MARGINALIA ON THE 575

SEMINAR ON DESIRE

Some useful references,

along with associations that came to mind
by Jacques-Alain Miller.

I Constructing the Graph

4. Fairbairn
Nowadays, when you come across a name like Fairbairn that you do
not know, you look it up on Wikipedia and you find a solid article
which, even to someone like me who knew him, is informative. There
is a photo of him in uniform, but my impression is that it must be
of someone who has the same name as him, the Lieut. Col. William
E. Fairbairn [the photo has since been taken down]. In this case, I
will simply provide the Wikipedia article [Miller provides the article
found at https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ronald_Dodds_
Fairbairn; the English-language Wikipedia site is far more extensive.]
After the entry, references are provided. His Psychoanalytic 576
Studies of the Personality was published in 1952 by Tavistock and
republished in paperback* in 1994 (under the Routledge imprint in
the United States and Canada).

6. Roses and lilies [Les roses et /es lys]

Do a Google search for these words and you find a Wikipedia article
about a song written in honor of Henry IV. The song is entitled Vive
Henri IV! and is said to have been "long popular in France." In the
second stanza, added in 1770, one finds the following simplistic
verses:

Comme nos peres

Chantons en vrais amis
 490 Appendix
Au choc des verres
Les roses et !es lys.

[Let us sing - as true friends, just like our fathers did, clinking our
glasses- to roses and lilies.]
What sorts of examples can we find of what Lacan calls "figura­
tive poetry"? The simplest are the Blasons du corps feminin.

6. John Donne
Your turn to look up Donne. I could write at length about the man
and his work. At Janson-de-Silly high school, I had an excellent
English teacher by the name of Kerst, who wrote some fine text­
books. He had no compunction about making us read, translate,
and comment on a poem by Donne entitled The Flea, one of the fun­
niest and most erotic poems I have ever read. That gave me a taste
for Donne and he remains my favorite English poet. When I met
Lacan, I was happy that he knew and liked Donne's work. The fact
that Lacan's theory accounts for what I had always experienced -
namely, the strong libidinal content of signifying subtleties - played
an important role in rallying me to his ideas. I very much admired
Jean Fuzier's translation of Donne's poems into French.

577 6. The physical theory of love as opposed to the ecstatic theory of

love
Here Lacan follows the work of Pierre Rousselot, Pour l'Histoire
du probleme de /'amour au Moyen Age [The Problem of Love in the
Middle Ages: A Historical Contribution (Milwaukee WI: Marquette
University Press, 2002)], Rousselot having invented this distinction.
Those who believe in the physical - that is, natural - conception of
love base love on "the natural propensity beings have to seek their
own good." Those who believe in the ecstatic conception of love
juxtapose love for others with selfish inclinations; to their way of
thinking, the more love places the subject "outside of himself," the
more closely it corresponds to its concept.
Rousselot was a Jesuit and was Henri de Lubac's teacher. I heard
about Rousselot's work through Lacan, but I already knew Lubac
from his Drame de /'humanisme athee ["Drama (or Tragedy) of
Atheistic Humanism"]. Fran�ois Regnault had me read his treatise
on the four meanings of the Scriptures, and gave me Lubac's La
Posterite spirituelle de Joachim de Fiore [Paris: Editions du Cerf,
2014 (1979-81)] for my birthday. Such admirable scholars! The
tragedy of my own atheistic humanism is that I do not appeal to
Jesuits. They flocked to Lacan but have deserted me, holding me
responsible for Lacan's drift toward logic. Gentlemen, this is a false
 Marginalia on the Seminar on Desire 491
and absurd notion, rotten to the core, but as Andre Maurois, who is
quoted in the Robert dictionary under the heading/aux [false], once
said, "nothing is more difficult to refute than what is completely
false."

7-8. Aristotle on brutishness [or: beastiality]; Spinoza and desire;

Lalande's Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie [a
dictionary]
Look them up yourselves! "Charming Lalande" suggests that Lacan
knew him. I know nothing about it. And in my day, people did not
read his dictionary.

9. Rauh and Revault d'Allonnes

Check them out yourself.

11. The stimulus-response cycle

People spent a lot of time thinking about this back then. Someone
could write a book on its history, and perhaps has already done
so. There is, in any case, a well-known book by Canguilhem, La
Formation du concept de reflexe aux XVII• et XVJIJe siec/es (Paris: 578
PUF, 1955; it was republished by Vrin in Paris in 1994). Regarding
the reflex arc in Lacan's work, one should at least be familiar with
(1) Der Aujbau des Organismus, by Kurt Goldstein [The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1934; The Organism: A Holistic Approach to
Biology Derivedfrom Pathological Data in Man (New York: Zone
Books, 1995)], and (2) Merleau-Ponty's second thesis, The Structure
of Behavior, which was first published by PUF in 1942 [Boston:
Beacon Press, 1963]. Lacan never stopped reformulating his notions
about this.

11. Three is the minimum number of terms

Lacan is thinking of the schema found in The Meaning of Meaning,
by I. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1945 [1923]).

12. The graph

In Lacan's earlier work, see Seminar V where Lacan introduces the
first stage of the graph; in his later work, see the article in which
he finalizes his conception four years later: "The Subversion of the
Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,"
Ecrits, pp. 671-702. As Lacan himself indicates, this article, which
summarized the remarks he made in 1960 at the famous colloquium
in Royaumont which was in theory designed to make his ideas
known outside of the circle of his students, was not published as
 492 Appendix
planned, and was not made �nown to the public OJ'. to myself until
1966 with the publication of Ecrits.

15. Jacques Cazotte's The Devil in Love

The Wikipedia.fr article on Cazotte, who died by the guillotine, is
excellent. Nevertheless, it fails to mention the following: the very fine
text by Nerval on Cazotte in Les Illumines, which one must read; the
preface by Nodier on Cazotte in his edition of the Contes [Tales];
Breton's preface to the 1954 edition of Me/moth ou /'Homme errant
(published by Pauvert); Bastien's 1816-17 edition of the Oeuvres
badines et morals, historiques et philosophiques, which was the first
complete edition of the work with the exception of two brochures
written on the occasion of the Querelle des Boujfons. I was familiar
with Cazotte's work, and had read The Devil in Love, before meeting
579 Lacan, through Nerval, Nodier, and Breton, and through a book
that became very well known by Max Milner, Le Diable dans la
litterature fran9aise, de Cazotte a Baudelaire, 1772-1861, which I
purchased at Corti's bookshop which I would stop by at after school
at Louis-le-Grand. A textbook published by Hatier in 1984 contin­
ued the study from Cazotte to Gracq. Pierre Castex, in his Anthologie
du conte fantastique fran9ais (Paris: Corti, 1963), considers Cazotte
to be "the true inventor of modem fantastical literature." Borges
wrote a preface for the edition of The Devil in Love that came out
in La Bibliotheque de Babel; it is intelligently discussed by Ricardo
Romero Rozas in Jorge Luis Borges et la litteraturefran9aise (Paris:
L'Harmattan, 2011), which I have in the form of an e-book. Many
different editions of The Devil in Love are available today.

16. The "bar"

See Ecrits, pp. 414-17.

17. Hilflosigkeit
On this topic, see Freud's Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, and
Lacan's Seminar X.

18. Urbild
This term is repeatedly found in Lacan's earliest texts and Seminars
devoted to the imaginary in its relations with the symbolic. The
same is true of references to mirror schemas.

19. Man thinks with his soul

This is one of Lacan's favorite sentences. We find this use of the
word "with" in the title of "Kant with Sade." By highlighting
the instrumental nature of the soul, Lacan is fully aligned with
 Marginalia on the Seminar on Desire 493
Aristotle's De anima [On the Soul]. According to Aristotle, the soul
is analogous to the hand (432al ).

20. Darwin 580

Lacan is mistaken in thinking that he read this anecdote in Darwin's
book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. It is
found in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Including an
Autobiographical Chapter, which was edited by his son, Francis
Darwin (London: John Murray, 1887); here is the relevant passage
from volume 1, page 75:

Of other great literary men, I once met Sydney Smith at Dean

Milman's house. There was something inexplicably amusing in
every word which he uttered. Perhaps this was partly due to the
expectation of being amused. He was talking about Lady Cork,
who was then extremely old. This was the lady who, as he said,
was once so much affected by one of his charity sermons, that
she borrowed a guinea from a friend to put in the plate. He now
said "It is generally believed that my dear old friend Lady Cork
has been overlooked," and he said this in such a manner that
no one could for a moment doubt that he meant that his dear
old friend had been overlooked by the devil. How he managed
to express this I know not.

Who was Sydney Smith? "An English wit, writer and Anglican
cleric," according to Wikipedia.org, which provides a fine article
on him. We learn there that he may have been the model for Henry
Tilney, the hero of Northanger Abbey, which is perhaps Jane
Austen's most beautiful novel.

22. Volpone
This is a reference to the play by Ben Jonson, Volpone, or the Fox, a
fox hated by Christine Angot who only liked hedgehogs.
The entire text has been made available online by Project
Gutenberg, and includes the following introduction:

The greatest of English dramatists except Shakespeare, the first

literary dictator and poet-laureate, a writer of verse, prose,
satire, and criticism who most potently of all the men of his
time affected the subsequent course of English letters: such was
Ben Jonson.

I first discovered the play through the film by Maurice Tourneur

made in 1941, starring Harry Baur (as Volpone), Louis Jouvet, and
 494 Appendix

Charles Dullin. I liked the film because the, minor role of Voltore
was played by Jean Temerson, the younger brother of Louis
581 Temerson (known as Bebe), who was a neighbor of mine and had
been wounded in the First World War; he and his wife Juliette
(often called Yeyette) would look after my brother and me when my
parents went out. Bebe's wisdom had a profound influence on me.
He was a serious marcheur [womanizer], as people put it at the time,
and he strongly advised me not to defer experiencing the pleasures
the opposite sex could offer me. It is to him that I owe having under­
stood already at ten years of age the meaning of the expression,
rarely used today, "half-virgin" [demi-vierge]. The Temersons were
Jewish, and acting in a film in 1941 must have been rather compli­
cated for them. When I read the stenography of this Seminar for the
first time, I was enchanted to see that Lacan knew the play.
The article provided by Wikipedia.org is solid. I would like to
have read everything listed under the heading "further readings,"
but the truth is that I have read none of the works included there.

23. The absolute master

This is an allusion to Hegel's master/slave dialectic.

23. "The tribe's words"

This is a reference to Mallarme's verse "donner un sens plus pur aux
mots de la tribu," found in Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe. [In English,
see "The Tomb of Edgar Poe," translated by Peter Manson (Miami,
FL: Miami University Press, 2013):

They, like an upstart hydra hearing the angel once

purify the meaning of tribal words
proclaimed out loud the prophecy drunk
without honour in the tide of some black mixture.]

24. Ear, skin, even the phallus

The pointy leaves of red Romaine lettuce are known in France as
oreilles du diable, "devil's ears.'' The sea, when it is whipped up by
a choppy swell, is described as la peau du diable, "the devil's skin."
The devil's tail [or: dick, queue] figures in the French expression,
tirer le diable par la queue [literally, to pull the devil by the tail; figu­
ratively, to live from hand to mouth].