Lacan “officially announced” that his topology thinking didn’t start until Seminar IX, but he actually began much earlier — even in the first few seminars, where he introduced his famous L-schema model of the analytical session, there are twists, flips, and turns. And, most tellingly, his early essay on Logical Time used the most famous example of the induction puzzle, the dilemma of three subjects who cannot see something on their backs or foreheads but must discover the truth collectively by realizing that the rules of the game had been defective. To connect this to topology, we would have to include colletif in our list of search terms and examine each context of each appearance.

Historicists have tried to tackle Lacan by dividing him up into recognizable chunks. “When did Lacan talk about extimité?” is a good example. Everybody knows the answer … Seminar VII!!!! Although J.-A. Miller can’t remember whether it was mentioned two or three times, even though he edited the text himself, he is confident that the inside-out idea didn’t occur to Lacan before 1959 and disappeared thereafter. This despite the fact that Seminar XVII is called L’envers de psychanalyse (1969). “L’envers” is not just “the other side,” as Grigg translated it, but what we get if we turn something inside out, and something even more revealing if we think of the line between inside and outside is an inversion circle. Lacan reveals that he knows what he is doing when he draws a PICTURE of the RSI transformed into its inverse in his lecture, “Le troisième.” (Iraj Ghoochani gets the credit for noticing this in “Le troisième.”)

In other words, the historicist picture wants to be clean and neat, but Lacan’s topological vocabulary (I argue) is evenly distributed across the full range of his long career. This is particularly evident once we realize the relation of inversion geometry and the induction puzzle to the functions of the (double) frame. You can google these terms to see what I mean.

The historicists find this disruptive, since they cannot adjust to the different points of view Lacan takes on topological relations. Topology is one thing for the L-schema, another thing for lalangue. It’s WE who should have to adjust to Lacan. It is thus WE who must contest the historicist view and assert that there is no neat division between the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real, which has been used as the classic model dividing his work.

The historicists are like Cæsar, who divided Gaul into three parts before he conquered it. But, what about the après coup, the Nachträglichkeit that requires us to fold time over on itself? This is so fundamental to the signifier and the subject’s realization of the “inverted message” of the Unconscious, how can we limit it to any one position in Lacan’s thinking? Isn’t it also critical to the death drive, where we fashion aggression precisely so that we will be, in the future anterior, humiliated?

I would appreciate your help with this project. I am making a list of search terms as a census of the seminars and related writings (L’étourdit, le Troisième). I have to use French rather than English versions because Gallagher and other translators seem to wish to ignore or repress evidence that Lacan’s topological thinking was evenly distributed. Thus, the search will necessarily involve the Staferla texts.

This is a “starter” list. I need help to make it more representative. Whatever it becomes, it will always only be an approximation. It’s not just individual words but whole lines of argument that have a topological connection. The problem is worse for inversion geometry, which involves things like symmetrical difference and twists. It is much worse for the induction puzzle, which is never mentioned literally but is present as a structure, as in the case of Lacan’s essay on Logical Time. The final result will, necessarily, be only an approximation to prove the point, that the even distribution of topology terms justifies a new way of reading Lacan, with the same “evenly distributed attention” that Freud insisted was essential for the psychoanalytical ear (Gleichswebende Aufmerksamkeit). This is like squinting to see the true form of things. You have to reduce the truth in order to see it properly.

Let this idea roll around in your head for a little and allow something to “pop up unexpectedly.” Any one term you think of will help, especially if you know the French word and some context.

Read: “Moving from the Knowledge/Truth Analogy to the Torus, or … Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Topology but Were Afraid to Ask Lacan,” or the shorter “Sample Distribution of Terms Related to Topology, Inversive Geometry, and Induction Puzzles.”

Here’s the list so far (French search terms on the left) …