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The Letter, Issue 42, Autumn 2009, Pages 109 - 126 SAINT PAUL AND FREUD: THE DENIAL OF THE SOVEREIGN GOOD IN LACAN’S SEMINAR VII [1] Daragh Howard In Seminar VII, Lacan makes the claim that Saint Paul and Freud tell us the same thing about the Sovereign Good in that what they each articulate about the law and pleasure constitutes a denial of the notion posited in traditional ethics that a relationship of complementarity exists between pleasure and this Sovereign Good. The author demonstrates that that this denial corresponds with Lacan’s own thesis in the seminar, which involves the idea that the moral law affirms itself in opposition to pleasure, and Lacan’s critique of such a relationship is presented in terms of the moral tradition failing to recognise the nature of the object upon which pleasure truly depends. We may reject the existence of an original, as it were natural, capacity to distinguish good from bad. What is bad is often not at all what is injurious or dangerous to the ego; on the contrary, it may be something that is desirable and enjoyable to the ego. Here, therefore, there is an extraneous influence at work, and it is this that decides what is to be called good and bad (Sigmund Freud). [2]

The Letter, Issue 42, Autumn 2009, Pages 57 - 108 KANT WITH SADE: A SCHOLION [1] Tony Hughes This scholion accompanies Lacan’s 1962 text in which he brings together of two very unlikely accomplices, Kant and Sade, and thereby sheds light on the nature of perversion. At first blush the two thinkers appear not to be drinking from the same well, but the author’s traversing the intricacies of thought wrought by Lacan in relation to The Critique of Practical Reason and Philosophy in the Bedroom provides the insight that the perverse phantasy of Sade has its basis in the universal maxim of Kant. Jouissance is said to be on the side of perpetrator and victim, although it isexperienced in different trajectories. The author concludes with Lacan that Sade was not a true pervert, despite popular views to the contrary. SECTION A Rectification of the Ethical Position of Two Thousand Years 1. Lacan opens his text by referring to the statement made by Jean Paulhan of the Académie Française in his work The Marquis de Sade and His Accomplice which stated that: Reiterating them through ten volumes and supporting them with a thousand examples, a Krafft-Ebing was to consecrate the categories and distinctions the Divine Marquis traced. Later, a Freud was to adopt Sade's very method and principle. There has not, I think, been any other example in our Letters, of a few novels providing the basis, fifty years after their publication, for a whole science of man. [2] Lacan said quite bluntly that this was a stupidity.

The Letter, Issue 42, Autumn 2009, Pages 21 - 56 KANT WITH SADE [1] Jacques Lacan This essay was to have served as a preface to Philosophy in the Boudoir. [2] It appeared in the review Critique (191, April, 1963) in the manner of a review of the edition of the works of Sade for which it was destined: Éd. du Cercle du livre précieux , 1963, 15 vol. SECTION A Rectification of the Ethical Position of Two Thousand Years 1. (765) [3] To say that the work of Sade anticipates Freud, even as a catalogue of perversions, is a stupidity repeated in the literature, thanks, as usual, to the specialists. 2. On the other hand, we do hold that the Sadean boudoir is the equal of those loci that lent their name to the schools of ancient philosophy: e.g., Academy, Lyceum, Stoa. Here as there, one prepares the way for scientific knowledge by rectifying any ethical position. Thereby, yes indeed, a clarification took place that was to make its way for a hundred years in the depths of cultural taste in order that Freud‟s way might be possible. Add another sixty years before one can say why.

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The Letter, Issue 41, Summer 2009, Pages  127 - 131 Response to Tom Dalzell Christian Fierens Christian Fierens argues in this paper against understanding Lacan's exception as a transcendental reality and, preferring L'Etourdit's topological approach to Lacan's geometric one in 1958, he contends that Schreber was right to foreclose the exception since “Schema I” is the truth of “Schema R”. Keywords: L'Etourdit; exception; Name-of-the-Father; topology; phallus First of all, we must consider how we think. It always difficult to get rid of “transcendental realism”: we too easily consider that when we say “there exists an x not phi of x”, then there exists in reality “an x not phi of x”; in a similar way, when we are speaking about a “psychotic”, we consider that the psychosis exists as the reality of this person. To consider that there exists an exception or that there exists a psychotic as a reality independently of our thinking (and that we afterwards come to think about it) is already to give to this reality a power which undermines all our thinking.

The Letter, Issue 41, Summer 2009, Pages  115 - 127 Schreber in L’Etourdit Tom Dalzell This article examines Lacan's interpreting Schreber in terms of the “not all” of the formulae of sexuation. It demonstrates how a substitution of the exception and the masculine universal for the missing Name-of-the-Father and phallic signifier in “Schema I” sheds light on Schreber's “push-to-the- woman” and absence of phallic sense, but it also argues that Lacan did not equate the questioning of the exception in femininity with its foreclosure in psychosis. Keywords: Schreber; L'Etourdit; foreclosure; exception; phallic sense Introduction Having spent a year speaking about Schreber in his third seminar (1955- 1956) and developed his thinking there in “D'une question préliminaire” (1958), Lacan returns to Schreber in his enigmatic 1973 text, L'Etourdit.[ 1] He had already been speaking about there being “no sexual relationship” (“il n‟y a pas de rapport sexuel”) in “D'un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant” (1971), “...Ou pire” (1971-1972) and “Le savoir du psych- analyste” (1971-1972).[ 2] There he was seeking to move beyond binary biblical and philosophical conceptions of the relationship between men and women and - by means of logic - beginning to explain their lack of complementarity in terms of their different relations to the phallic function. While there might have been an “all men” who were subject to castration or the phallic function, there was no “all women”, since, on the feminine side, the phallic function was valid for “not all” of x. L'Etourdit takes Lacan's thinking on this “not-all” further.

The Letter, Issue 41, Summer 2009, Pages  97 - 114 Saying, the Said, Signification and Meaning in L’Etourdit Tony Hughes One of the levels of complexity which is found in L'Etourdit arises because Lacan distinguishes between “what is said”, “what is heard”, and “saying”. It is necessary to be aware of the differentiation he makes and the implication this has for signification. This paper shows how these issues affect interpretation within the clinic of psychoanalysis which relies on the movement of the four discourses. Keywords: said; saying; heard; signification; four discourses Introduction L'Etourdit makes important distinctions between saying, what is said, signification, and meaning. I hope to show how they differ from each other, as this is essential when trying to understand some of the complexities of this challenging text of Lacan. I am relying of the interpretation by Christian Fierens which is found in his excellent book Lecture de L'Etourdit, [1] and of which Cormac Gallagher has, thus far, translated the first four chapters into English. I will be focusing on the work contained in the first six pages of L'Etourdit. These pages are commented upon by Fierens in the first two chapters of his book - “Relationship of Signification to Meaning” and “Freud's Saying”. I have included, by way of appendix, the four discourses, set out in the three different ways in which they can be utilised - clockwise, anti-clockwise and inverse directions - as this may help in following some of the comments made.

The Letter, Issue 41, Summer 2009, Pages  79 - 95 The Vas Difference On Traversing the First Loop of L’Etourdit... Patricia McCarthy This article suggests that in L'Etourdit, the neologism “Vas” has a resonance for Lacan which returns us to the vase of the optical schema. By means of a drawing, an attempt is made to drape this vase with the logical accoutrements of the phallic function and the four formulae. As an example of “ab-sens”, working with “Vas” allows us take seriously Lacan‟s urging to locate the sphere of action of the analytic discourse. Keywords: Vas; optical schema; logic of the signifier; analytic discourse; ab-sens; phallic function This paper expands on my presentation at the study day of one of the cartels of The Irish School for Lacanian Psychoanalysis, ISLP. Held on May 9th 2009, the study day came of our attempt in the preceding academic session to traverse - not read, not make sense of, literally traverse in the sense of traversing very difficult terrain - the first half of Lacan's L'Etourdit. This text of Lacan's with its purposeful neologistic style, a text which according to Melman has “no imaginative grounding” has been likened to Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Trying to produce a paper out of it? Well, it's like wrestling with a giant octopus[ 1] where once one tentacle of thought has been subdued another comes to wrap itself round you! Approach with extreme caution and with a guide for company. The guide I would recommend has to be Christian Fierens' Lecture de L'Etourdit in much the same way John Bishop's Joyce's Book of the Dark might be considered the guide to Finnegans Wake. And yes, Fierens guided us also at our study day as, of course did the other contributors, Tom Dalzell, Cormac Gallagher, Tony Hughes and fellow members of ISLP.

The Letter, Issue 41, Summer 2009, Pages 31 - 77 “L’Etourdit”, Scilicet 4 (1973) pp. 5-52 Jacques Lacan Trans. C. Gallagher FIRST TURN: THE SIGNIFIER AND THE ABSENCE OF SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP (5, 449) In contributing to the 50th anniversary of L'hôpital Henri-Rousselle for the favour that my friends and I have received there in a work concerning which I will indicate what it has been able to do, namely go beyond presentation, I pay homage to Dr. Daumézon who allowed me to do it. What follows, as is my custom, does not prejudge anything about the interest that was taken in it by those to whom it was addressed: my saying (mon dire) at Sainte-Anne was a vacuole just like at Henri-Rousselle, and, just imagine, for almost the same time, preserving in any case the price of this letter that I say always arrives where it ought. 1 RELATIONSHIP OF MEANING TO SENSE I start from morsels, not philosophical ones to be sure, since they are scraps from my seminar of this year (at Paris-1). "I wrote on two occasions on the board there (and a third time in Milan where on my travels I made it into a headline for a news-flash on "the psychoanalytic discourse‟) these two sentences: That one might be saying (Qu'on dise) remains forgotten behind what is said in what is heard. This enunciation which appears to be an assertion since it is produced in a universal form, is in fact modal, existential as such: the subjunctive by which its subject is modulated, testifying to this. If the welcome that responds to me from my audience is enough for the term "seminar‟ to be not too unworthy for what I contribute there in terms of speech, had not enticed me away from these sentences, I would have wished from their relationship of signification (rapport de signification) to demonstrate the sense (sens) they take on from psychoanalytic discourse.

The Letter, Issue 41, Summer 2009, Pages 19 - 29 Introduction to L'Etourdit Christian Fierens The following is an extract from Christian Fierens' 2002 book, Lecture de L'Etourdit. Lacan 1972 (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2002), translated here into English by Cormac Gallagher. Keywords: Lacan; L'Etourdit; saying; meaning; formulae of sexuation Preface Is it readable? As a writer Lacan's whole life could be summarised by the wish “in the end to be properly read” ( Lituraterre , Autres écrits , p. 13). Far from being material for a simple reading, the Ecrits of 1966 and a fortiori the Autres ecrits , published in 2001, should be deciphered as rebuses. In that, they fall into step with what is reserved for the dream in the Freudian Traumdeutung . There each fragment - obscure or not - is supposed to be subjected to the work of speech, of association and of the saying, in the belief that a sense might appear. But in decrypting the Ecrits , is one reading them properly? In the course of a six year long seminar aimed at interpreting Lacan's writing from A to Z, one text appeared particularly obscure and enigmatic to me: L ' Etourdit resisted decipherment. I promised myself to make an index of the obscurities of the text and to work on them one by one. In the course of this explanatory unpacking, the index expanded with new obscurities unperceived or minimised during the first reading: obscurity slipped into the texture of the illumination. Was I going to be plunged paradoxically into the darkness of a text closing in on itself in a terminal hermeticism?

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The Letter, Issue 40, Spring 2009, Pages 83 - 91 Schreber’s Lack of Lack [1] Charles Melman This paper deals with the problematic relation in psychosis to what Lacan calls “the big Other”. Referring to contemporary clinical examples, it argues that the world’s loss of meaning in Schreber was due to a lack of the lack that causes desire and that this was precipitated when he had no Name- of-the-Father to which to refer himself and he lost his subjective domicile in the locus of that lack, the big Other. Keywords: psychosis; Name-of the-Father; lack; Other; Schreber Thank you for your invitation. I would like to compliment Jane, Helen and Barry for their very interesting remarks, and I will try to add a few elements. I think first of all that the Irish know in their very bones what the Name- of-the-Father is - the father is above all a name, a signifier. It is Irish (sic). The Irish know how the lack of this signifier did not allow them to be recognised in the field of reality, put men in the position of being emasculated and women of not being honoured, and how they were obliged to repress their original tongue. The Name-of-the-Father, as we shall see presently, always has essential consequences, and in particular in this precise case to people or fill the unconscious with a whole language, a whole tongue, not of repressed elements, but a positive language that has been given to us. And that situation has many consequences because, at the same time, the place of the Other is no longer Other, but is inhabited by our ancestors and, as we know, it is from that place that we receive our own message. So then if the Other is not a foreign language or an original tongue, what is it? We encounter the dimension of the Other every time we lie on a couch and begin to speak.

The Letter, Issue 40, Spring 2009, Pages 69 - 82 Bleuler, Freud and Jung on Dementia Praecox (Schizophrenia) in 1908 [1] Bernhard Küchenhoff This paper demonstrates what Bleuler, Freud and Jung had in common in 1908, but it also highlights their theoretical differences in relation to the aetiology of dementia praecox or what Bleuler that year called the “schizophrenias ”. It also reveals that both Bleuler and Freud had questions about Jung ’s diagnosing dementia praecox in Otto Gross and it points out that Freud held Jung responsiblefor Bleuler’s distancing himselffrom the psychoanalytic movement. Keywords: Bleuler; Freud; Jung; Schizophrenia; Gross The term “Schizophrenia” was first mentioned by the Swiss psychiatrist, Eugen Bleuler, in 1908. I will concentrate on that year, 1908, in which we find condensed the common interests and fractured relationships between three figures: Bleuler, Freud and Jung, who were so important for the development of psychiatry and psychotherapy. I will focus my remarks on two crystallising points which illustrate the tensions between Bleuler, Freud and Jung: firstly, the discussion about dementia praecox or schizophrenia as a diagnosis and, secondly, the turbulence about Otto Gross in which the question of a diagnosis of dementia praecox played an equally important role.

The Letter, Issue 40, Spring 2009, Pages 59 - 67 Foreclosure and Discordance: Is Schizophrenia Thinkable? [1] Christian Fierens This article argues that schizophrenia, as the illness of the psychical system in its generality, can only be approached by posing the preliminary question: ‘‘what is association?”. If one thinks in terms o f a logic of the “excluded third”, schizophrenia seems to be excluded from the field of psychoanalysis. But the author maintains that thinking in terms of a logic of the “included third” is not only coherent with psychoanalysis, but results in what is said schizophrenically supporting the discourse of the analyst. Keywords: foreclosure; discordance; schizophrenia; topology; logic In his major work Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias (1911), [2] Eugen Bleuler replaces “dementia praecox” with the group of “schizophrenias”. The main characteristic of the illness in question would no longer be either dementia or precociousness, but a splitting of the mind or a disturbance of associations. The invention of the term “schizophrenia” does much more, however, than rename a specific mental illness, for Bleuler speaks about the “group” of “schizophrenias” in the plural. What is the principle of this regrouping? Firstly, most of the symptoms which attracted the attention of the psychiatrists before Bleuler, namely hallucinations and delusions etc., are only complications of the illness, or only accessory and secondary symptoms. Secondly, unless there is a complication, the principal classical functions of the psyche remain intact: no disturbance of sensibility, no disturbance of memory, no disturbance of consciousness, no disturbance of motor functions. [3] What remains then to characterize uncomplicated schizophrenia or simple schizophrenia? Could it be an illness without symptoms, an “un-triggered” illness?