...or Worse - The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X IX

Lacan's Seminar XIX emphasizes the importance of the One in its real dimension, rejecting the Two of sexual relation and signifying articulation. He depreciates desire and promotes jouissance, rejecting Being, which is mere semblance. He also abandons graphs and topological surfaces in favor of knots made of rings of string, each of which is an unlinked One. This is an attempt at a discourse that would take its point of departure in the real, the radical thought of modern Uni-dividualism.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 274 pages
Publication date: 23 December 2022
Publisher: Polity Press

A chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella. The unlikely showdown between a whale and a polar bear. One was crafted by Lautréamont; the other punctuated by Freud. Both are unforgettable. Why is that? They undoubtedly resonate with something within us. Lacan articulates what it is. It's all about man and woman.

There is no accord or harmony between man and woman. There's no program, nothing has been predetermined: every move is a shot in the dark, which in modal logic is called contingency. There's no way out of it. Why is it so inexorable, that is, so necessary? It really has to be reckoned that this stems from an impossibility. Hence the theorem: There is no sexual relation. The formula has become famous.

In the place of what thereby punctures a hole in the real, there is a plethora of luring and enchanting images, and there are discourses that prescribe what this relation must be. These discourses are mere semblance, the artifice of which psychoanalysis has made apparent to all. In the twenty-first century, this is beyond dispute. Who still believes that marriage has a natural foundation? Since it's a fact of culture, one devotes oneself to inventing. One cobbles together different constructions from whatever one can. It may be better... or worse.

There is Oneness. At the heart of the present Seminar, this aphorism, which hitherto went unnoticed, complements the "there is no sexual relation," stating what there is. It should be heard as One-all-alone. Alone in jouissance (which is fundamentally auto-erotic) and alone in significance (outside any semantics). Here begins Lacan's late teaching. Everything he has already taught you is here, and yet everything is new, overhauled, topsy-turvy.

Lacan had taught the primacy of the Other in the order of truth and the order of .

Weight: 420g
Dimension: 232 x 155 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780745682457