The Non-Existent Seminar. Part 1. Jacques-Alain Miller.



Source: The Symptom

There is a simple way to present Jacques-Alain Miller, to call him Jacques-Alain Miller.  This name will be presented as a proper noun, that is as a proper name.

We are dealing here with a seminar by Lacan which does not exist.  There is an advantage in presenting a seminar that does not exist: nobody would be able to tell me afterwards that I have not talked about this or that.  The commentary will be necessarily complete.

Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis

Why can we say that there is a Lacan’s seminar that does not exist?  Because we have the name of the seminar, “The Names of the Father,” and as we have the name of the seminar, however we can say that there is no seminar of Lacan that corresponds to this name.  The fact that there is a name allows us to say that there is no corresponding seminar to this name.

The name “The Names of the Father’,” the title, was announced by Lacan in 1963 for the academic year 1963-1964.  We know that Lacan delivered the first lesson of this seminar and then came to a halt: silence …  Thus the title, the name “The Names of the Father,” remained as an empty reference.

I recall that I wanted to publish this only lesson, the first lesson of the non-existent seminar, within his Seminar XI The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, which is the seminar that Lacan began in 1964, after the interruption of that of “The Names of the Father.”  I proposed Lacan to include this lesson as prefacing the volume.  First he said yes, and next morning he called me and said that he had changed his mind: “No.”  So, the opening lesson has not been published, at least by me, ever since.  I think we should do it now.

Thus, “The Names of the Father,” the seminar for that title, was a hole in Lacan’s teaching.  I think Lacan liked that the series of his seminars had a hole, a lack, as a proof that you are not going to know everything.  And, over the years, he clearly had a great pleasure in interpreting that hole.  He used to say—and this is found in his seminars as well as in Écrits: “It is not by chance that I could not do my seminar on the Names of the Father.”

He regarded the fact that he couldn’t deliver the seminar on The Names of the Father as belonging to the realm of the impossible: “It is not by chance,” there is a need at work, that perhaps renders it impossible.  As if—we could venture into the “as if” raised by this hole—to meddle with the Name-of-the-Father in psychoanalysis was still impossible, as if the Name-of-the-Father should remain under a veil, as if those who dare to interfere with the Name-of-the-Father were doomed to some act of vengeance, as if some kind of curse was attached to the Name-of-the-Father, the curse of the Pharaoh.

Sometimes Lacan also said something else: “I will never say what might have been said about The Names of the Father because they don’t deserve it (ils ne le méritent pas!) and they will never know it!”  Sometimes he was a Pharaoh himself prone to retaliation…

So in this way, this curious object, “The inexistent seminar”—which mimics a title by Italo Calvino—seems to point to the fact that Lacan had in mind to take with him to the grave the secret of The Names of the Father, becoming the Pharaoh himself lying in the pyramid that protects the secret of “The Names of the Father.”  What secret?  Because we must first ascertain if there is a secret.  The secret would be what the very title of the seminar declares.  The secret is evident in the title itself, as evident as the purloined letter.  It can be read as if the whole seminar was in its title: the secret is that there is no Name-of-the-Father, that the name as such, as singular, as unique, the name as absolute, does not exist.  So, the secret would be that the grave of the father—of the father in the singular—is empty.

Lacan somehow comments on this in Écrits, in “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” that “Moses’ tomb is as empty for Freud as Christ’s was for Hegel.”  He then concludes: “Abraham revealed his mystery to neither of them.”  In similar fashion Lacan refrained from revealing his mystery to us, he didn’t want to.  In this regard Lacan positions Freud and Hegel on the same side and makes fun of both: there is something of the father they have not understood!  Whereas it is possible that Kierkegaard—who devoted a long essay to Abraham’s sacrifice—understood.  It is chiefly the father who makes off with the secret, who assumes the secret of life and goes down with such a secret, with the ultimate answer that is always locked for the subject.

There is a clinical case in which, in a dream, the subject keeps sucking a lock.  And here we are with “The Names of the Father” sucking the lock, the lock Lacan left behind.  And if we would have ask him why he hasn’t told us the secret, in all probability he would have responded as in the history of the Freudian cauldron: “I didn’t reveal the secret of ‘The Names of the Father,’ firstly because this secret cannot be said, secondly because I have been kept from saying it and, thirdly, because I didn’t want to say it, and I wouldn’t have been able to say it because I don’t know it.”

This would be the introduction of the inexistent seminar.  I’ll proceed with the story and the structure.
But first I would like to remind you that the issue between the Name-of-the-Father and “The Names of the Father” has always been for Lacan a clinical question.  And it seems appropriate to refer them to “The Function and Field of Speech of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” where I think this the first written occurrence of the term “the name of the father.”  Lacan doesn’t write it as we usually do, with capital N and capital F, but all lowercase and in italics.

And this essay, when he first introduces the term, he wishes to emphasize that the recognition of the name of the father, i.e. the distinction between the symbolic father, the imaginary father and the real father, implies a strong impact on the actual direction of the treatment.  He  says: “This conception allows us to clearly distinguish, in the analysis of a case, the unconscious effects of this function from the narcissistic relations, or even real relations, that the subject has with the image and actions of the person who embodies this function; this results in a mode of comprehension that has repercussions on the very way in which interventions are made by the analyst.  Practice has confirmed the fecundity of this conception to me, as well as to the students whom I have introduced to this method.  And, both in supervision and case discussions, I have often have occasion to stress the harmful confusion produced by neglecting it.”

Distinctly, it presents the Name-the-Father as the principle of the method, the clinical method, and as a decisive factor in the direction of the treatment which he claims to have verified both in his own practice and in supervision.  This implies that the studying of the impact of the Name-the-Father in clinical cases appears in Lacan from the outset.

Now I will, among other texts—as an a anecdote of the inexistent seminar—refer, for example, to “Science and Truth,” where Lacan says, ”I am inconsolable at having had to drop my project of relating the function of the Name-of-the-Father to the study of the Bible”.  And in a footnote he refers: “We put on hold the seminar we had announced for 1963-64 on the Name-of-the Father, after having given the opening lecture (November 63).”

It is notable that he says “the Name-of-the-Father” in singular when, obviously, this is the Name-of-the-Father in plural.  It is fun to see how the same French edition writes the Name-of-the-Father in singular, when, in fact, he had announced it as “The Names of the Father.”  This can be interpreted.

The hole preserves the memory of the obstacle met by Lacan himself, precisely at the moment of the final showdown with the International Psychoanalytic Association.  On November 19, 1963 the name of Lacan is crossed out, deleted from the list of training analysts, by his colleagues of the French Committee of Training Analysts, according to the decree of the IPA.  And the next day, November 20, Lacan gives the opening lecture of his seminar “The Names of the Father” stating that this seminar would stop at the end of the lesson.  He also declared of having received the news the night before…  There are several stories about that moment.

There is a certain curse that befell on the five signatories of the decree.  I will not detail the life of each of them, but it seems that none of them really approved the act.  Recently one of these persons made known to us how he had signed that effacement: almost by mistake…

So, he gives the first lesson,  stops and leaves Sainte-Anne.  Althusser and Ferdinand Braudel soon pick him up and invites him to continue at the École Normale Supérieure, and there Lacan begins the seminar on the Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis.  Personally there, I listened to Lacan for my very first time on that day in January 1964 when he began the seminar on the Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis, which was published as his eleventh Seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, because that is how the whole audience called it, and is the title we gave the book.

Lacan begins this seminar, as you well know, with an account of his excommunication, as if he had been punished for having soiled the Name-of-the-Father, for questioning the Name-of-the-Father, for impiety; as if the heirs of Freud at the IPA would have punished him for meddling with the father as constructed by Freud, and with Freud himself as the father of psychoanalysis.

There is a substitution.  In place of the seminar ”The Names of the Father” Lacan gives a seminar on the Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis, namely on the concepts of Freud.   One could almost write, why not, the concepts instead of the names, as a substitution, as a metaphor.


Is it not perhaps the same?  Would it not, the seminar on The Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis, just be the seminar “The Names of the Father” unde a different guise?  Although The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis is presented as a epistemologicical study, Lacan quietly continues arguing with Freud and his desire.  And more to the point on his desire of the Father to the extent that the IPA responds to the desire of Freud.  As if Lacan,  as a son, as a small Abraham, though a small and guilty Abraham, a Abraham that would also be Spinoza, should be sacrificed to the wrath of the Father.

For Lacan there is a correspondence between the seminar “The Names of the Father” and the excommunication, as if the story of his life is consistent with the structure of the psychoanalytic movement, as if the crossing out of his name, the bar on the name of Lacan concurs with the bar he puts on the Name-of-the-Father, as if the crossing out of his own name is reciprocated by his barring on “The Names of the Father.”

Now let’s go back to the following point: the metaphor of the name.

Alongside with the epistemological investigation of The Four Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan continues his enquiry on Freud’s desire.  He tries to locate what has not been yet analyzed of Freud’s desire, thus submitting to discussion the part that Freud and his desire played in the development of psychoanalysis, be it it in the treatment or in the psychoanalytic movement itself.  In particular, he addresses the role of religion since he intends to bring psychoanalysis to the level of science, while holding that in its current state it still involves a great deal of religion.

And what he says in Seminar XI (in the first lesson, which is titled “Excommunication”) conveys a better understading of this background: “What are the formulae in psychoanalysis concerned with?  What motivates and modulates this ‘sliding-away’ (glissement) of the object?  Are there psycho-analytic concepts that we are now in possession of?  How were we to understand the almost religious maintenance of the terms proposed by Freud to structure the analytic experience?  Was Freud really the first, and did he really remain the only theoretician of this supposed science to have introduced fundamental concepts?  Were this so, it would be very unusual in the history of the sciences.  Without this trunk, this mast, this pile, where can our practice be moored?  Can we even say that what we are dealing with are concepts in the strict sense?  Are they concepts in the process of formation?  Are they concepts in the process of development, in movement, to be revised at a later date?”

This goes beyond the correction, the purification of our understanding of Freudian concepts.  This goes beyond the common interpretation of “the return to Freud” as a return to the source, to the authenticity of his teaching.  Lacan intends to move from a type of psychoanalysis that invests a religious respect onFreud’s set of notions, namely Freud’s expressions, the concepts he formulated, to a scientific use of the concept.

Unconscious, repetition, transference, drive: we owe these names to Freud.  And these four concepts are the Names of the Father.  In the same way Gracián could enumerate the names of God, in the same way those names could be registered (love, justice, charity, purity), we say, unconscious, repetition, transference, drive.
At precisely that point Lacan starts, with determination, to move from the concepts to the mathemes, to replace Freud’s Names of the Father with the mathemes, which are Lacan’s.  Sothat, while he is replacing the concepts with names, he is actually preparing to substitute the concepts with mathemes: he is negotiating the substitution of Freud himself.

We can also locate the first substitution, that of the Name with the Name.

The transition is from the singular to the plural.  How can this be interpreted?

To begin with, there is more than one.  But the fact that there is more than one changes everything, because we go from the one to the many, and the effect is clearly a relativization of the Name-of-the-Father.  It is not absolute but relative; it implies the idea that there is a Name-of-the-Father and another and another and so on.  That is, a kind of paganism, just what is prohibited by the God of Israel, who wanted to be partnerless and had no desire for a newcomer who would utter “Me too,” which clearly creates a problem of territorialization that has been going on forever…  Instead of being one, it means to be “one amongst others.”  I must say that it involves the castration of the God of Israel, the castration of God who in this way enters into a series.

But it also means that for Lacan, even if one believes that when the Name-of-Father is uttered the father is the only Name-of-the-Father capable of bearing the Name-the-Father, the father is a name “Name-of-the-Father” among others.  That The Woman, for example, The Woman may be a Name-of-the-Father too.
In this way he introduces two meanings for the father.  The Name-of-the-Father is only the name of a function.  This means that the Name-of-the-Father can be written as a function: NP (x), introducing in each case, in each clinical case, the question of what is that has been functioning for the subject as Name-of-the-Father.

Making from the singular to the plural implies proceeding from religion to science; this may be a prelude of the passage from religion to science.

Dealing with the name of God is a religious issue.  We don’t need to accumulate much evidence to support this: “Thou shall not take my name in vain,” indeed, in Judaism the name is the name we don’t know how to utter  Not knowing protects the name itself, that is to say that the name is protected by an encrypted internal secret, an essential cyphering, a silent signifier, a letter that no one knows or that no one is allowed to pronounce.

Every time Lacan refers to the Name-of-the-Father, he refers to the tradition that the Name-of-the-Father itself upholds.  This connection corroborates that the Name-of-the-Father was not invented by psychoanalysis, but that it is a legacy of a culture among other human cultures.  Roman Catholicism speaks of God as a father, the Father par excellence.

We also find in religion an issue with the names of God—I’ve already mentioned Gracián—where the attributes of God are sought, the names designating His essential qualities, and all this revolves around an essential unity.  Whereas with the pluralization of the Names of the Father—but not with a subordinate multiplicity surrounding the unicity of the name of God—when Lacan speaks of the Names of the Father, there is only a plurality surrounding a function.

Here we find a transition from religion to logics which implies that the Name-of-the-Father is a function that can be supported by various elements playing the role of the Name-of-the-Father; also the Name-of-the-Father, as was previously utilized and as Lacan himself did, is not the final answer.

This objection was persistently addressed by Lacan against himself, I read it with the expression “Lacan against Lacan.”  The development of Lacan’s teaching consists in contradicting, in continually objecting anything he said before.  Well, this is clearly the case.  The nonexistent seminar “The Names of the Father” is the objection made to the paternal metaphor and it also refers this metaphor as the basis for further reflection.
In the paternal metaphor the Name-of-the-Father performs the function of metaphorizing the Desire of the Mother.  But the Name-of-the-Father is already the metaphor of the father.

We write the Name-of-the-Father as the metaphorizing agent of the Desire of the Mother like this:

But we should remember that this Name-of-the-Father is, above all, the metaphor of the presence of the father.

The Name-of-the-Father works very well in the absence of the father and subsequently Lacan criticizes the theory of the lack of the father.  But the Name-of-the-Father makes the father himself absent.  The function of the Name-of-the Father makes the father absent because in the Name-of-the-Father we deal with—and this belongs to most popular Lacan—the father as spoken by the mother, that is, as a being of language.

This means that the Name-of-the Father exists in absence, it exists as something that is murdered by the signifier, as a subject, a topic, a reference of the discourse of the mother, as an empty reference.  To begin with, the Name-of-the-Father is the father metaphorized by the discourse of the mother and as such it is dead, killed by that same discourse.

As those who are bereft of father, whom never knew their father, the Name-of-the-Father has, in this case, acquired an even stronger force since it was unable to compare the Name-of-the-Father with the dejected husband of the mother.  As we see in analysis, they suffer not so much of the lack but of the presence since the paternal ideal holds extreme weight: they suffer of the Name-of-the-Father.  Sometimes there is a great relief in finding out that all this was a fabrication of the maternal myth.  The fall of the Name-of-the-Father as the support of the Ideal may indeed bring great solace.

Thus, in Lacan, the concept of the Name-of-the-Father links the Freudian Oedipus complex to the myth of Totem and Taboo in the paternal metaphor.  They fit together in a very elegant way, the Oedipus complex, the myth of Totem and Taboo—as far as it introduces the father as a deadfather—and the castration complex.  The strength of the paternal metaphor resides in uniting these three aspects of Freud’s teaching.


At the same time, the Name-of-the-Father is an element of the general theory of the name, linguistics and mathematical logic; it belongs to the general theory of proper names.  So that would it would have been possible to present “The Names of the Father”—I’ve thought about it—first as a theory of proper names and, second, as a theory of the father.