the Lacanian barred subject.

Désêtre, désirpas, and the end of analysis

In Seminar XIV Lacan elaborates the notion of désêtre (“unbeing”), which would increasingly come to mark, in his later teaching, a dimension of the end of analysis. Playing on French prefixes and homophonies, he treats unconscious desire as “pure desire”, dés-être, analogously to dés-espoir (despair)—a figure of going (ire) that has not gone through, an impassé or impasse.

Lacan’s neologism désirpas (“desire-not”) condenses this impossibility: analytic interpretation yields no final “solution” (issue) to unconscious desire because there is no solution to desire as such. Hysterical “unfulfilled desire”, phobic “prevented desire”, and obsessive “impossible desire” are different configurations of the same structural deadlock.

Within this frame, the analytic task is not to satisfy desire but to lead the subject to know something of the truth of its desire and of the fundamental fantasy that supports it. Yet this knowledge is at once liberating and devastating: “By itself, the object a upholds the truth of alienation; to discover this truth is to discover that there is no universe of discourse, because something real escapes it.” Later Lacanians will link this orientation to the notion of “traversing the fantasy” as a marker of analytic termination.

Sexual act, sexuality, and the non-rapport

One of the most striking theses of The Logic of Fantasy is Lacan’s assertion that “the great secret of psychoanalysis is that there is no sexual act.” By this he means that, at the symbolic level, there is no signifier that would adequately represent the “sexual act” as a relation between two sexed subjects; there is only sexuality as a field of fantasy, drive, and partial objects.

For Lacan, an act has a specific definition: it involves a signifying duplication that allows the subject to be inserted into a chain in which it inscribes itself, instituting or modifying a symbolic position. Because there is no signifier of sexual difference and none for “woman” as such, no act of copulation can inscribe two subjects as sexed in a symmetric relation within the Symbolic. Between man and woman, Lacan suggests, there is always a “third object”, objet a, whose sliding function of substitution prevents any stable opposition of the sexes in an eternal essence.

At the formal level, Lacan notes, there is only (a + 1) and (a – 1), where a term marks difference as plus or minus: the phallus functions as “the sex-unity”, the incommensurable 1, while the object a marks a deviation from this unit measure. These considerations anticipate the later formulas of sexuation and the famous declaration, in Seminar XX, that “there is no sexual rapport” (il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel).

Marx, value, and the sexual economy

In Seminar XIV Lacan draws on Karl Marx’s analyses of use value and exchange value to rethink the economy of sexual difference and the circulation of the phallus. He introduces the figure of “man-he” (), a play on the neutral pronoun il, to designate the “man-standard” and “man-stallion” () as bearer of the signifier of sex, doomed to symbolic castration. Without an Other to guarantee his position—not even a God exempt from castration—“man-he” seeks protection in social constructions based on masculine homosexuality and fraternal bonds.

The Primal Father of Freud’s primal horde, imagined as enjoying all women, sees “his jouissance killed” when he is murdered; the phallus survives only as circulating signifier. If the phallus circulates, Lacan says, it is due to women. “Woman represents the phallus as an exchange value among men; and, if the power of the penis bears the mark of castration, it is because fictitiously she becomes that which is enjoyed (ce dont on jouit) and circulates as an object of jouissance: she is the locus of transference of this jouissance-value represented by the phallus.”

By identifying with the phallus as use value, woman is transformed into an “object-good” in masculine exchange. At the same time, Lacan insists, she does not lack resources—such as masquerade—to act as “man-she” (). As “man-she” she becomes inexpugnable “as a woman precisely outside the system of the sexual act”, with a “different use of her own jouissance outside this ideology”, pointing toward the “radical heterogeneity” of the jouissance of the two sexes that will become central in Encore.

Fantasy and the Real

Throughout the seminar Lacan links fantasy to the Real in two senses. First, as noted, a is the “real” leftover of the signifying operation, that which resists symbolization. Second, the logical articulation $ <> a serves to formalize the way the subject’s relation to the Real is mediated by fantasy: a “makes shine in its inexpressible oscillation” in the cut where the subject is constituted.

At several points, Lacan emphasizes that recognizing a as the support of the truth of alienation implies acknowledging that “there is no universe of discourse”, because something Real always eludes the field of signification. The Logic of Fantasy thus continues Lacan’s long-standing insistence on the structural limitation of any symbolic totalization, connecting it explicitly to sexual non-rapport and to the impossibility of a complete theory of the subject.

Theoretical significance and clinical implications

Fundamental fantasy and structure

Seminar XIV consolidates the notion of fundamental fantasy as a structural operator that organizes the subject’s relation to desire, the Other, and jouissance. The matheme $ <> a is not a clinical symptom but a formal schema that can be instantiated in different ways in different clinical structures (hysteria, obsession, phobia, perversion).

For example, Lacan links hysterical “unfulfilled desire”, phobic “prevented desire”, and obsessive “impossible desire” to distinct ways of placing or displacing a in the fantasy frame. Later Lacanian clinical teaching often treats the elucidation of the subject’s fundamental fantasy as a central task of analysis: by articulating how a is positioned, the subject can recognize both the support and the limits of its desire.

Traversing the fantasy

Although the expression “traversing the fantasy” (traversée du fantasme) is more explicitly thematized in other seminars, commentators frequently associate this proposed goal of analysis with the work of Seminar XIV. To “traverse” the fantasy is not to abolish it but to modify the subject’s position in relation to it: to cease taking the fantasy as a hidden representation of reality and to assume it as a structural frame that can be reconfigured.

In this perspective, the end of analysis is not a harmonious reintegration of the ego but a “desupposition” of the subject’s relation to the Other and to a, corresponding to the dimension of désêtre and to a new relation to the impossibility of sexual rapport.

Interpretation, desire, and impasse

Seminar XIV has important implications for analytic technique. If, as Lacan suggests, there is no final “solution” to desire—no exit from the désirpas or structural impasse—then interpretation cannot promise closure or full satisfaction. Instead, interpretation seeks to displace and re-articulate the fantasy, allowing the subject to experience its desire in a different way and to loosen its attachment to certain fantasmatic scenarios.

At the same time, Lacan’s insistence that “truth is related to desire” warns against any purely logical or meta-language position for the analyst: the analyst’s interventions are themselves caught in the field of desire and fantasy. This insight will inform Lacan’s subsequent treatment of the analyst's desire and the psychoanalytic act in Seminar XV.

Sexual non-rapport and later developments

By linking the structure of fantasy to the absence of a signifier of sexual difference, and by exploring the “third object” a that intervenes between the sexes, The Logic of Fantasy prepares the ground for Lacan’s later formulas of sexuation and his thesis that “there is no sexual rapport.” The seminar thus occupies an important place in the genealogy of Lacan’s thinking on sexuation, feminine jouissance, and the heterogeneity of the jouissance of the two sexes.

Reception and legacy

Status in Lacanian teaching

Although unpublished, Seminar XIV has a significant status within Lacanian schools. Transcriptions (notably those circulated under the name “Staferla”) are widely used in teaching, reading groups, and commentaries. Its central matheme $ <> a and its elaboration of the logic of fantasy are regularly invoked in doctrinal presentations of Lacan’s theory of the subject, the object, and the end of analysis.

Within the internal chronology of Lacan’s seminars, The Logic of Fantasy is often treated as part of a compact sequence—L'objet de la psychanalyse, La logique du fantasme, L'acte psychanalytique—that jointly articulate the object, fantasy, and act as three fundamental dimensions of the analytic experience.

Influence in theory and the humanities

Beyond clinical circles, Seminar XIV has influenced philosophical and theoretical appropriations of Lacan, especially in debates around fantasy, ideology, and the framing of “reality”. The Lacanian notion of fantasy as a structural “screen” that both covers and produces the Real, and the matheme $ <> a as a minimal schema of subject–object relation, appear in work on film theory, political theory, and cultural critique.

In many of these contexts, The Logic of Fantasy is read alongside earlier seminars (on the mirror stage, symbolic order, and psychosis) and later seminars (on discourse, sinthome, and Encore), as part of a larger Lacanian effort to formalize subjectivity in terms of language, logic, and jouissance.

See also

• Jacques Lacan
• Seminar XIII
• Seminar XV
• Fantasy
• Objet petit a
• Desire
• Drive
• Jouissance
• Sexual difference
• Phallus
• Cogito
• Topology
• There is no sexual relationship

Further reading

• Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre XIV: La logique du fantasme, 1966–1967. Unpublished seminar; consulted in circulating French transcriptions.
• Lacan, Jacques. “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious”, in Écrits. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966. English trans. in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.
• Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

• Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London/New York: Routledge, 1996.
• Rabaté, Jean-Michel (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• Roudinesco, Élisabeth. Jacques Lacan. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.