Reading XIII involves a whirlwind of ideas of no less importance than the seminar’s first “session,” a re-presentation of Lacan’s lecture on “Science and Truth.” With early presentations by André Green and topology, a diversion to Lacan’s punned “Discours de Rome” to his essay in support of lalangue seemed unavoidable.
This page lists notes, treatments, and position papers relation to the project of lalangue, the dreaming butterfly, and whatever else comes up in this spooky seminar.
• Iraj Ghoochani, “The Paradox of Unity: Exploring Existence as a Point with Parts”
• Don Kunze, “Induction Puzzle in XIII, Session 14”
Just as inversion is fundamental to projective geometry, the induction puzzle is foundational for inversion. It provides a comprehensive inventory of actions and spaces related to the “defective instruction” that initiates Lacan’s presentation of the Three Prisoners’ Dilemma in his essay on Logical Time and relates this defect to the self-intersction that occurs between the two frames required by the inside v. outside view and their corresponding observers. This essay begins with a DeepL translation of a passage in Session 14 that is particularly problematic. Lacan cites a puzzle that Viktor Frankl was fond of presenting to his lecture audiences: “Given 12345, what is the smallest number not present.” This is not the best example of the induction puzzle, but Lacan recognizes its provenance and gives this trivial example credit for connecting to the highest truths of psychoanalysis. To sympathize with Lacan’s gesture, we must understand the induction puzzle in terms of its two traditional features: (1) the faulty or flawed instruction, which appears in various forms, and (2) the induction of the detail, which is often trivial, contingent, and easy-to-dismiss to universal implications.
The move from obscure detail to universal consequence is not just what happens here, in this session, when Lacan takes a meagre and hard-to-understand example of the induction puzzle and builds an impressive case for its relation to the most fundamental aspects of the subject and signifier; it’s Lacan using the very thing he intends to define, as if to say that he prefers a demonstration to a presentation. “Don’t do what I say, do what I do” is the eternal lesson of the mi-dire, which itself is a form of the induction puzzle’s lofty goals in the face of incomplete advice.
Our cartel member Claudio Sgarbi enlisted the help of ChatGPT and got this reply: “Lacan’s reference to Guilbaud and Frankel’s “trick 1, 2, 3, 4, 5” and the “smallest number that isn’t written on the board” is a playful but conceptually rich allusion to a classic paradox of definition and representation, especially relevant in psychoanalytic and philosophical discussions of language, absence, and the symbolic order.…”
• Don Kunze, email to the Seminar XIII Cartel, April 19, 2025
“I was trying to think of how the 6 was a part of what was written on the chalkboard, and how this insight might show how Lacan has a better idea of the induction puzzle than Frankl did, when he said it wasn’t written on the board. The problem of course is that, if Frankl or Lacan had written the ‘6’ on the board literally, we would not be talking about this. The 6 is not present in chalk form, but Lacan may be arguing that writing, like the Symbolic, includes things that are not there but present as gaps or contradictions, i.e. that the Real is present in the Symbolic in the form of these ‘non-orientations’ in the same way that the third error is present in the sentence with (apparently) only two errors. Or should I say ‘erors’?”
To read the full, detailed essay, click here.
• Don Kunze and ChatGPT: “The Object of Psychoanalysis: The Jouissance of the Induction Puzzle
After a long absence, I renewed my conversations with ChatGPT with a question about the induction puzzle. In our “cartel,” participants (Claudio Sgarbi, Berrin Terim, Jodi LaCoe, Iraj Ghoochani, and Quinn Foerch) studying Lacan’s Seminar IX, The Object of Psychoanalysis, had run into some hard objects and objections about the induction puzzle. Lacan had introduced one, which he borrowed from (I would speculate) Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist, not from Paul Frankl the furniture designer or Paul Frankel the Program Manager at Mississippi State University. Frankl (misspelled by both Gallagher and the Staferla transcribers) liked to present the following puzzle in his lectures. Writing 1 2 3 4 5 on the chalkboard, he would ask, “What is the smallest number not written on the board?” Lacan gives the “obvious answer,” 6, but then says that this number is actually written, in the 1 2 3 4 5 numbers. How? Lacan explains, but rather obscurely, that writing itself includes gaps and fissures in the same way the Symbolic not so much resists the Real (which it does) but incorporates it, at the level of the signifier, thanks to its metonymic logic.
• Don Kunze, “Bug and Glitch”
In computing, the distinction between bug and glitch is interesting in relation to the induction puzzle. Originally, the bug was literally the bug that would, attracted by the heat and food sources when wires were used, crawl into large computers and create short-circuits. The glitch was the programing error, the missing comma, parenthesis, or other symbol in coding that would inadvertently create do-loops or other malfunctions. This essay takes the bug and glitch problem back to the induction puzzle and finds, in the modern computer case, the central function of the katagraphic cut as a hinge between presentation and demonstration that has important consequences for Lacan’s theoretics and its critical link to topology. As an added bonus, these consequences are foreshadowed by Giambattista Vico’s dictum verum ipsum factum and the ethnological motif of the “Sheela-na-gig.”