Lacan Seminars XXIII and XXIV (1975–'77): On love, unknown knowing and the failure that takes flight

Lacan Seminars XXIII and XXIV (1975—‘77 ):  On love, unknown knowing and the failure that takes flight

... and what now?  What to do when the bindings come undone, and there’s no longer any authority to appeal to?  When the symbolic has floated free of the imaginary and the real, Lacan taught, psychoanalysis provides a mending:  the symptom itself.  Refashioned via our practice, the symptom can itself relink the registers, help them to go on, even when—due to whatever mistakes—there’s no longer anything holding them together.

Only the talking cure can fashion a savoir-faire, a know-how or artifice able to endow, as he put it, a remarkable quality to the art of which one is capable.  From the twin poles of the body and language, a real accord; from a babble of tongues, an élan... this art can even, faced with the void of a failed paternity, knot a four-leaf clover out of a broken Trinity.

Only our practice—centered on the equivocity of speech, engaging in, to cite Steiner’s words describing the sinthome of James Joyce, collages of word-play, macaronics or acrostics—opens avenues to the understanding and pleasure derived from that tensed imbalance between the expected and the shock of the new which is itself, at its finest, a shock of recognition, a déja vu... only this practice can take us home to that we didn’t know we knew.

We’ll spend this year in a close line-by-line reading of Lacan’s Seminars XXIII (1975— ‘76):  The Sinthome and XXIV (1976—’77):  L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre in English translation, alongside French versions of the texts.

Sessions consist of reading the seminars aloud for one hour by seminar participants, each consecutive session of Lacan’s seminars corresponding to one meeting, followed by an hour of free association, exploration, analysis and exegesis.

Readings:

Lacan, J.  The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII:  The Sinthome, (2016).  Trans. A.R. Price.  Cambridge, UK:  Polity.

Additional online readings to be assigned.

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Dates and times: online, biweekly Wednesdays 5–7pm Pacific Time, beginning 7 January 2026.

Fee: Free of charge (voluntary donation to LSP encouraged).

Contact: benjamdavidson@me.com.